A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  “So I became the boyfriend,” Maynard would recall. The disco bass that pounded into Tantrum from the main room only added to the realism of the routines. “It was perfect,” Laura would recall. “The premise was that Vince’s band was making this pathetic attempt to get industry people to come see their act on a weeknight, so the more that could go wrong, the better.”

  As Tawny wrapped her routine, Maynard and Adam and Sean took the stage in wigs and spandex pants, red suspenders and T-shirts, fedoras and Cat in the Hat hats. “Every time Vince’s band showed up, it would be a little different, because they couldn’t keep it together to last longer than a week or two,” Maynard explained.

  They took up their guitars in a parody of the wannabe bands he’d scorned when he’d arrived in L.A. Their music didn’t much improve from week to week even as the band’s name changed from Twisted Mister to D’Artagnan Canyon to Umlaut to Recreational Racist.

  My firm belief is that comedy—to quote Steve Martin—isn’t pretty. Comedy is bound to offend somebody. It’s self-deprecating or somebody else is getting thrown under the bus. We have to laugh at ourselves. Never mind that some guy writes a cool song and puts a nice video online. That’s not what gets the traffic. “Fatty Falls Down a Hole in a Convenience Store,” that’s the one that goes viral. Somebody’s the butt of that joke. Deal with it. I’m the butt of many jokes, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

  The audience sang along, clapped, and shouted for more when Laura, in cowgirl hat and boots, joined Maynard’s Billy D character in leisure suit and wig and moustache in a bawdy performance of the old Tom Morello and Adam Jones song “Country Boner.”

  Performing as part of a collective freed Maynard to test new personas and material a frontman dare not explore. “There was less judgment in doing comedy than in music,” he would explain. “I could go into that space with other comedians and be a side note. I wanted to pursue this and figure out how I could do more. This was fun.”

  By early summer, his role had expanded from member of the comedy chorus to creative collaborator. “We’d spend all week putting themes together,” Laura remembered. “We’d come up with ideas and Maynard ran with them and helped produce a lot of those shows. He always got so excited talking about this stuff. His eyes would light up and it’s almost like he was rubbing his palms together.”

  The players might don white lab coats and head mirrors and portray doctors-cum-waiters. The Diamond Club, according to the script, had been purchased by a restaurant chain, its theme a surgical practice complete with cocktails wheeled to the tables on gurneys. Until Tantrum’s lease expired, the show would go on while Dr. O’Cuttahee’s served its patrons. “Maynard made table tents,” Laura explained. “Instead of regular menu items, he listed things like colostomy baguettes and tater cysts, just horrid medically themed appetizers.”

  “While some poor bastard like Craig Anton was up on the stage trying to do his bit,” Maynard remembered, “the rest of us—David Cross, me, and a couple of other people—stood at the back of the room and whirred about 32 mixed-drink blenders.”

  Their working-class, fundamentalist backgrounds created between Cross and Maynard an instant camaraderie, the foundation for long hours of conversation on any topic at all—discussions at times heated but always ending in unexpected insights and laughter.

  “Maynard’s really an intense dude. That’s probably the number one reason we connected,” Cross recalled in a 2013 interview. “I knew early on that he deeply appreciates comedy, and more specifically, pointed comedy about cultural hypocrisy and politics and religion.

  “The first time I hung out with him, he invited me to his house in the Valley. He was conscious of the fact that we were doing man stuff,” Cross recalled of Maynard’s carefully choreographed evening of animal care, jiu-jitsu, and red meat. “He definitely appreciated the irony of saying, ‘I just gotta feed my lizard and then we’ll watch UFC and cook up these steaks.’”

  And after their meal and after cheering on the Gracies, they sat over pale ale discussing the roles they’d take in next week’s Tantrum show, the progress on Cross’s upcoming TV program and Tool’s next album, like-minded compañeros offering encouragement and support.

  “Many comedians are mean-spirited and jealous and petty and want to see others fail. Maynard isn’t like that,” Laura explained. “He wants to uplift and he has really high standards. I think he feels let down when people don’t measure up to their potential.”

  If Tool’s fans recognized him on the Tantrum stage, Maynard realized, they’d no doubt fear his new ventures would dilute his commitment to the band. But he knew too that an infusion of comedy could only enhance his music.

  I still wanted to see if I could blend comedy and music in a way that made sense. I felt like I could offer another dimension. I’m not a drummer, so I wasn’t going to move in that direction. I’m not a guitar player. I’m a storyteller. As I expanded my palette, everything would benefit from everything else.

  This new venture wasn’t exactly a parody band. It wasn’t a country band either, or a shift to comedy or theatrical production. It was, if it must be named, a project, a project of many facets, each dependent on all the others. A project that would spiral in unexpected directions as its course became clear. A project he’d call Puscifer.

  Maynard stood on one foot. Keeping his balance wasn’t hard, and he tipped his head back and stretched his fingers toward the sky. A warm wind swirled around his outspread arms, then gently lifted him until he soared above the village. It didn’t seem in the least odd that he could fly. He floated there, suspended in the sunshine, and looked down at weathered wooden buildings set along dusty streets, at roads winding in switchbacks and hairpin curves through green valleys and copper-gold mountains.

  The dream came more often now, always more detailed, and each time, he awoke satisfied and content. He didn’t question the source of the dream or what his subconscious was telling him. “I didn’t feel like anything in L.A. resonated properly,” he recalled. “It didn’t feel good there.”

  Tool’s royalties didn’t yet provide the income required to enjoy the city in style, and he’d had his fill of gridlock and smog, ruthless competition, and relationships he couldn’t quite trust. And the music landscape had lost not a little of its appeal with the demise of Raji’s and Gazzarri’s and Club Lingerie. Maynard needed only a place to lay his head when Tool was in rehearsal or recording, and he cringed when he considered his certain future should he remain in L.A. “I knew if I stuck around, I was going to get sucked into the red-carpet-at-the-Grammys scene,” he would remember. “I had to get out and regain some connection with the land and with space where there wasn’t a lot of noise and distraction.”

  He’d moved enough times to know that no matter where he lived, he needn’t lose his friends, David Cross, Moon Zappa—or Tim Alexander, despite their inauspicious meeting during the Lollapalooza tour. “I remember him walking toward me backstage where all the buses were parked,” Tim recalled. “He had a Mohawk at the time, and it reminded me of Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver. I didn’t know who he was, so when I saw him headed in my direction, I became a bit concerned, not knowing what this strange person could possibly want.”

  The two had since become allies, and Maynard related to Tim his recurring dream and his suspicion that the place in his vision might be Arizona. He didn’t particularly want to live there, he explained. When Tool had performed in Phoenix, Maynard had found it just one more congested urban maze crowded with secretaries and CEOs parading in lockstep to their cubicles.

  But Tim told him of another Arizona, an Arizona of rugged mountains and wide skies, of sudden cloudbursts that eased the summer heat and cleared to bright, balmy afternoons, of a town that sounded to him very much like the village in Maynard’s dream. “Tim said he needed to take me on a little trip,” Maynard would remember.

  The Buc
kskins and the Harquahalas and the Eagletails extended mile after mile across western Arizona, unbroken by forest or highway, their peaks and gorges resolving in sharp relief as the plane began its slow descent over the Phoenix airport.

  Midsummer wasn’t the ideal time for a road trip through the desert. July was the state’s hottest month with temperatures expected that day to top 110 degrees, but Maynard was eager to visit the town his friend had described and ignored the thermometer. Tim lowered the top of the rental car, and Maynard ran his finger along the interstate marked in a thick green line in his Rand McNally. In two hours, he determined, they’d reach their destination, so long as they kept close watch on the fuel gauge and calculated the distance between the tiny towns along the way where trading posts might or might not sell gasoline.

  Their northbound route took them through flatlands brown with scrub, the Johnson grass and mullein at the road’s shoulder drooping in the heat. They passed Rock Springs and Turret Peak and Towers Mountain, and looming outcroppings barren of vegetation. At the horizon, the Weavers and the Sierra Anchas rose in purple-gray haze, and the cloudless sky reflected in the heat mirage that shimmered always before them across the asphalt. They drove higher, above the tree line, above the frost line where even cactus did not grow.

  Through the foothills they climbed, their ears popping, until they turned at last from the interstate at Camp Verde. “We came over the crest into the Verde Valley,” Maynard remembered, “and my heart started to race. What I saw was so familiar.”

  They’d reached a promontory nearly a mile above sea level, a place of green meadows and stands of Arizona elder, willow and walnut and sycamore. The gentle climb along the ridge paralleled the valley, the gorge bounded by towering mountains, a vista he’d never known but recognized all the same.

  Not far ahead were Cornville and Cottonwood and the old highway that wound in switchbacks past billboards announcing Dead Horse Ranch State Park and a bit farther, Cleopatra Hill, the mountain formed nearly two million years before by a volcanic eruption beneath the vast Precambrian inland sea. Maynard and Tim looked out on the United Verde open pit, the 300-foot-deep reminder of the area’s copper mining heyday at the turn of the twentieth century. And just up the road was Jerome, the tiny town of brick and wooden buildings perched on the mountain’s face.

  Jerome was a collection of antique shops and cafés, art galleries and boxy brick hotels, weathered storefronts like the television versions of Virginia City and Dodge Maynard remembered from evenings in the Ohio living room. None of the buildings were particularly square. They stood pitched at odd angles along the canted streets, victims of gravity and decades of settling mine shafts beneath the town.

  The sidewalks might be crowded come the weekend, but just now, only a few pedestrians walked about, friendly enough strangers who nodded in greeting as Maynard and Tim made their way up Clark Street and down Main, streets arranged in parallel terraces up the mountainside and crisscrossed by steep flights of concrete steps. Maynard read the brightly painted signage advertising gemstones and pottery and pizza and looked out at the far ridges of the Mogollon Rim. And he knew again the sensation he’d known in his dream, the feeling that he had come home.

  “We stopped at the Flatiron café,” he would recall. “Brian and Alan, the managers, introduced themselves right away, and their amazing Italian espresso was the last piece of the puzzle. I said, ‘I’m living here.’”

  My gut and my heart and my head were practically screaming in three-part harmony that this was where I was supposed to be. If you’ve ever met your soulmate, you’ve felt that. You just know. No one has to talk you into it. Your intuition and your instinct tell you this is the one. When we got to Jerome, I thought I was going to pass out, because it was the little town in my dream.

  Fewer than 400 people lived in Jerome, and the town proper was less than a mile square. But as he walked its dusty streets, Maynard imagined the dreams of long-ago miners who’d built this town—and the Yavapai and Apache before them, and people from the cities more recently come to stay. And he knew that should he live the rest of his life in this small place, it would not be long enough to learn all its stories and secrets, its promises and possibilities.

  In this mile-high town, borders dissolved in a vista of valley and mountain and sky. Maynard might turn down Hill Street, climb higher to Hull Avenue, but wherever he stepped, he would be a part of the vista he walked through, and as limitless.

  Here he might discover the profound silences and sounds of the desert, turn to song its legends of hills and light, read the weather and the sky and the soil, and tend the things that would grow here.

  The doctors had said his child would be born in the first week of August, but that was no reason to bow out of his commitments to Tool. The August 6 Big Mele festival in Oahu would put the band on the bill with Rancid, Down by Law, Face to Face, and Guttermouth, and Maynard looked forward to the final performance before starting work on the next album. Surely he’d be back on the mainland well before the baby made its appearance.

  But when the plane set down at Honolulu International, he checked his pager and discovered that sometimes, babies paid attention to due dates after all. “I had to do the right thing and be there for the birth,” Maynard recalled. “I sent the band on ahead and told them I’d try to be back the next night in time for the show.”

  He darted through the terminal, imagining the baby’s mother—2,500 miles away—repeating the deep-breathing exercises she’d learned in Lamaze class. He’d never quite understood their purpose, but he practiced them now as he negotiated with the ticket agent and fidgeted during the flight delay and suffered the stop-and-start cab ride through the more-frustrating-than-ever L.A. gridlock.

  He arrived at the hospital harried and exhausted, where the baby’s mother lay upon her pillows, a cassette player at her bedside, the baby an hour old. The nurse nestled the child in Maynard’s arms, and he moved the edge of the blanket back from his face, stroked his fingers, held his tiny head against his own. “I couldn’t say anything,” he remembered. “I just played ‘Kashmir’ over and over.”

  “Kashmir,” the song that seemed a portal to connection and synchronicity, the song to welcome Maynard’s son, the child with wide brown eyes and thick dark curls, the baby they named Devo.

  Ticket holders were plenty disappointed when they found Tool missing from the Big Mele lineup. Another flight delay had kept Maynard from the island after all. But the no-show was forgiven the next year with the release of Tool’s new record, the 15-song collection that would debut at Number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and prove to be anything but the uninspired and stereotypic third album.

  Before the critical acclaim, before the international tour and the Grammy award and triple platinum status, the band must resolve the creative standstill interrupting the album’s progress. “We’d worked individually on a few lyrics and some music,” Maynard recalled. “We met for long sound checks and practices and rehearsals, but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.” The teamwork that had come so effortlessly in the past seemed elusive, as if with maturity and new interests, the four had begun to lose sight of their common goals. By midsummer, it was clear that, like Maynard’s, Paul’s objectives had broadened. His taste in music had shifted from the heavy riffs a Tool song would demand, and he felt ready to realize the dream he’d abandoned in Washington and form his own group.

  Paul’s departure created another challenge: identifying the bass player whose learning curve would not further delay the band’s work. “We were looking for someone with a wellspring of ideas and talent,” Maynard would recall. “Two things were most important. They had to be a very competent player and they had to be somebody we liked.”

  Candidates were dismissed one after the other, flawless players who couldn’t quite grasp the band’s philosophies, personable musicians who arrived for their auditions unprepared, professionals with perfe
ct execution and prior commitments. When Danny and Adam suggested they consider the Peach bass player they’d met the year before, Maynard agreed. Justin Chancellor’s low end had brought to Tool a welcome complexity, and a transatlantic phone call later, he’d committed to join them.

  “I pulled a dog-eared slip of paper out of my pocket,” Maynard would recall. “I unfolded it and showed it to Adam and Danny, the piece of paper that said ‘Paul’ and ‘London.’ It kind of blew their minds.”

  With Chancellor onboard and the band’s momentum restored, Maynard could forget his concerns and devote time to his new pursuits—at least until album production began in earnest.

  Since Tool’s earliest shows, Maynard had spoken with countless reporters who’d powered their way through their questions and allowed him only truncated responses before moving on to the next. “It was weird being interviewed,” he would later admit. “Most of these people had already anticipated my answers, so they didn’t even bother listening to what I said.”

  It was time to turn the tables and ask a few questions himself, to create the sort of interview he’d like to read.

  Bikini Magazine was willing to accept a submission, and Rickson Gracie agreed to an interview as Maynard’s first subject. If he wanted a deeper understanding of Gracie and his beliefs, perhaps readers would, too, and he guided his instructor through a candid exploration of jiu-jitsu philosophy, the mathematical principles his father had applied to the discipline, and the balance of body, mind, and spirit that guaranteed joy on the hiking trail and victory in the ring.

  The piece would need a bit of editing before it would be published the next September, but in the meantime, Maynard received a second assignment. Editors at the San Diego publication Hypno: The World Journal of Popular Culture were impressed enough with the Gracie draft that they suggested he try his hand at a similar piece for their magazine.