Writing those songs and performing them was like scream therapy. It felt good to have a good cry in my Häagen-Dazs. It helped me work through my own issues. You can do that, too. Go get some ice cream and cry in a corner. If you make me responsible for moving that piece in you, then I’m responsible for it all the time. But you can do it yourself—that’s the whole message.
For every fan who mistook the pointing finger for the path, countless others understood that Maynard was no run-of-the-mill lyricist. He’d provided a map, but it was for them to determine the destination. They recognized in Tool more than an excuse to slam in the mosh pit. Ænima was a mirror held up to fear and unresolved sorrow, an invitation to listen and listen again, to trust their own pure inner voice and step beyond the shadow self to a place of possibility, an album Cleveland music journalist Chris Akin called “a hard rock record for the thinking man.”2
1 Steve Morse, “Sonic Evolution with the Use of Tool.” Boston Globe, November 15, 1996.
2 Chris Akin, “Tool: Ænima,” The Scene (Cleveland), December 1996.
The medicine drew Maynard deeper into the fire’s rhythm, the stories it kept, the spirits of the grandfathers and their grandfathers and theirs that danced in its flicker. He breathed the essence of sage and cedar and his heart beat in time with the water drum and the flames died down then leapt again through the night and the moon made its way across the desert sky.
Lou Maglia had remained in touch with Robby Romero since signing him at Island Records in 1989. Robby was no stranger to the Native American Church. He’d grown up participating in its ceremonies with his mother and had been reintroduced to them through Reuben A. Snake, church spokesperson and national chairman of the American Indian Movement. A sun dancer and pipe carrier, Robby was plenty familiar with the sundown-to-sunrise journey of healing and spiritual transformation.
Robby was not, though, familiar with Tool, but that didn’t lessen his sense of obligation when Maglia inquired about his bringing Maynard to the reservation. “I wanted to do it for Lou and for Maynard,” Robby would recall. “I remembered what Reuben had told me, that if someone reaches out and it’s appropriate, you should always help them.”
And on a day in midsummer, Robby’s assistant met Maynard at the airport in Albuquerque and drove him across the desert, past sagebrush and cactus and mesas orange at the horizon, ever deeper into the Indian territories and the Dené reservation.
Taking part in a peyote ceremony, Maynard quickly discovered, wasn’t quite as simple as booking a seat in the teepee. Before the ceremony proper, he must ready himself through the purification ritual that would detoxify his body of impurities and cleanse his spirit, too, of anger and fear, greed and negativity.
The sweat lodge sat at the edge of the reservation, a squat, rounded structure no bigger than an animal’s lair or a child’s snow fort, far too small, Maynard could tell, for a man to move about inside without stooping. The dome was formed of bent saplings and covered with tarps, and represented, he learned, the womb of the Great Mother, a dark cocoon he’d enter and from which he’d emerge—or so the legends had it—reborn.
Late in the afternoon, Maynard and Robby and the road men who would guide them along the Peyote Road crawled inside on hands and knees and took their places in a circle. The entrance was closed off, and the only light was the red glow of the heated rocks stacked in the circle’s center.
It didn’t take long for the lodge to grow as hot and steamy as any sauna. Darkness and drumbeats and prayers and the tickle of sweat down his back were the whole world, and time became a concept Maynard could barely remember. Hours later—or minutes—the closeness and the heat and the glowing rocks and the rhythmic drumming became at last overwhelming, and he crawled out into the desert and knelt there, and the scorpion tattoo across his back glistened with sweat. In time, he scuttled across the sand and back inside, determined to remain on this path and discover where it might lead, however strange its course.
He knew that to change his mind now was out of the question. Already, he recognized that his presence was as crucial a part of the ceremony as the words of the blessings, as the precise placement of rocks in the fire pit. “You’re not a passenger and you’re not a voyeur,” he would explain. “From the time you show up, it’s all-encompassing. It’s not like you buy a ticket and come for the show. You participate in this event and help to create it.”
The next day, the group moved farther into the desert to a secluded spot at some remove from the village. Maynard lay long wooden poles on the ground, helped bind them with thick rope, hoisted them until they leaned in perfect balance one against the other, and wrapped thick canvas over the framework.
He stepped back. The teepee stood strong and tall against the evening sky. The desert was empty but for figures he watched approach from all directions: chiefs and elders, road men, a medicine woman and a grandmother, a drummer, people of the Dené and Apache and Pueblo nations, Robby’s children. Each came for reasons of their own, and came, too, to walk beside the others in the communal journey.
Now they sat in a circle upon the ground, a family gathered to share green chili, bread baked that afternoon by the women of the reservation, corn grown in the nearby fields, mutton from the tribe’s Navajo-Churro flock.
The whole thing was a sobering experience after going through what I had for the past few years. People kiss your ass because you’re in a band and they think they can get something from you. You get all this attention. But the elders and the sacred dancer and the kids don’t give a fuck about your rock star status.
And that was very liberating. You’re back to being where you can see the struggle on the struggle’s level, where you have to prove yourself—or not. Some of these people might not even like you, but you have to be OK with that. You can’t expect to be treated differently from anybody else.
Stars appeared one by one in the darkening sky. Bowls and cups and thermoses were packed away in baskets and backpacks, and the teepee glowed, backlit by the setting sun. Maynard took his place in the queue and filed inside with the others. They circled the fire, replicating the movement of the planets around Father Sun. The road man welcomed them and welcomed the spirits of the ancestors, too, that would sit beside them in the circle until morning.
The road man blessed the medicine with cedar smoke and passed it around the circle, fresh peyote buttons and dried, and amber peyote tea. The medicine might bring deep introspection or unexpected insight, heightened perception or strange visions, but Maynard’s hours in the dark sweat lodge had left him trusting of the will of the peyote spirit, and whatever it might bring, he accepted the sacrament when it was offered.
I wasn’t a stranger to that sort of thing. But over the years, when I did partake, I respected as much as I could that altered state. You have to honor it. You’re there for a reason. It’s not about getting fucked up. You’re signing off on this thing as a spiritual journey.
You’re not going to do peyote and all of a sudden come up with a new theory of relativity. Well, maybe you will, but if you do, I think it’s in you already. The reason you do this is to take a lateral step to the right or the left to look at things from a different perspective. You do it to become aware of something you should already know but might have missed because you were looking at it from the wrong angle.
Each element of the ceremony—every gesture, every object handed from one to the other around the circle—held its story. Its form, its choreography, was determined by nothing less than the laws of geometry: the teepee poles angled to form its conical shape, the entrance situated to face due east, the peyote blessed and the sacred songs sung one, two, three, four times—once for each of the four directions, the four elements. The circles echoed the unbroken connection of all things. The balance of body, mind, and spirit, of fire, water, and medicine were triads sturdy in their grace. And when the flames burned low, the fire keeper brought b
ranches to feed the fire and meticulously arranged them to form a V, its apex pointing toward the center of the crescent-moon altar.
“Maynard knows that we become what we think,” Robby would explain. “He understands it’s not what we do, it’s the way we do it.”
The rituals created a pattern, a rhythmic clockwise repetition through the night of songs and prayers and drumming, each step pitching Maynard from the familiar and shepherding him further into the new way of seeing and an awareness of his part in the equation. When it was his turn, he smoked from the sacred smoke. He accepted the gourd rattle from Robby, took midnight water from the drinking cup, then passed it to the grandmother beside him.
The road men spoke their healing prayers, the people shared their stories, their own and those of the ancestors, and each telling created another dimension of the eternal tale. The flames flickered in counterpoint to the jangling rattles, the pulse of the water drums, and the songs. They cast shadows against the walls of the teepee and told the fire’s story all night long.
The women and children drew back the flap from the entrance and brought dried meat and wild berries and fresh water from the river. And Maynard stepped into morning. The desert was still. The desert crackled with life. Across the lightening sky winged seven black birds as if placed there by design. In the distance, mountains rose against the horizon, sharp and distinct as his own attentiveness. He stood in just that place, the sand cold under his bare feet. From somewhere quite nearby or far, a cactus wren rasped its daybreak song. Beneath a cluster of prickly pear, a horned toad stirred, and the morning star shone in the east.
“I think the ceremony had a profound impact on him,” Robby would recall. “After a ceremony, a different spiritual life begins. We respect and maintain that life. What Maynard experienced allowed his spirit to touch the beauty and power of our people. He got to experience medicine in a respectful way, in a good way, in the way the Creator intended.”
Maynard’s night in the teepee had brought no revelations, or none that he would afterward recall. He’d seen no visions, received no otherworldly advice, and there was no telling what prayer, which word, which blessing would be the one he’d remember always. The journey had been an extended, concentrated moment, a path that opened to the mirror image of discord and anger, opened to a rhythm, a harmony. That was all. At the end of the path was morning, a morning not so different from those when he’d looked up from his notebook at the surprise of gray dawn and discovered he’d created in the night a song where once there had been silence.
“What you see is a validation,” he would explain. “But it’s not a coupon you can go cash in. It’s not a sign. It’s just a nod. It’s the universe nodding. And you’re part of that.
“There’s no possible way to explain it to somebody who wasn’t there. And you know what? It’s OK. You don’t have to. You see it. You nod back. And you move on.”
Ænima had been certified gold ten weeks after its release and by the time the tour ended was well on its way to reaching double platinum. The album had been a 1998 Grammy nominee for Best Recording Package and had come away with the award for its title track.
Royalties had at last offset the Zoo advance, and nearly seven years after releasing its first album, Tool had begun to see a financial return. Steady paychecks, Maynard realized, meant his days of roommates and substandard apartments could be a thing of the past. “The goal is not the money,” he would explain. “Money is just gas in the tank to be able to do the things you love.”
During a break in the tour schedule, he’d discovered a rent-to-own house on the outskirts of Jerome, a modest one-and-a-half bedroom on a southwest-facing slope overlooking the valley and Mingus Mountain. Here, just outside the city limits, he could trade the evening gown and high-heeled slippers for bib overalls and work boots and transform his acre into terraced gardens.
It would take some research to determine which plants would actually thrive on the rugged hillside. This was not the black loam of Mike’s peony and day lily plots, but a gravely, sandy caliche, commixed with lime and calcium. And the climate might present an agricultural challenge or two as well. He’d experienced the heat of a Jerome summer, and locals had told him of frost on the mountain as early as October and in some years, as late as May Day.
But the little house would be the quiet retreat he needed, the home where he could build Lego cities with Devo and at Christmastime stack books about Native American history under the tree for him. And not far away were Main Street and the Flatiron café, where already Maynard was a welcome regular, and an hour distant, Prescott, the progressive college town offering, he was pleased to learn, periodic sessions of Melchizedek’s Flower of Life seminar.
Eager as he was to settle into life on the mountain, he must—for the time being, at least—divide his time between Jerome and his Tool responsibilities in L.A., and he took up temporary residence at the La Maida house, where Billy was busy at work on music of his own. And the arrangement worked out fortuitously for Mike. He and Jan had parted ways, and now he would live in the orchard house across the road and watch over the Jerome house while he enjoyed his retirement years on the hiking and skiing trails of Arizona.
For the first couple of years after I moved, I spent more time in airports and the tour bus than I did in Jerome. And after the Ænima tour, I still had to rehearse and record with the band. Nowadays, you can open your laptop and record an album in your living room wherever you are. But back then, all the equipment and studios were in L.A. You’d have to rent mics and cables and end up spending twice as much if you tried to record an album in the middle of Arizona.
Before work on a fourth album commenced in earnest, Maynard took advantage of his time in L.A. He joined Laura on the Tantrum stage in their “Country Boner” act and with a renewed enthusiasm, revisited the acting lessons he’d begun when he’d first come to the city. It was par for the course, he’d learned, for sitcom stars and singers and sports figures to branch into films, their success in one discipline paving their way to another. If ever he were to follow that path, he’d need to up his performance level.
By now a master of disguise, he enrolled at the Ivana Chubbuck Studio on Melrose as only “James” and came to class in worn leather jacket and jeans, ostensibly just one more unknown with no expectation of special treatment or intention of riding his own coattails to cinematic success. “I busted my ass in that class,” he would recall.
He struggled with breathing exercises and cold readings, confronted his weaknesses, and tried his best to play to what he imagined his strengths should be. In his attempt to master Chubbuck’s 12 steps to character development as actors Eddie McClintock and David Spade had done before him, he all but ignored his natural comedic talents. And when class was dismissed, he returned to the La Maida house discouraged, frustrated by the challenge that seemed only a chore.
A month into the course, Maynard’s concerned coach took him aside. “He said he thought he knew what my problem was,” Maynard remembered. “He felt that I was absolutely terrified that I was average.”
He knew at once that his coach was on to something. Despite Undertow’s platinum status, despite the awards and reviews and sold-out arenas, Maynard still harbored the suspicion that one day, his past would surely catch up with him. The spotlights and applause would be revealed as the illusion they were, and he’d come face-to-face with his true destiny: that of a complacent factory worker nursing forgotten dreams and Bud Light in a gray Ohio living room. “I felt I had to always be one step ahead so I could say I did something before that happened,” he would recall.
His greatest challenge at the Chubbuck studio wouldn’t be earning an A, but outdistancing the echo of dismissal and underestimation, the irrational and persistent belief in his mediocrity. And the course did little to encourage the pace he’d need to maintain if he were to reach either goal.
Every week, we were assigned a partner
. We were supposed to meet with them during the week and develop a scene and present it in the next class. I kept getting stuck with these actresses or models who just couldn’t be bothered to study with me. I was there for like two, maybe three months, and I only did three scenes because these people kept cutting class to go to auditions or photo shoots. It was a waste of my time to be there and not be able to exercise whatever the fuck I had to exercise.
But at the Gracie studio, he had only to rely on himself. Jiu-jitsu wasn’t a tandem effort; he needn’t depend on a partner to earn an above-average score. “It’s up to you to work hard,” he would explain. “If you’re getting your ass kicked every time, you’re not getting any better. There’s no coasting in jiu-jitsu.”
Success was a matter of avoiding the head-on attack, of stepping to a more advantageous position to alter the very dynamic of the game, of diverting his opponent’s energy—and redirecting his own.
“If your opponent is driving all his weight on you, you move to the side and let it go into the ground or into the wall,” he said. “Instead of trying to push back, I learned to step outside the situation.”
In hotel rooms and airline terminals from Fresno to Newcastle, Maynard had used his downtime during the Ænima tour to work on new songs, songs more complex, more metaphoric than ever. But a contract dispute with Zoo’s successor, Volcano Entertainment, had stalled progress on the next album, and by early 1999, the legal disputes had left the band’s creativity blocked and Maynard feeling restless.
“Things weren’t moving as fast as I’d like,” he would recall. “What was I supposed to do now, sit around the house rereading all these depositions? That’s boring. I felt like I wasn’t doing enough.”
I knew I had more to offer than the timing of Tool would allow—more songs, more music, more art. I come from a background of people who couldn’t do any of those things. They couldn’t be in one band let alone three. They couldn’t add up the monthly bills or even dress themselves.
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