A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  The picture of professionalism in tailored suit and tie, he quietly articulated at Jerome community meetings the needs and triumphs of area winemakers and took part in winemaker panels and seminars on cultivation and pest control and the latest in submerged cap fermentation. And as part of the 2012 Arizona Centennial celebration, he stressed the importance of sustainable agriculture to the state’s future.

  Back in Scottville, I watched my family and neighbors grow much of their own food, so I understood even then what it is to be sustainable. We lived within our means and were creative with what we had. If you have a farm or a vineyard, no matter what else is happening in the world, you can survive.

  Throughout history people got by in spite of wars and weather and whoever was in charge—kings, queens, dictators, fascists. They understood how to maintain a connection with their place and how to feed themselves from that place. The cornerstone of that activity was most often vines.

  If the effort were properly managed and regulated, Maynard imagined, wine making could become the industry to bring economic stability to Arizona. His vineyards did their small part—provided his crew a living wage and, by extension, strengthened the local tax base—and should the wine making movement go statewide, the effect could be far-reaching.

  Maynard—one of ten Arizona thought leaders invited to speak at the 2015 Local First Arizona event—encouraged potential growers to do their part, to commit themselves to possibility, to avoid the easy path and work through the inevitable friction that would yield the greatest rewards. “That’s where the art happens,” he explained, the sweetest music from strings stretched to their limit, the most moving poem created in the night’s darkest despair, the finest wines from vineyards tested by drought and frost and blight.

  If new vintners were to succeed, they would need an advocate, and Maynard became a self-appointed spokesperson, appealing to legislators for fair zoning and distribution policies that would move wine making from a cottage industry to a significant economic force. Arizona wine, he insisted, was a unique commodity, a global export that celebrated the local, each bottle the essence of desert herbs and spice, of chalky earth and palo verde in bloom.

  Wine is a product that can’t be outsourced to China or Mexico. It expresses our home, our place, our Arizona. The essence of why a wine is interesting and what compels people to talk about it is the idea of place, of uniqueness. Within that uniqueness that’s fairly consistent from year to year, you have the variations from year to year based on weather patterns.

  But at its core, this place is expressing itself through that bottle, provided the stewards of that grape and of that place are getting out of the way to allow that to happen.

  “Maynard is an Arizona enological pioneer,” Gago explained. “He is creative and quality-oriented and brings new perspective and a new audience for wine.”

  After earning her agroecology degree from Prescott College, Nikki Bagley had been eager for practical experience. Joining the vineyard crew to hoe Bermuda grass and help bring in the 2008 harvest fit the bill. “It was great to see some truly sustainable agriculture going on in Yavapai County,” she would recall. “I had struggled to imagine how agriculture fit into this arid county with all its water issues. It was wonderful to get in on the ground level of this amazing industry.” It wasn’t long before Maynard promoted Nikki to vineyard co-manager, and the two joined forces to help bring viniculture to Arizona.

  Winemaker allies who attended the first meeting of the Verde Valley Wine Consortium in 2008 were unanimous: Yavapai College should be the epicenter of education and resources for new winemakers. Trowel in hand, Maynard provided two years later an on-campus experimental site, the Negro Amaro vineyard he planted where the campus racquetball court had once been. “It was his investment that really showed the college that they could do this on a large scale,” Nikki—the program’s first instructor—explained.

  The next summer, Yavapai’s Southwest Wine Center in Clarkdale became home to Arizona’s first program to offer degrees in viticulture and enology. From a first-year enrollment of 30 students, the program had grown by 2016 to more than 90 future winemakers and vineyard owners and tasting room managers.

  Maynard and Nikki supported winemaker Joe Bechard in his instrumental role in creating 2014 legislation allowing alternating partnerships, the ability for multiple Arizona wineries to share common production space. Owner of Clarkdale’s Chateau Tumbleweed, Bechard enabled Maynard’s transformation of Camp Verde’s former meatpacking plant to Four Eight Wineworks, the shared incubator allowing experienced but underfunded vintners to produce their limited releases until they are solvent enough to build bunkers of their own. In a spirit of camaraderie and support, winemakers share de-stemmers and tanks and the bottling line, knowledge and insights and muscle at harvesttime.

  And the next year, Maynard joined forces with equally committed professionals to put in place the Arizona Vignerons Alliance, a group dedicated to establishing parameters for grape growing and wine production and holding vintners to recognized international standards.

  In light of the farm-to-table and Local First movements, it’s important for us as a wine industry to at least start there. No product from an area will speak as loudly as wine about a specific place and time. The AVA is about aligning ourselves with the idea of the local and increasing understanding of what makes a region unique.

  “Of all the people in this industry, Maynard is one of the few that has taken a long-range view,” Nikki said. “He’s one of the state’s most visionary winemakers. He sees the future of Arizona wines, and he’s pushing hard to get us there.”

  As if his e-mail ID needed further justification, he began investigating the development of next-generation subsurface drip irrigation. “This could be a game changer for vineyards in Arizona,” he explained in early 2016. Growers and environmentalists would be pleased with the novel belowground method that encouraged stronger root systems, conserved Arizona’s precious water, and left no carbon footprint.

  “Because of Maynard’s generosity, these are significant things that will make a difference in Arizona,” Tarbell would explain. “He has the clearest voice about what Arizona wines are and could be. He’s providing a very articulate, strong, intelligent role of leadership to the state’s budding wine industry.”

  And at every conference, every meeting, every planning session, Maynard shared stories—stories of September afternoons in an apple orchard on Darr Road, of dreams of flying high above the evening desert, of a view from a rooftop in Somerville. “Things come up that to most people would be irrelevant,” Todd would explain. “But they’re so relevant and such a part of where things came from, that for Maynard, they’re a constant frame of reference. And they are relevant if you know the story.”

  1 Sarah Jensen, “What’s Maynard Been Up to Lately?” Ludington Daily News (Michigan), February 15, 2005, 4.

  The magic of stories, or so Kiss and Melchizedek and Anne Meeks had taught, lay in making them one’s own. The infinite settings and plot twists told after all a personal tale, the tale of trial and possibility, of chance encounters with characters who were purveyors of epiphany and keepers of dreams, their influence clear only when remembered across the repeating spiral of time.

  During Tool’s Seattle stop on the 2002 Lateralus tour, Maynard and Steele had spent a long-overdue evening recalling their time on Pearson Street and plotting their next adventures. “He told me he wanted to start a new band,” Steele would recall of their talk in the tour bus. “He told me about this Puscifer idea, the fun and different music he wanted to do.”

  Maynard had released angst and anger, had exorcised through his lyrics his personal demons. It was time to take another direction, a road that paralleled Tool’s, but one that would give free rein to his creativity. It was time to honor the story of hope and survival, of the uniquely human ability to cocreate the universe. “I wanted to do s
omething serious, almost as a religion, in reverence to where we’ve come from,” he would explain. And Puscifer—the multifaceted project he’d envisioned more than a decade before, would be his vehicle.

  A long time ago, people understood that the only thing that kept them alive was coordinating in groups and being more creative than the creatures that were threatening them. They were never going to be stronger or faster than those creatures, so they had to be smarter. We’re losing touch with that, because everything we need is readily available. You can’t walk ten feet in any direction without running into food, shelter, or clothing.

  I feel like art has taken a backseat. The whole creative process seems kind of odd because we don’t think it’s relevant to keeping us alive. But we need to use every fiber of our imagination, every spark of our creative energy, to stay ahead of what’s happening to our planet, to our relationships, to our ability to think for ourselves.

  Life is too short not to create something with every breath we draw.

  “I didn’t see Maynard that much,” Laura Milligan would recall of the years he’d busied himself with Tool and APC and the vineyard. “But every time I did, he would say we had to do this, we had to do that, we needed to put together something like what we’d done at Tantrum. He was always brewing that idea.”

  Puscifer would be an homage to art, he told her. Puscifer would be sound and color, country and rock and symphony and jazz, costume and story and non sequitur, a friction-driven work in progress, open-ended to leave room for surprise.

  The revolving troupe might include actors and comedians, guitarists and vocalists and sound engineers who had become over the years family. He’d reprise his Billy D character, the roué in wig and mustache, and Laura and her cowgirl boots. Puscifer would be the cabaret at the crossroads of Joseph Campbell and Hee Haw and Sonny and Cher. Puscifer would be funny.

  “I was losing touch with the comedy part,” Maynard would explain. “That’s why Puscifer had to come back in a big way. “If you want to follow me as an artist, you have to laugh. You have to stop taking yourself so seriously.”

  Fans had appreciated—or at least tolerated—the humorous elements of his work: the padded bras and Kabuki makeup, his blowing paper towels at guest drummer Coady Willis mid-song during the 10,000 Days tour, the irreverent Rev. Maynard. Once they were let in on the joke, they’d delighted in the Teutonic chants and the vineyard’s suggestive name. But they’d never been forgiving of a comedy routine as part of a live show.

  Tool’s audience at the Hollywood Palladium in 1998 had been impatient for the show to begin, no matter how entertaining the opening act. They were mildly amused when Bob Odenkirk and David Cross stepped to the stage in surgical garb, examined Maynard, and diagnosed him with the rare disease tittilitis. But by the time Maynard was draped in a hospital johnny and guided to a wheelchair, they’d had enough and chanted their insistent demand for the main event.

  But Maynard had known that silliness should be integral to his act ever since he’d catapulted hot dogs to the English Acid crowd. “At the time, it looked like misspent time, like so many things he did,” Jack Olsen would remember. “In retrospect, of course, it all seems to line up beautifully toward what eventually happened.”

  Mounting such an ambitious effort would take a pro, and Maynard realized that Mat Mitchell was the right man for the job. Mitchell came in with not only the technical skills to produce recordings and videos, but a background with video game developer Electronic Arts, and he understood the importance of schedules and deadlines and practical details. “Mat is the steady, grounded piece of this puzzle,” Maynard would explain. “While I’m out there like a kite, he’s the one hanging onto it.”

  And in 2007, Puscifer was launched in all its punk-inspired purity, an independent band with no sponsorship and no obligation to recording industry dictates. Maynard and Mat created not only lyrics but arrangements, incorporating rhythm machines and techno programming and digital soundscapes, echoes of the delay pedal effects and Mike Meeng’s drum machine at Gaia’s decades before.

  “It’s very refreshing to work with someone who’s open to experimenting and allows me to experiment as well,” Mat explained in a 2016 interview. “Maynard’s always looking for the next thing. He looks at every pebble and asks, ‘Where do I leap from here?’”

  In spare moments during the last leg of the 10,000 Days tour, Mat set up his laptop and worked with the cadre of musicians and writers and vocalists to ready Puscifer’s first songs for the final mix. APC’s self-recording of Mer de Noms in 2000 had been big news at the time, but seven years later, it had become commonplace—and economical—for bands to take the independent approach.

  Back in the day, a band would have to sell at least half a million records before they saw a profit. But now, music can be as sustainable as wine making. We can have far fewer sales and still pay the rent because there’s no middle man, no bunch of executives in the way, nobody sticking their fingers in the pie.

  And in those days of MTV and music magazines and a brick-and-mortar record store in every mall, new recordings had been spoon-fed directly to consumers. “What musicians did then, we could not do now,” Maynard would explain. “Without that machine in place, people have to discover music in other ways.” The Internet, the go-to information source of the digital generation, had enabled real-time promotion, bringing news far more quickly than print publications could go to press. The public would generate the Puscifer buzz.

  The group’s first single, “Queen B,” was released as a video and a podcast on Puscifer.com, priming fans for the release in late October of its first album, V Is for Vagina, and assuring its debut spot at Number 25 on the Billboard 200. The Puscifer team broadened its reach with pages on Myspace and Facebook, allowing fans to discuss this new trip-hop phenomenon, and more important, spread word of their discoveries and upcoming releases.

  Puscifer followers logged on one morning in early 2009 and discovered a comedic video announcing the group’s long-awaited live debut. Maynard, in full military regalia as the stern, pedantic, and quirky Major Douche, took questions from a largely clueless press corps about what they might expect from the show. He promised nothing less than shock and awe.

  The screen above the stage brightened to reveal Major Douche, service cap in one hand, flask in the other. He stood before an oversized American flag, glared at the concertgoers, and barked orders to silence all cell phones and stow all cameras. The sold-out Valentine’s Day weekend shows were not the elaborate production Maynard fans had expected. The Pearl Concert Theater at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas was set with Tim Alexander’s and Gil Sharone’s drum kits and Rani Sharone’s bass, floor-stand mics for Maynard and Juliette Commagere, and, suspended over the stage, her eyes staring straight into the crowd, was the image of the Queen B herself, Ms. Puscifer.

  And Maynard stepped to the stage.

  The crowd was on its feet at once, caught up in the cacophony of opener Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival, the rockabilly duo of Brother Ant and Brother Ed and their chaos of bullhorns and percussion section of cardboard tubes and cartons. The show segued from sketch comedy to video to song, song that ascended in Eastern ululation, dipped in guttural chants, slowed in sultry R&B rhythms that evoked a summer night in Motown.

  Maynard’s rich, clear voice rose in rap and blues and pure rock. He was the impassioned tent revivalist urging his flock to transcend dogma and recognize the earthly paradise, then, in a sharp left turn, a lounge singer delivering his paean to the erotic. “Maynard has to be one of the most idiosyncratic frontmen that rock has every had,” music writer Steve Morse would explain. “He’s a puzzle, but under it all, there’s a consistency and a need to communicate. He challenges us to examine our idea of a frontman.”

  The company came together in layered harmonies, parted for solos and duets, joined again in the trancelike “Indigo Children,” and then cleared center stage
for Milla Jovovich’s solo of the ways of the underside, her scarlet dress shimmering against the monochromatic set.

  “It was a vaudeville show for the twenty-first century,” Alexander said.

  If the vineyard was the quest, the struggle, Puscifer was the dance that followed, the celebration of song and laughter that continued in a wash of colored strobes long into the night.

  Puscifer’s debut triggered in Maynard a burst of productivity. Only five months after the group’s live launch, he was back on the road with Tool for a mini tour that included the Mile High Music Festival in Colorado and Lollapalooza 2009 at Chicago’s Grant Park. And following the November release of its EP “C” Is for (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference HERE), Puscifer was off again across the U.S. and Canada. For much of the next two years, Maynard took his turn now with Tool, now with APC, again with Puscifer in a round robin of tours across the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

  “I remember him coming home from a long tour,” Tim Alexander would recall. “I had lunch with him the next day, and he told me he’d been out in the vineyard at 6 a.m. picking grapes. That’s why he creates success in his life. He puts in everything he has.”

  With Chris and Lei Li at the helm, the vineyard was in good hands during his absences, but Maynard used his time on the road to his advantage. Concerts were an opportunity to cross-market his varied brands, he realized, to raise awareness of his Sangioveses and Cabernets. “With Maynard, there’s so much complexity. He’s not just a musician or a songwriter,” Nancy Berry would explain. “He’s a very astute businessman with an entrepreneurial spirit.”

  A ticket upgrade admitted fans early for the preshow VIP wine tasting—a Caduceus 101 course in assessing bouquet and balance and finish. Maynard delegated classroom duty to the best man for the job, the man who’d sat beside him at tastings and pairing dinners from the beginning. “He needed someone to teach fans how to interpret wine,” Todd would explain. “So now the security guy teaches the wine course.”