His choice of an interviewee, he realized, was a long shot, but he was prepared. Maynard had imagined the things he would ask her for a long time, their conversation should he ever have the chance to speak with her. “I told them if I was going to interview anybody,” he would explain, “I’d like to talk with Joni Mitchell.”
His open-ended questions allowed Mitchell to speak at length of her unconventional chord progressions, her melodic structures and alternative tunings. Their dialogue branched in unexpected turnings and illuminating tangents from the synesthesia of color and sound to the mathematical basis of a Mozart composition to the way minor chords resonate with the rhythm of the soul.
“I think she was comfortable speaking to me because I was an artist,” he explained. “I didn’t come in with an agenda. She was able to just talk stream-of-consciousness about music and process rather than having to jam sound bites into a predetermined format.”
Published in Hypno’s October 1995 issue, the three-page spread was illustrated with photos of Maynard and Mitchell, their hands clasped, their smiles wide as if caught by the photographer mid-conversation before a cozy fireplace as they shared stories and a fine Shiraz.
And in November, HBO aired the inaugural episode of Mr. Show, the series created by Maynard’s Tantrum colleagues David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. Among the sketches was a nine-minute routine featuring Cross as Ronnie Dobbs, a trailer trash troublemaker catapulted to fame by Odenkirk’s television program documenting his arrests. And Maynard—in a badly cropped wig and the blue and gold cross country T-shirt he’d worn in high school—made his own TV debut. Partway through the skit, he and Adam performed as the Dobbs tribute band, a band called Puscifer.
“Whatever Maynard did, there was always a lightbulb that would go off that he could meld comedy and music,” Laura would recall.
HBO viewers knew what to expect of a variety show format and didn’t question a rock band’s sudden appearance in the middle of a comedy sketch. But audiences weren’t so forgiving when it came to humor as part of a live concert. “In December, we brought Tenacious D to open for us in San Diego,” Maynard explained. “They got fuckin’ quarters thrown at them.” They’d been audience favorites at Tantrum, but their clowning was lost on the Soma crowd, who pelted the stage in a rain of coins and silenced their routine with shouts of “We want Tool!”
The band’s name was as much in demand as its music. Social justice organizations and environmentalist groups seemed to believe that if their fund-raising events included a Tool performance, contributions would roll in and the rain forests would be saved, political prisoners freed, and puppies in South America rescued from starvation.
It was heartbreaking to be in a position where people were coming to us saying, “We value your name enough to attach it to this event which will help somebody.” I’m sure many of these organizations were legitimate, but you often find that a huge percentage comes off the top for people who set up the PA and the riggers and the lighting guys. They’re not donating their time. And some artists are paid insane amounts of money to be part of a benefit and then promote themselves as benefactors.
We had no interest in being part of that. That’s not what I consider a true benefit. Yes, money has to go for basic infrastructure, for insurance and water and to make sure people are fed, but at the end of the day, everybody should be donating their time, and the cash should go to the actual cause.
So much of the energy they put into these things seems misdirected. How about saving the guy who’s dying in the alley right next to your house?
Maynard, true to form, recognized the comedic side of the fund-raising efforts.
He’d heard the rumors about Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Hole frontwoman Courtney Love. He’d read in the tabloids of Courtney’s suspected heroin use during her pregnancy and of the investigations that had led authorities to remove the baby from her parents when she was only two weeks old. He knew of the parade of nannies assigned to her care, of the toddler’s visits to her father during his stay at the rehab center. “I read this stuff and thought, ‘That poor girl is stuck with a tornado of a mother,’” Maynard would recall. “‘How will Frances Bean survive this crazy life?’”
Helping a four-year-old caught up in a world of drug abuse and family dysfunction was a cause he could stand behind. A run of T-shirts would raise awareness of the child’s plight, T-shirts he designed and produced and distributed to whomever laughed, white T-shirts printed across the front with the message Free Frances Bean. “I thought it was appropriately rude,” he would explain.
Courtney’s behavior seemed to Maynard just one more symptom of the madness that was L.A. He’d been there for melees in the parking lot and snail’s-pace traffic on Wilshire, and for a tense and harrowing week in 1992, he’d watched the city erupt in riots and lootings in response to the acquittal of police officers responsible for the beating of Rodney King the year before. “L.A. was burning to the ground,” he would remember. “I saw how quickly everything could go off the rails.”
By 1996, I’d had enough. I’d been listening to Bill Hicks talking about L.A. falling into the ocean. And in a way, I think I wanted it to, because so many people I met were negative and just kind of vampires.
I felt like so much was polluting my ability to remember that it was all just a ride. You get so worked up into thinking it’s not going to work out that you can’t imagine that it will. I had to get away.
“For a long time, Maynard talked about leaving L.A., getting off the grid,” Moon Zappa would recall. “I’d never met anybody so convinced something was going to happen and that we had to get out of here fast.”
On the other side of the Buckskins and the Eagletails were green valleys, wide expanses of rock and sky, quiet and space and dusty streets terraced up a mountainside golden in the sunset. And one morning in late summer, the new album completed and ready for production, Maynard loaded a rental van with his belongings. He placed a supply of strawberry Twizzlers on the seat beside him and drove across the city—past Sunset and Hollywood and Beverly Boulevard and to the entrance ramp of I-10, eastbound.
“I unpacked the van and put everything in the Jerome apartment,” Maynard would recall. “And then I was on a bus again.” The low-slung duplex stood at the eastern end of Jerome in a row of bungalows all alike, efficient units where mining crew foremen had lived years before. Maynard moved in cartons and bags and the black trunk, and, with little time to set up housekeeping, took a deep breath and prepared for another international tour.
He and Adam and Justin and Danny had found their groove. For the past year, they’d translated their shared vision to sound and story, to an ambitious album that would—as they knew it must—surpass their previous work.
They’d hung the walls of the loft with whiteboards and covered them with equations and formulas, geometric depictions of intervals and reversed beats and fractional time signatures. “As Tom would remark, a Rage song is easy,” Jack Olsen said in a 2014 interview. “A Tool song is not simple by any stretch of the imagination.”
Complex as it was, the music, as always, came first. Only after Danny and Adam and Justin had worked out melodies and motifs did Maynard put pen to paper. He drew upon all he’d studied: Jung’s shadow-self archetype, Melchizedek’s genetic theories, Joseph Campbell’s battle of opposites and the redemption their union would bring, the angle of a jiu-jitsu stance. He counterbalanced lyrics of healing with acid rock dissonance, juxtaposed images of destruction with poetic Eastern rhythms.
And on September 17, 1996, the album was released, a sonic collage of metal and comedy, of Teutonic cadence and seagull cries, of wailing babies and the click of a skipping phonograph needle. The glittering cover art harkened back to the extravagant gatefold albums of decades before, and the dreamlike images on the picture disc and promotional posters were all Ramiro’s. “The spiritual nature of Ramiro’
s art represented Tool in a good way,” Maynard would explain. “It was a grounding factor.” It was, then, an album of connection, an album dedicated to Bill Hicks, an album called Ænima.
It took only a bit of research for fans to discover the title’s etymological roots: anima, the Latin term for the soul and the feminine force coupled with enema, a sophomoric allusion to the album’s theme of spiritual cleansing. But as with most things Tool, the title’s significance went beyond the obvious. “I chose the name partly as a tribute to John Crowley,” Maynard would explain. John Crowley, whose fictional doors and pathways had opened the way for Maynard, whose multivolume Ægypt series told the tale of lost histories and the hum of creative energies existing between souls.
Every track was strong enough to hold its own, but Boston Globe music writer Steve Morse was among the first to articulate the album’s larger artistic accomplishment. Ænima’s message, he pointed out in a November 15 review, could be best understood by a close listen, start to finish. This was no collection of random rock rants, no crazy quilt of sound effects and hidden meaning. Ænima, he recognized, was an experience, a CD with a message, a sonic vehicle “taking listeners on a journey.”1
“They obviously have a lot of darkness on the surface,” Morse said of the band in a 2014 interview. “But ultimately, there is an emphasis on communication and bringing people together.”
Maynard’s lyrics didn’t disguise his growing dislike of L.A., and even when California disappeared from the map when the lenticular jewel case was tipped just so, it didn’t mean despair. All would be well, the songs urged, if one at last learned to swim: remembered one’s place in the collective unconscious, one’s role in the co-creation of the universe.
“Maynard has that spiritual side,” Moon Zappa explained. “He’s doing something with that mind of his, and he’s able to straddle being technically excellent at his job and taking you a little bit further. He’s a philosopher with an audience and a microphone.”
Tool hadn’t performed outside California since early 1995, but now the band would more than make up for lost time. In mid-October, they’d begin a nearly nonstop tour through the U.S., Europe, and Australia that would keep them on the road for much of the next two years.
If the band’s sound had reached a new maturity with the new album, Maynard’s onstage moves had taken on new aspects as well. From their front-row seats at L.A.’s American Legion Hall in October, Tom Morello and Brad Wilk could see the detailing of the Enochian magic board suspended behind Danny—and they were close enough too to notice Maynard’s stomps and struts, the sharp jerk of his head when he passed near. “He had a whole new repertoire of frontman behavior,” Tom would recall. “It was turkey behavior.”
The Ænima tour made its way through the South and across the Midwest, on to Amsterdam and Paris and Auckland, and at every stop, audiences looked forward to what Maynard might wear nearly as much as they did the music. At first, his costume was no more outrageous than a Mulhawk or the red union suit he’d worn during the Undertow tour. In black sweatpants and Birkenstocks, he ducked and dodged across the stage, singing of boredom and burdens, of balance and nipple rings, his bare torso glistening.
But by the third show, he’d taken his look in a complete 180. His face was a Kabuki mask of white, his eyes rimmed in thick black liner, his stare more penetrating than ever. In December, covered in blue and white body paint and clad only in print boxers, he crouched and swayed in a sinuous interpretive dance against the triple meter of Danny’s floor tom.
Just before the band departed for the Netherlands in January, Maynard temporarily abandoned dramatic attire altogether. When vocalist Tori Amos suggested he accompany her during her Madison Square Garden concert in support of RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, he didn’t hesitate. The two had long admired each other’s art, and when they’d met the summer before, they’d become fast friends, baking cookies from Judith’s recipe and spending hours on the phone in the lonely Los Angeles nights. And when he’d opened the 1992 Napa Valley Silver Oak she’d given him, Maynard suddenly understood what Kjiirt had tried to tell him about pairing a fine Cabernet Sauvignon with a good steak.
Appearing with Tori was more important than my reservations about benefits in general. If my being there helped the cause, great. But it would also let people see what I was capable of. I was perceived as a metal dude, but that really isn’t who I am. I needed to let out some of the more complex nuances that get lost in the sonic bulldozer that is Tool.
They sat close at the piano, their harmony creating of Tori’s song “Muhammad My Friend” a passionate reminder of the feminine side of divinity. And that night, Maynard was the relaxed, smiling man in a gray crewneck, a singer more balladeer than bad boy.
From Houston to Detroit to Ghent, Maynard’s costuming became increasingly outré, and ten months into the tour, he made his entrance at California’s Concord Pavilion in flowing black curls, white face paint, and deep crimson lipstick, his floor-length silver gown slit up the front. He vamped across the stage, methodically stripping until he stood in the spotlight in only green panties and a scarlet bra and sang of sacrifice and chaos, of the black holes of memory, of the dead Ohio sky.
He and his bandmates had made it a point to focus attention on their art and had kept their likenesses from Tool videos and promotional materials, but with increasing fame came instant recognition. Too often, fans approached Maynard in cafés and airports and the corner store, expecting a few words of conversation as if they were old friends. In truth, all they really knew of him was what they’d interpreted from his gnomic lyrics, and that’s the way he preferred it.
The wigs and gowns and makeup might create a necessary diversion, he realized, a smoke screen to enable him to travel incognito in street clothes to the playground with his son.
Back when I watched the early REM videos, I liked not having a clue what Michael Stipe looked like behind his hair. And you only heard of Swans. There were very few videos of them. Kiss would be onstage with all their makeup and you’d wonder who they were, what they looked like. There was power behind the characters. And when they took their makeup off, they were able to go on their merry way.
In art school, Deb Rockman had taught us that less is more. You don’t have to have every structural line in place to get the general gist of a painting or a charcoal drawing. And I didn’t need to be recognizable to tell a story. I felt like less was not only more, less was safer.
Silly costumes made it easier, he soon discovered, to at last bring humor into a Tool performance. During the summer’s Lollapalooza tour, a new character emerged. Billy D—the mustachioed satyr from his “Country Boner” routine—had metamorphosed to the Rev. Maynard. Audiences had no trouble accepting the irreverent humor of the Southern preacher in a tan leisure suit. During breaks between “Pushit” and “Hooker with a Penis,” the good reverend called for hallelujahs from the mosh pit and invited volunteers to come forward and be healed of the curse of fundamentalism—all in the name of the Church of Jesus Fucking Christ.
By Ozzfest ’98, Maynard had adopted more effective camouflage than sequins and painted eyebrows and ball gowns. “For a multitude of reasons, I receded to the back of the stage,” he would explain. “As the eye contact became awkward, I stepped back. It was partly a technical decision; the sound was spilling into my mic from the cabinets behind me. But it also helped get away from the ‘frontman’ label. I absolutely hate the phrase ‘lead singer.’ I’m not a frontman. I’m just part of the story.”
The Lollapalooza faithful wandered in clouds of patchouli across the festival grounds. They examined woven bracelets and tie-dye skirts at the crafts booths, visited body piercing tents, found cooling relief at the misting stations, and received, if they laughed, Free Frances Bean T-shirts.
When the opening bars of “Ænema” rang out across the grounds, they turned their attention from the taco and sam
osa stands to the video projected on the rear of the stage—the disturbing, not-fit-for-MTV video of an alien straining at his shackles and driving a needle into his head. Boston Globe music writer Steve Morse considered Tool, with its Led Zeppelin echoes, illusory tempos, and enigmatic lyrics, the highlight of the main stage. “I thought they stole the show from Korn and Snoop Dogg,” he said in a 2014 interview. “They were fresh and innovative and intriguingly mysterious.”
Maynard wasn’t in the least confident that the audience had deciphered those mysteries. He watched as they flailed in the mosh pit, enraged as ever, and in more than a few shows that summer, he stepped forward and addressed the crowd. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about this band,” he said softly. “It’s not about hate and violence, but about opening your heart.”
His lyrics spoke of picking at scabs and the coming Armageddon, but between the lines was a call to resist easy dogma, to see beyond the obvious, to choose compassion over fear and help usher in a new age of cosmic consciousness. “Maynard has always had an undercurrent of something very positive,” Morse said. “He doesn’t say much onstage, but he comes up with these guru-like aphorisms that are quite striking.”
Maynard had paid attention when Paul Grout had cautioned against confusing metaphor with the truth it illuminated. He’d looked old hurts squarely in the eye, examined destructive patterns, recognized self-doubt as a delusion born of taking to heart the opinions of others. He’d translated his quest into songs, but some listeners could not separate the singer from the search.
I was just interested in figuring out how math applies to human behavior, the geometry of emotions and all those things. Then, people started looking to me like I had something to offer, like they thought I could solve their puzzle. They seemed to think I was the answer. Dude, I am definitely not the answer. I’ve got ideas. I can put Band-Aids on stuff, but I don’t have the fuckin’ answers.
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