If you have the means, the knowledge to create something and you don’t, shame on you. If you’re able to be good at your job, to raise a child, to plant a garden, whatever, it’s your responsibility to do it—not only for yourself but for the world.
Billy Howerdel had his own portfolio of partially completed music—a sort of post-punk, darkwave hybrid he’d spent years tweaking and editing and polishing. He’d never considered the possibility of his songs one day making the Billboard charts—or being produced, for that matter. His art was a solitary exercise in craft and composition, a challenge to create with his portable four-track recorder a sonic layering of orchestral movement and heavy metal.
“It happened one day that Maynard walked in while I was working,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. “I played him one of my songs, and he said, ‘I could hear myself singing that.’” Flattered by his response, Billy nevertheless dismissed Maynard’s words as a fraternal pat on the back and returned to his headphones, equalizers, and VU meters.
But Maynard was persistent. Not only did he recognize potential in Billy’s work, he saw a chance to sidestep the Tool impasse and broaden his own artistic range. “Billy had these great songs, and I asked him for a tape I could work with,” he would recall. “I thought I might be able to punch them up.”
Maynard heard in Billy’s unique sound subtle echoes of Randy Rhoads, the Cure, Siouxie and the Banshees, an intriguing framework for a new direction his lyrics might take. By the time he’d added vocal melodies and words, Billy’s blueprint had telescoped to a three-dimensional structure of harmony and rhythm and story. Even the song Billy had believed was fully realized, an homage to a childhood mentor, Maynard recast to an impassioned screed against blind adherence to dogma. “When I heard what he did, I was just blown away,” Billy would recall. “He’s the master of figuring out odd puzzles.”
It seemed to both a foregone conclusion that they should continue their collaboration, bring in a few musicians, and see just how far their project might go. Perhaps, Maynard thought, forming a band with Billy would give him fresh perspective on the Tool standstill. “When you’re in a relationship, you can’t see it clearly,” he would explain. “I had to look from the outside in, have another relationship to give some contrast.”
The two knew enough professionals to avoid the frustration of open auditions. They called in their A-list, members of bands that had opened for Tool and musicians Billy had worked with as a guitar tech. For the cost of lunch and an afternoon in a rehearsal studio, they realized a satisfying return on their investment: players not only competent and personable but who understood their vision for the band. Failure guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen made the cut, and Paz Lenchantin, the classically trained bassist Billy had long admired. He and Maynard gave the nod to both Josh Freese of Devo and Guns N’ Roses and to Tim Alexander, who would alternate on drums until one or the other became a permanent member of the group.
With a handful of songs more or less completed and the fledgling band fully staffed, Maynard and Billy took the next logical if somewhat ambitious step. Booking shows a few months out would give them a deadline to work toward, the motivation to fine-tune their material and create a thematic, album-length body of work.
Years of sharing tour buses and the La Maida house had accustomed them to each other’s quirks and working style, and they tackled their job with an inspired and coordinated ferocity. Maynard reviewed Billy’s music and developed melodies and lyrics, careful to retain the essence of the originals. Each iteration raised the bar for Billy, who then took the pieces to even higher levels of complexity. “I trust him,” Billy said of Maynard’s input. “Even when he does something and my first reaction is, huh?, I let it go. I don’t question it. And not because I don’t want to piss him off. It’s just literally that I completely trust him.”
Maynard’s writing for Tool had been a cerebral exercise, a masculine approach of anger and attack. The night in the teepee had freed him to face his vulnerabilities head-on, to face the roots of that anger and move from the abstract to grounded, sensual lyrics—“Pull me into your perfect circle / One womb / One shame / One resolve”—lyrics that defined the music’s leitmotif and gave the new band its name. A Perfect Circle would bring to the forefront Maynard’s emotions, his experience—his voice.
Billy had for a long time imagined the vocalist who might do justice to his music, the strong woman who would take his songs in a more feminine direction than most mainstream rock and shatter the stereotype of the fragile girl singer. But when he heard Maynard’s vocal treatment of their material, he thought again. “Maynard and I were on the same page,” Billy would explain. “There was an unspoken understanding that a powerful sentiment could be conveyed from a feminine perspective—sung by a male.” Maynard’s was the voice that could best tell the APC stories, the voice that ranged effortlessly from anguished scream to tender whisper, from growling aggression to the gentle nuance often lost in Tool’s wall of sound.
The argument that many people had about Tool’s music is that they couldn’t hear the vocals. I had to scream to be heard, and that’s not necessarily a pleasant sound. It works for the rage, but it doesn’t work for the art if you have to scream your head off to be heard over the amps.
In a way, besides being its own band, I always thought of A Perfect Circle as a way to serve Tool. I thought if my voice was more audible and people learned how to recognize it, they’d have more respect for Tool if they could hear that fourth instrument.
By the summer of 1999, concertgoers and online reviewers were already referring to APC as Maynard’s side project, though he considered the new group anything but a diversion. His bands would be given the time and space each required and deserved—and that included the undertakings of his Puscifer project.
In mid-August, L.A.’s rock community turned out in force to support one of its own. Former Circle Jerks and Black Flag vocalist Keith Morris faced that summer staggering medical bills following his recent diagnosis of type 2 diabetes and a series of surgeries, and the two-show benefit was one more fund-raiser Maynard could get behind. The varied lineup included Pennywise and Fishbone, Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers, Thelonious Monster, and actor Johnny Depp—and in the afternoon show at Whisky a Go Go, Recreational Racism.
Maynard opened with countrified versions of Circle Jerks’s “Group Sex” and “Back Against the Wall,” and then, in platinum pompadour, bushy blond mustache, and beige leisure suit, joined Laura Milligan in “Country Boner,” the Libertyville campfire sing-along that had become a Recreational Racism staple.
And that evening at the Viper Room, A Perfect Circle made its public debut. Maynard warned the curious audience that the sound they’d hear that night would not inspire head-banging. A Perfect Circle was AM radio music, he joked, the kind of music Billy liked. “Perfect Circle allowed Maynard to be a little bit looser,” Billy would explain. “We bonded over humor even more than music, a dry, love-of-Monty-Python, British, slipped-under-the-table humor.”
The six songs they performed that night weren’t exactly easy listening but were a delicate balance of heavy rhythms and crunching guitar riffs, atmospheric rock and melodic intervals. New as the band was, its performance was tight, its members attuned to the others’ nuances as if they’d played together for years. Percussion and bass interwove with guitar and words of release and remorse, forgiveness and fidelity in songs so new that Maynard from time to time consulted his lyric sheet as he sang.
A few days after its debut, the band played an afternoon show at the Opium Den, the new incarnation of the Gaslight as cave-dark as ever and where water still seeped onto the stage from the men’s room upstairs. The performance included the same half-dozen songs they’d done at the Viper Room—and a promise of brand-new material at the Troubadour that night.
Between shows, the band stopped by the backyard of Nine Inch Nails bassist Danny Lohner to join in another of Hollywoo
d’s ubiquitous cookouts. While the others passed the potato salad and sipped their Sam Adams, Maynard sat at the edge of the yard, straining to see in the fading light the lyrics he scribbled in his yellow notepad.
A Perfect Circle made its way up the coast, opening for Fishbone or Oxbow or Dolores Haze in tiny clubs from St. Luis Obispo to San Jose to San Francisco. At each stop, the lyrics were more polished, the presentation more professional, and the gate more satisfying as word spread of this surprising alt-metal, art rock, operatic band.
The mini tour was interrupted by APC’s most well-attended performance to date. Maynard fans had looked forward for months to Tool’s October 10 appearance at the inaugural Coachella Art and Music Festival in Indio, California, its first show in more than a year. But they changed their plans when they learned his new band would open the festival on the ninth. The 100-degree temperatures couldn’t keep them from the Empire Polo Grounds that day, and they carried their water bottles to the mosh pit at the main stage, where they swayed in time to Billy’s Les Paul and Tim’s percussion and Maynard’s songs of emptiness and loneliness and the healing a perfect circle of connection might bring.
If audiences expected the intense, screaming frontman they’d come to know, they discovered instead a more subdued Maynard who uncharacteristically held his spot on the stage and made little eye contact with the crowd. And if they shouted his name when the band made its entrance, he shook his head and held a finger to his lips. No member of APC was more important than any other, the gesture seemed to say. The music was, after all, Billy’s dream, a dream Maynard was not about to co-opt. “Maynard was beyond gracious, beyond inspiring, and elevating,” Billy would recall of his largesse. “He can really love the underdog. He basically said, ‘I’m going to let you steer this ship.’”
A Perfect Circle was an ensemble, a team, and Maynard refused to take the role of frontman or spotlit rock star—despite the message written in glitter across his T-shirt front: Fuck me, I’m famous.
The days of rummaging beneath cushions for loose change were over. Maynard’s long-overdue financial security meant wining and dining in style the ingénues and fangirls eager to appear at his side—and indulging a bit in the rock star lifestyle that seemed expected of him. But he didn’t put his royalties entirely toward vintage Cabernets and top-of-the line mobile phones, gourmet cat food for his Siamese, Puppy Cat, or Prada skunk-skin blankets.
He and Billy knew that maintaining artistic control of their project must come at a price. Investing their savings and their skills in the production of a demo would ensure the integrity of the singular sound that reflected their shared musical language. “Billy was influenced by things that I felt Tool would never be influenced by,” Maynard would explain. “I liked the idea of bringing in some Byrds melodies, some Love and Rockets. The harmonies were all Joni Mitchell.” And if they recorded the demo on their own, they could be sure of its timely completion.
I work best when you give me a puzzle and a set of parameters. Billy had been kicking around this music for a long time, and I think it motivated him for me to go, “OK, we have exactly five minutes to do this.” Eventually, I was going to have to get back to Tool and I wouldn’t have time to work on anything else. So if we were going to do this, we needed to do it now. And because we just absolutely had no time, we were able to create something pure without overthinking it.
That winter, while the rest of the world prepared for the impending Y2K digital shutdown, Maynard placed his trust in Billy’s Mac 9600 and his Pro Tools expertise. Renting studio space and recording to tape didn’t come cheap, and going digital, they discovered, was economical and efficient. “It’s the total norm nowadays,” Billy explained in a 2015 interview. “But in 1999, it was extremely rare to record an album yourself.” Except for an afternoon at Sound City and two days of percussion work at the home studio of Billy’s friend Scott Humphrey, the recording and overdubbing and editing was completed in their own backyard—a room off the garage that Billy had converted to a vocal booth and recording studio.
By the end of January, Mer de Noms was a reality, a collection of tales of failure and redemption, of pain born of truth dismissed or overlooked, a chronicle of those who’d shaped Maynard’s life for good or ill, their names cascading through the song titles like a log of biblical begats.
The two brought onboard attorney Peter Paterno to guide the demo toward recording companies likely to show interest. The eye-catching cover art couldn’t help but make a positive first impression, Billy’s ambiguous Perfect Circle logo embodying the album’s theme. At first glance, the mismatched arcs weren’t a perfect circle at all. But with a shift in perspective, a peek behind the obvious, the image emerged of a layered symmetry, figures eclipsed in shadow, but visible all the same if one were only to look.
It was Nancy Berry’s job as vice chair of EMI’s Virgin Music Group Worldwide and Virgin Records America to review the demos sent her way by hopeful musicians and their reps. The rock genre was still strong in that winter of 2000, and Mer de Noms was just one more in the ever-growing stack of CDs in her inbox. But Berry’s friend, Curve vocalist Toni Halliday, had inside information. Maynard and Billy had recruited Halliday’s husband, producer and engineer Alan Moulder, to mix the demo, and she knew firsthand that A Perfect Circle was a cut above the average fledgling band. And on that rainy Sunday night in February, determined to clear her to-do list before a new workweek began, Berry took her friend’s advice and placed their demo in her player.
“I listened to ‘Judith’ and absolutely fell in love with it,” Berry recalled in a 2014 interview. “I said, ‘OK, now I’ve got to go listen to it in the car,’ because that was always the test for me in signing bands.” Up and down the glistening streets of Bel Air she drove, aware only of the anguished ache in Maynard’s voice, of Billy’s atmospheric riffs, of Paz’s driving bass. Then she played the CD from start to finish, lost in the haunting Eastern rhythms and dark waves of percussion, the daring segues from orchestral to goth, Maynard’s plea for healing, for recognition, for peace. She pressed replay and listened again.
In her years with Virgin, Berry had worked with such talents as Smashing Pumpkins and David Bowie and Janet Jackson, and her standards were high. The final mixing and mastering would come later, but already Mer de Noms was a clean, professional production. She recognized that for all its hints of the Cocteau Twins and Swans and the Cure, for all its shifts in tempo and genre, the APC sound was in a category all its own, distinct, cohesive, and radio-friendly. First thing Monday morning, she telephoned Paterno with an offer.
Berry wasn’t alone in her enthusiasm. Top labels had already begun their courtship rituals, wooing Maynard and Billy with the usual lobster dinners and overpriced wines and too-good-to-be-true promises. Once more, Maynard had listened over steak and sashimi to chatter of royalty structures and distribution schemes and the band’s glittering future. Accustomed by now to the seductive rhetoric, he sipped his Gewürztraminer, imagined floppy rabbit ears, and paid attention only to the practical commitments the labels might bring to the table.
“Virgin seemed to be a more focused company,” he would recall. “And 90 percent of the company was women, all hell-bent on proving themselves in a man’s industry.” And after consulting with her husband, EMI president Ken Berry, Nancy sweetened her offer with terms that tipped the scales toward Virgin even more. “She got us a joint venture deal, which most labels weren’t willing to do,” Maynard would explain. “We’d be business partners. The band would invest in promotions and marketing and we’d split the profits 50/50 with the label.”
With only two months to prepare before APC was to go on the road, Berry made the band a Virgin priority. “I’ve never in my career done anything as fast and intense as we did for Perfect Circle,” she would recall. The final mastering of Mer de Noms must be completed, and a music video, the marketing campaign, and the design of elaborate sets in time for the band
to open for Nine Inch Nails in its Fragility v2.0 tour that would begin in April.
Nancy Berry managed to wrangle David Fincher to direct the “Judith” video, which is a gorgeous piece and really did a lot for us. I’m sure dealing with someone like me wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for him, but of course, we butted heads a little bit. We had to negotiate a compromise between him wanting to see my face and me wanting to be Cousin Itt behind a wig.
We managed to find a happy medium, and in the course of filming, he expressed interest in having me possibly read for his next film. Legend has it that I was booked for it and turned it down. But no, I had to get to work and go on the road. Dwight Yoakam ended up getting that role. There’s no possible way I would have pulled off what he did in The Panic Room, so that was probably the best decision Fincher ever made, to not pursue having me read for the part.
Searchlights and strobes illuminated the twin arcs and the rune-like renderings of Mer de Noms song titles suspended over the darkened stage. Louder and louder against the crowd’s expectant cheers rose Josh’s staccato percussion, Billy’s wailing guitar, Paz’s crashing bass, Troy’s insistent rhythms. The music slowed, then expanded, then erupted in sonic chaos.
Through the Midwest, across Canada, up the East Coast, mosh pits exploded in a blur of slamming and crowd surfing. APC, audiences discovered, was a symphonic pop-metal fusion, a balance of grunge and rock, a celebration of the unexpected: an erotic strip-poker intro, a ten-minute mash-up of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” sung over the Cure’s “Love Song,” Maynard’s frenzied burlesque of self-stimulation.
He and his bandmates communicated cues with no more than a glance, their sensitivity belying their brief partnership. The APC members were mysterious characters in black, their costumes a shadowy camouflage that allowed their stories to take center stage, the tales of dismissal and heartbreak, of rage and introspection and forgiveness. Maynard growled and crooned and raged Billy’s lyrics and his own, lyrics of how much was lost in the blind surrender to love, how much gained in authentic connection, how much destroyed in unquestioned faith in a specious savior. He hunched and crouched and convulsed across the stage, twisted his bare torso and jerked his head, and the long hair of his wig fell across his eyes.
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 26
