A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  And in Boston, Lansdowne Street was just as Maynard remembered. Most of the crowd had come to Axis to hear Rollins, but a steadfast half-dozen were there for Maynard: friends from the North End Thanksgiving table, and Kjiirt, who’d loyally flown from Seattle to back his buddy at the club they’d so often visited together.

  When Tool took the stage, the crowd responded as if it were the headliner. They filled the dance floor and moved in time to the music, leaned forward and strained to decipher Maynard’s every word, and not a few women shouted suggestive invitations from the mosh pit—the very women perhaps who’d not long before ignored the advances of a lonely pet store merchandising manager.

  A lone manic mosher thrashed convulsively through the pit, hurling himself against the others, oblivious to their angry glares. “He was a big dickhead punk,” Kjiirt would recall. “It was totally uncool. If he was going to roughhouse during the show, he had to go, but nobody on the staff was noticing. Finally, he ran into me and I grabbed him and pushed him away as hard as I could.” The commotion brought the security crew at last from the shadows, a pair of stern bouncers who reached for Kjiirt’s arm.

  Despite the spotlights shining into his eyes, despite his concentration on the job at hand, despite his inability to tell one slammer from another in the dark pit, something caught Maynard’s glance. Perhaps it was the flash of Kjiirt’s white Tool-logo T-shirt. Perhaps it was his blond hair distinct in the darkness. Perhaps it was synchronicity or chance or coincidence, but he looked out into the crowd and saw his friend.

  Maynard stopped singing. He stepped to the edge of the stage and raised one arm. The guitars fell silent, Danny’s drumsticks were still. The crowd was quiet, too, disoriented by the sudden shift in energy. Maynard pointed toward Kjiirt and spoke, his voice steady, firm. “He stays.”

  Then he stepped back, and the music resumed as abruptly as it had ended. Danny and Adam and Paul picked up the beat and Maynard’s cry rose on key. The troublemaker was led to the door, and Kjiirt joined the crowd as it closed in a swaying semicircle before the stage, the driving rhythms drawing them deeper into the mystery of what this group might be all about.

  Maynard’s 1993 Day-Timer showed few breaks in an itinerary that would take the band three times across the Atlantic and to no fewer than 29 cities on the summer’s Lollapalooza circuit.

  You wake up and you know you’re on the road, but you don’t know where you are. It wasn’t like I was drunk the night before and woke up and couldn’t remember anything. But you had to remind yourself what’s happening today and where you were yesterday. There were so many people profiting from our being on the road that half the time, you didn’t have any control of where you were going or when.

  A month in Europe early in the year included stops in Paris and Copenhagen, Zurich and London in a performance schedule that left no time for sightseeing. Given the minuscule per diem, even cab fare for a quick jaunt from their hotel to a castle or a museum was out of the question. A day off meant an excursion no more exotic than a walk to a nearby pizzeria, where Maynard and his bandmates pooled their kroner and weighed a life on the road against its all but invisible rewards.

  I’m hoping that I’m not out here for nothing. You’re looking for acceptance in whatever form it might take, whether it’s a young German lady smiling at you, or some guy who’s excited because a song blew his mind, or an older dude who came to the show with his younger brother. You didn’t expect he’d like this music, but somehow it resonated with him. You’re looking for any sign that you’re doing something right.

  You wanted a roomful of people to walk away going “Holy fuck! Yes! That was what I hoped it would be!”

  The release in April of Tool’s first full-length album kicked off a two-month promotional tour up the California coast where audiences discovered in Undertow a study in contradiction, a balance of heavy metal and soft cadence, a lyrical paradox that not only demanded attention but invited participation.

  The album’s immediate success was due as much to Zoo’s respect for the band’s creativity as to its marketing efforts. “When you have a band that is so thoroughly evolved, the smartest thing to do is to support it and get out of the way,” Matt Marshall explained in a 2014 interview. “The best marketing a record company can do is be as invisible as you can and let the artwork and imagery and music speak directly to the fans. To do that full package as well as Tool did right from the beginning is rare.”

  With the release of Undertow came the official Tool biography, an out-of-the-box departure from the standard just-the-facts-ma’am press kit. The two-page backstory credited the band’s mentors whose work had impacted their own, including first and foremost American lachrymologist Ronald P. Vincent. Tool’s ideology was at last explained, to the relief of journalists and music critics struggling to understand the band. Its approach, the document explained, was a musical testament to Vincent’s principles: the imperative to fearlessly face both joy and sorrow in order to transform personal pain into healing and enlightenment.

  Radio stations across the country soon added the audience favorite “Sober” to their programming, and the video was regularly featured on MTV’s Headbangers Ball. And word of mouth played its part in bringing the album to the attention of listeners who’d otherwise not have associated Maynard with the latest rock sensation.

  “A friend of mine told me about the album shortly after it came out,” Steele Newman would recall. “He told me about this great guy on vocals, this Maynard Keenan. I’m like, ‘Not Maynard James Keenan!’” Steele remembered Maynard only as the housemate who’d sat quietly on the Pearson Street couch eating Cheerios and was hard-pressed to imagine the man who’d fed fish food to party guests as a frontman. But when he placed the CD in his player, the voice he heard was unmistakable. “I listened to it, and wait a minute! Yes! I loved the music, and not just because it was my old roommate singing.”

  Maynard, always insistent on giving credit where credit was due, listed as an inspiration in the liner notes comic Bill Hicks, whose recordings had made bearable the long hours in the Ryder truck the summer before. “We sent him copies of the album,” Maynard would recall. “He wrote back and thanked us for the music. I called him and pointed out that we’d mentioned him in the liner notes. He hadn’t noticed. He was just thanking us for the CD.”

  The call began a dialogue that by the time the band returned from Canada in early summer had turned to the topic of collaboration. “We were both excited about working together on a mixed media presentation,” Maynard would explain. “Maybe he could do a comedic stand-up between Tool sets. Maybe he would open for us, or we’d do half a set and he’d come out and do a bit.”

  But the more they discussed their plan, the less confident they were. Hicks had no trouble captivating a crowd in a comedy club, but as much as his in-your-face material complemented Tool’s, holding the attention of keyed-up slammers would be another matter. “We realized a show like that would have to be presented in an unfamiliar forum,” Maynard explained. “Given the expectations of a Tool audience, we’d have to take it out of the rock club they’re used to so they could appreciate the whole experience. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we’d calm down a bunch of skinheads to listen to jokes.”

  Even in the wake of Undertow’s success, Zoo Entertainment hadn’t forgotten its commitment to Bill Manspeaker. Cereal Killer, the 11-song Green Jellö video Manspeaker had begun nearly two years before, had wrapped recording at Sound City and was at last ready for distribution. Zoo had sent copies to a handful of outlets including Seattle rock station The X KXRX.

  The Seattle DJ was appalled by Cereal Killer’s low artistic quality and high degree of inanity. “He said it was the worst degeneration of music that could possibly be happening,” Manspeaker remembered. The assessment only confirmed what Manspeaker had said all along, that the history of rock ’n’ roll had culminated in the world’s worst band
and its song about pigs. The DJ cued up the track to demonstrate to his listeners the sort of drivel he received from recording companies and prefaced the song with an exasperated discourse on the lamentable breakdown of the music industry.

  Then a curious thing happened. The request lines flashed with calls from Seattle listeners begging for more—more Big Bad Wolf, more machine-gun fire, more falsetto chinny-chin-chin. And “Three Little Pigs” became the most requested song in Seattle radio memory.

  When the news reached the Zoo office, they scrambled to press enough CDs to satisfy the sudden demand of record stores and radio stations from California to Maine whose listeners had learned of the little-pig phenomenon and insisted they, too, air the song. “All of a sudden, this weird pig song’s playing everywhere,” Manspeaker said. “The next thing I know, we’re on MTV.” To his amazement, the song rose to Number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 list and Number 5 in the U.K. And in May, “Three Little Pigs” was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.

  “That was Maynard’s first hit song,” Manspeaker explained. “Of all of his incredible songs and all the gold and platinum records, that was his first. The guy that everyone is so serious about, it all started with ‘not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.’”

  In 1993, American youths had more on their minds than cavorting pigs. L.A. still reeled in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident and the ensuing riots, and tensions were high following American attacks on Iraqi intelligence headquarters and the attempted bombing of New York’s World Trade Center. They welcomed a summer of release in the third season of Lollapalooza, the movable feast of music and dance cofounded two years before by Tool manager Ted Gardner.

  All summer long, they descended upon stadiums and fairgrounds and amphitheaters as the festival made its way from Portland to St. Paul to Raleigh and across the South. Thousands strong, they came in search of grunge and alt rock, of earsplitting, angry catharsis to reflect their discontent and deflect their anxiety. They crowd-surfed in the mosh pits and visited the ethnic-food tents and vendor booths, and despite the heat and overpriced Evian, they dedicated their days to their mission: a surrender to the dark metal of Alice in Chains, the funk twang of Primus, the passionate melodic screeds of Rage Against the Machine—and the discovery of bands on the second stage, groups like Sebadoh, Royal Trux, Mutabaruka—and Tool.

  Tool was low band on the totem pole and its tour bus only a step above the Ryder truck. “It had kind of a better bed,” Maynard would recall. “If a coffin is a better bed.” At dinnertime, he took from the small cooler another can of Coors Light and watched band managers and promoters and accountants share fine Rieslings and Gewürztraminers. Faint guitar riffs and shouts of the crowds drifted over the grounds, and he thought of whole ducks crackling on a grill, goblets of first-growth Bordeaux.

  But Lollapalooza was the realization of dreams he’d never imagined on those Somerville evenings: an invitation to join Alice in Chains’s Layne Staley in a stirring duet of “Rooster” on the main stage, and best of all, taking the stage following his friend Tom’s act. “Many a show, Tool would get the better of us and we were like, ‘We gotta go write some more songs,’” Morello would recall. “It was great. People were getting the shows of their lives.”

  The enthusiastic audience response to Tool allayed any lingering fears Lou Maglia might have had about Maynard’s appearing in a venue larger than Club Lingerie. “The band was killing it,” Matt Marshall would recall—so much so that in mid-July, Tool was elevated to a slot on the main stage.

  The tour was a chance for friends and family along the Lollapalooza route to discover exactly what Maynard had been up to since he’d moved to L.A. “We were surprised,” Jan would admit of her day with Mike at Maynard’s July performance at Chicago’s World Music Theatre. “We thought he was just saying he was in a band.”

  When the tour reached its final stop in Irwindale, California, in August, Maynard and Bill Hicks tested their idea of collaboration. Hicks announced the band, and then, deadpan serious, told the crowd he’d dropped a contact lens in the mosh pit. Impatient as it was to hear “Swamp Song” and “Flood” and “Prison Sex,” they obediently knelt to search the dusty lawn.

  Maynard returned to L.A. for a two-month respite before he must do it all again. And his dream began, the dream of a place welcoming and safe and somehow familiar, the dream that stirred in him a nostalgia for green valleys and canyons and creek beds he’d never seen, of mountains red with sunrise, of the spangle of stars in a sky he’d never known.

  I dreamt that I was flying over a vast desert. I’m flying through the air, and I come over a crest into a valley and hover over a small town on the side of a hill. I turn toward the west, and I see in the distance a huge wave cresting and just completely annihilating this large city on the horizon.

  About a month later, I got a package from Bill Hicks. He was in the middle of editing his third album, and he sent me a cassette of the music. He had some questions for me about whether the music fit with the comedy or not. It was called Arizona Bay.

  I thought about my dream, and I had an idea that it had to be Arizona I saw. I’d spent time in Phoenix, and the dream didn’t look anything like that. But I knew that it was definitely Los Angeles getting its ass kicked.

  With the new year, Maynard was off again for performances in Atlanta and D.C. and Toronto. “A normal, going-home lifestyle? You don’t want to let your mind go there,” he would recall. “Touring is what life is now.”

  Between gigs, he’d found time to move to the Tudor bungalow in North Hollywood he’d admired when he’d visited Steve Hansgen’s sound studio there. When the house became vacant, he was first in line to sign the lease and transported his boxes and his black trunk, the finches, two parrots, and a brand-new water bed to the little house where gingerbread cornices curled beneath the eaves, a shade tree overhung the front lawn, and the porch light would be on when he came home.

  The windowed wall in his bedroom looked out over the gardens and the wide backyard where squirrels and chipmunks scampered through the ferns, and hummingbirds and kinglets and the occasional raven settled among the purple flowers of the jacaranda tree. Once the touring schedule settled down, he imagined, he’d tend the rosemary and bougainvillea and trim back the ivy that crept up the side of the house. “A Zen garden always includes a water feature, so I built a pond in the backyard and stocked it with koi,” he would recall. “I needed to maintain that sense of where I came from. You’ve got to have some sort of oasis to stay grounded.”

  He’d have no trouble writing there in the productive company of Hotsy Menshot and Pepper Spray Jerry, housemates as committed to their work as he. Hotsy was Gary Helsinger, a Green Jellö member and a savvy A&R rep for Chrysalis Music Group. Guitarist by night and businessman by day, Jerry Phlippeau spent long hours hunched over his desk developing his credibility and his contact list and working to legalize the public sale of pepper spray.

  A frequent visitor was Tim Cadiente, a self-styled entrepreneur whose talent behind the camera was equaled only by his passion for rock ’n’ roll. If there was a band to be photographed, Cadiente was there with his Nikon, and after shooting Tool’s Palladium show in January, he and Maynard had become fast friends. As marketing consultant for Oakley, Inc., Cadiente was ever on the lookout for opportunities to promote its sunglasses and visors and ski apparel, relying on social networking long before his competitors had heard the term.

  The word marketing had always left a bad taste in my mouth. But Pepper Spray Jerry and Tim weren’t in a stuffy office coming up with clever catchphrases to trick you into buying carcinogens. They were growing their businesses by working with friends. It was my first glimpse into the positive side of marketing. They made it look like fun.

  Maynard’s own work had reached an awkward and worrisome impasse. His Opiate and Undertow lyrics had come easily, the words and motifs he’d tr
anslated from his own anger and frustration and sadness, but his new efforts seemed forced and uninspired. Tool’s next album should transcend what had come before, he knew, but nearly two years on the road could only inspire an industry cliché, the legendary and doomed third album. “In the ’70s and the ’80s, it seemed like the first two records of every band were exciting collections they’d worked all their lives to write,” he would explain. “Then there was the third record they wrote on a tour bus or in a hotel room. There’s no life in it. It’s the fuckin’ road album. I didn’t want that for us.”

  But the house on La Maida, six miles from the commotion of Hollywood Boulevard and the unpredictable comings and goings at the loft, might be his haven, the peaceful setting where he would regain the psychic balance he seemed to have lost.

  Gold records and hit singles and international acclaim cast about Maynard an aura irresistible to the groupies and aspiring performers who imagined fame-by-association when they appeared in public at his side. If they weren’t the trusted sisters of the long-ago beach days, their adoration and intimacy was, for the time being, satisfying enough.

  My biggest concern was to get laid. My priority was to be validated, to be desired. This was my ticket to undo all of the dismissive behavior from family and teachers and the army of people that had ignored my potential. It was my chance to have somebody who I didn’t even know and who didn’t even know me give me everything in a moment, without question. Just surrender. I’d never had that. That power was new.

  There was no dearth of attractive young admirers eager to share his life and his bed, and he became expert at subterfuge and split-second timing, often returning from a night with one woman seconds ahead of another pulling into his driveway.