Puscifer’s second full album, Conditions of My Parole, debuted at Number 27 on Billboard’s 200 list in October 2011. Recorded among the barrels in the bunker when the tour schedule allowed, the collection was an ode to the Verde Valley in all its contradiction. The album brought together original ensemble members and newcomers including British vocalist Carina Round, drummer Jeff Friedl, bassist Matt McJunkins, keyboard player Josh Eustis—and Devo on cello. The Conditions tour kicked off with a Halloween appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, the infectious energy inspiring music director Paul Shaffer to break into a spirited keyboard rendition of the title track.
At last, Maynard had solved the dilemma of rock and comedy sharing the stage. Puscifer was, after all, theater, and he wisely booked venues designed for just that. A 15,000-seat auditorium would never provide the intimacy a variety show demanded, but conservatory auditoriums would fit the bill, and historic performance houses that had been stops on the circuits of nineteenth-century lecturers and Shakespeare companies and vaudeville troupes.
The beauty of Puscifer is going into theaters where there are ushers, not the rock clubs that people are used to. The unfamiliar forum throws audiences off their normal game. They’re out of their element, because they have to sit in their own seat and they get chastised for pulling out a camera or invading someone else’s space. It’s like boot camp for them, breaking them down to build them back up so they can pay attention and appreciate what’s happening in front of them.
The spaces were ornate with Corinthian pilasters and gilt-edged balconies and pastoral paintings above the stages, but the mood was anything but reserved. “Puscifer is a many-faceted building with many cornerstones,” Maynard would explain. “The first is to remember to have fun. Remember to dance, to follow your bliss.” And the fun began before the theater doors opened. As fans queued on the sidewalk, Brother Ed strode among them and, zealous as any street preacher, implored them to turn away from sin, to avoid the show and save their hell-bound souls.
The houselights dimmed, and Maynard pulled an aluminum Airstream from the wings. Carina stepped from the trailer and helped him arrange a charcoal grill and lawn chairs at the edge of the proscenium, and a red-and-white-draped table set with bottles and goblets. While the players awaited their turns in the spotlight, they sat in a circle and sipped wine, the orange paper flames of the barbecue fluttering toward the fly.
Conditions of My Parole was smooth guitar and ominous chant, curious electronic distortion and melodic harmony, lowbrow humor and linguistic play, rock and country and karaoke in a trailer park. “In Maynard’s shows, you come off this rush of intensity, and then it’s him coming out of an Airstream,” Steele would explain. “He’s a combination of the spiritual, and then, ‘Here, have a dish of fish food.’”
The performance was punctuated by video interludes that told the story of eccentric desert dwellers: the crass and bumbling Billy D, Hildy in crop top and leopard-print kimono, Peter Merkin and his infatuation with conspiracy theories and Debbie Gibson. Concertgoers began to suspect there was more to the skits than tales of make-believe people. The characters seemed somehow familiar, no different really from the dreamers and the downtrodden and the wannabe bass players they’d known, the uncle who every year dominated Thanksgiving dinner with rants about dope sniffers. Maynard’s lyrics of echoes and ghosts and omens could have been about the fears and passions of real people just like them, their ambiguity an invitation to make the stories their own and to accept their part in their creation.
“Puscifer works through the whole chakra system,” Laura Milligan would say of the shows’ format. “You go through the entire gamut of human experience. You have that connection with your belly and your first chakra, you get silly and laugh, and then you move up to that beautiful place at the end when he’s just soaring with Carina and the mandolins.”
Maynard’s intense scream, unrelenting stare, and bold lyrics had gotten the public’s attention, and they couldn’t stop listening now, when his art had become more complex and multilayered. Steele had recognized Maynard’s spiritual depth, but it could never be said that the man who’d sung “Fuck your Christ!” embraced mainstream religious views. He and Ramiro had discovered in their long-ago late-night discussions Joseph Campbell’s concept of “religio,” a linking back, a reconnection with ancient mythologies, not through blind belief in parroted dogma, but an understanding of their practical purpose.
Religion helps explain important information so it’s easy to understand and doesn’t have to be explained every time. People living in the desert thousands of years ago couldn’t eat pork because it was full of worms and they’d die if they ate it. In order to keep people from eating it, it became a religious proscription, and then avoiding it just became a part of the daily routine. They didn’t think about the survival mechanism attached to the ritual. “Why don’t we eat pork again?” “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t eat pork.”
The Japanese tea ceremony started because if there’s a tsunami, boiling the water purifies it so it’s safe to drink. It became part of their religion to boil the water.
We just casually make these things part of our daily routine so that when a tsunami hits, at least our family might survive, almost accidentally, because our ritual taught us how to boil water and drink that instead of the contaminated water. Honoring that ritual is heaven. The knowledge of good and evil is salvation.
The searchers and seekers and mastodon fleers of the old stories, he and Ramiro had learned, were but characters in one story with infinite variations, eternally replicating the human tale of possibility and survival. Carina in her black gown, Maynard in his Italian suit or his cowboy costume, Friedl at his drum kit: The story was repeated once more. The crowd sat as rapt as magi, pitched to a weightlessness beneath projections of swirling stars and the moon that floated fat and full in the desert sky.
The Conditions team brought onboard musicians Zac Rae, Josh Morreau, and Claire Acey to record 2013’s Donkey Punch the Night, an EP of two new songs and their techno remixes, and a Puscifer treatment of Accept’s “Balls to the Wall” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the early days of C.A.D., Maynard had vowed he’d never take the easy way out, and tackling Queen’s masterpiece reminded him that he’d kept his promise. “Re-tracking ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ almost note for note forced me to pay attention to its complex harmonies and multiple movements,” he explained. “It reminded me of how I’d always believed music should be approached. I’ve never stuck to that simple intro-verse-chorus-bridge format.”
If Mitchell was a grounding influence, so too was Maynard’s time on the mat. He’d begun each winter to join interested high school wrestlers in the MCC gym, assisting coach Jim Allen in teaching them the fundamentals just as Mike had taught them, the pure math and physics of the leverage the sport demanded. And he didn’t stop there. He helped fund the team’s summer wrestling camp retreat—and let them know the gift came with a price. “I had them write essays,” he would explain. “I asked them to tell what wrestling means to them, or why wrestling should be kept in the Olympics.”
“Maynard’s level of give-back is amazing,” Steele said. “I imagine him telling the wrestlers, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what you should do. Find the things that make you healthy and happy.’ But then he would probably add, ‘And if you haven’t seen the Will Ferrell movie Old School, you’re doing yourself a disservice.’ He always does some form of comedy.”
And in 2015, during a long-overdue vacation, Maynard visited Limão Herédia’s Maui Jiu Jitsu academy, the island’s premiere Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. It had been a long time since he’d studied under Herédia at the Gracie academy, and their reunion would be a chance to train with him again. “I was honored that after 20 years, Maynard came to see me,” Herédia said in a 2015 interview.
On their second afternoon of training, Herédia turned to Maynard. In his hands he held a purple
belt, the level in Brazilian jiu-jitsu signifying conscious competence. “He earned the belt because he’s tough,” Herédia would explain. “He’s capable and focused and a good student. But I also wasn’t going to pass up the chance to thank him for all he’s done for jiu-jitsu. His involvement brought an awareness of the sport. How many musicians and fans are studying jiu-jitsu because of Maynard?”
Deb Rockman had looked forward to Puscifer’s Chicago performance as much to celebrate her former student’s success as to forget for an evening a time of too much illness and death, too much grief. “It had been a difficult, difficult year,” she explained in a 2013 interview. “I e-mailed Maynard and poured my heart out to him, and he opened his heart and listened to me.”
And that night at the Cadillac Palace, Maynard’s voice rose in a hymn of beauty and peace, of surrender to the healing rhythm of the sea, the cleansing waves that gather then break across the sand. He sang of the hope that remains in the wake of sorrow, he sang the song he dedicated that night to Rockman.
Weary traveler, calloused and sore
Time and gravity followed you here
Rest, my sister, and tell me
All about the ocean
Spoils and troubles, the burden you’ve bore
Pay them no mind, they matter no more
Leave them behind and show me
All about the ocean
Look in your eyes
I’ve never seen the ocean
Not like this one
“How else could his fan base get exposed to such ideas?” Moon Zappa would reflect. “It’s miraculous. And he does it in a relatable way, with sound and lights and artistry. He’s an alchemist and a wizard for sure. A merry trickster.”
The merry trickster, quite unbeknownst to Lei Li, booked the underground bar of Louisville’s Seelbach Hotel for the afternoon of Puscifer’s Leap Day show. And after a 30-year gap in communication, he invited his Church of the Brethren pastor Paul Grout to join him for brunch at the Neighborhood before Tool’s Boston performance in January. He had important arrangements to discuss.
Puscifer’s success was due in great part to Lei Li, who had taken on filling customer orders and managing the Puscifer store in Jerome where fans stocked up on T-shirts and posters, vinyl and CDs, locally roasted coffee beans and squid-ink pasta. At last, she’d put her art degree to good use in designing Puscifer’s women’s clothing line, and Maynard relied on her to assemble tour merch and to arrange for flights and shuttle buses and meatless meals for the vegetarians in the cast. Lei Li got things done.
She’d never been dazzled by Maynard’s celebrity. The respect and admiration she’d felt for him from the beginning had only grown stronger, but happy in her work—and fully aware of his dalliances—she’d kept her professional distance. “I definitely didn’t want to jeopardize my job,” she would recall. “If he didn’t reciprocate my feelings, it could be awkward.” But the more evenings she spent with him, the more Thanksgiving pizzas they shared, the more old friends and family she met over Cream of Wheat before a show, the harder it was to deny what her heart was telling her.
Meanwhile, Maynard looked forward to returning from the road or a long day in the bunker and finding her there to share Cabernet and a discussion of the finer points of Carlos Castaneda. Lei Li had become more than an employee, more even than a trusted sister.
And there came the day when he recognized in her the one person who could catch his glance from across the room, smile with him at the inside joke, stand beside him in the face of all possibility. He’d fallen, to his surprise, in love.
You have to lose your way to find your way back. I reached the point where I needed to stop going down the wrong path, because the only thing I saw was that there’s nothing to it. You’re never going to find connection or love or commitment in transient relationships. It’s like in Charlotte’s Web. You see “Some pig!” and you forget that actually, the spider pointed it out and the pig is nothing. You’re looking for the web and the spider, and you get distracted by the pig. Several pigs.
I don’t regret one single step I took down that road. I learned a lot about myself and turned those experiences into something positive, into songs and art.
In the words of Bill Hicks: “In this business, it takes a very special woman—or a lot of average ones.” I finally understood what he meant.
Meanwhile, in the distance, you have Lei Li going, “Fuck. Finally.”
Above the bar at the Rathskeller in the basement of the Seelbach Hotel, gold-leaf signs of the zodiac glinted in the candlelight. The space was lined floor to vaulted ceiling with hand-painted Rookwood tiles depicting scenes of apple orchards and walled cities, and about the old speakeasy, sturdy pillars were encircled with pottery pelicans, a symbol of good luck.
Maynard hadn’t told Lei Li the details of his plan until the stage had been set. He’d left her just enough time to choose a gown and visit the florist and, after a two-year engagement, presented her with a perfectly choreographed afternoon. And while the band performed the sound check before that night’s show, they slipped away to the Rathskeller to be married.
The winding path, the switchbacks and wrong turns and detours had inexorably led to this: Maynard’s bride in beribboned gown, her bouquet of red roses, her smile as he came near.
Jan was there, and Lei Li’s parents, Puscifer’s tour manager, Todd, a photographer, and the Rev. Grout. “Our long-ago connection was meaningful to Maynard, and it was meaningful to me, too,” he said of his agreement to travel from Vermont to perform the ceremony. “I thought he was pretty amazing back then, and I was struck that he’d carried that uniqueness for so long. The fact that he remembered the things I’d told him was touching.”
Maynard and Lei Li listened to Grout’s words of the joys and challenges and necessary forgiveness they would share. Then Maynard looked into her eyes and she into his, and they whispered their vows.
“Then we went to the Brown Theatre and threw the garter and bouquet to the band,” Lei Li would remember, “and shared cupcakes with everyone.”
The two-week stay in Italy was as much a research project as a honeymoon. Maynard and Lei Li had visited Piemonte vineyards, the terraced Barolo and Barbaresco acres near Alba, and next on the itinerary would be a stop at Luca Currado’s Vietti winery in Castiglione Falletto. “I’d met Currado at a wine distributor meeting in Denver years before,” Maynard would explain. “We hit it off and kept in contact.”
Currado led the newlyweds through his cellar, fed them wine and cheese, and Maynard, in a rush of Midwestern gregariousness, told him of their plans for the next day. They’d hire a driver and explore, he explained, and search for details of Spirito Marzo and Clementina Durbiano, his great-grandparents who—according to vague family stories—had been married somewhere in the Val di Susa more than a century before.
If Maynard needed assistance in his sleuthing, Currado and his wife Elena were just the pair to help. Currado knew Susa well, he said, had skied there often, and with the town’s chief of police, no less. After a few flurried phone calls, Elena reported that Maynard’s ancestors weren’t from Susa at all, but nearby Venaus, and he and Lei Li were expected at the Venaus archives the next day.
And on the morning of his 48th birthday, Maynard tucked a bottle of wine under his arm and stepped from the narrow street and into the municipio, bustling that morning with Venausians filing papers and investigating titles and resolving their municipal matters. “I figured we were in the right place,” Maynard would recall. “The nameplate on the counter said ‘Ariana Marzo.’”
Ariana waved them toward an adjoining room, where Maynard saw not the bulging file cabinets and musty ledgers he’d expected but a trio of national and local reporters, the mayor, and a cluster of townsfolk who greeted him with a hearty “Hello! Welcome home!”
On the table was stacked all the information Maynard cou
ld have hoped for: maps and addresses and copies of birth certificates and death certificates and marriage licenses of Boniface Spirito Giacinto Marzo and Maria Clementina Durbiano, and of their daughter Maria Luigia Ernestina Marzo, his grandmother.
A visit from an American rock star was the most exciting thing to happen in the little town in quite some time, particularly a rock star with local roots. The next day, the newspapers would include spreads detailing Maynard’s visit and his family tree, a tree that branched to include most of the people in Venaus. Even Mayor Nilo Durbiano was family, they discovered, a cousin on Clementina’s side, and they toasted in Nagual del Marzo their unexpected reunion.
It wasn’t surprising that so many shared common ancestors. Surviving the harsh alpine winters had never been easy, and people of the region had decades before relied on the bounty of neighboring villages to get them by until springtime. While blizzards raged over the mountains, the Marzos and the Durbianos had donned heavy coats and boots and mittens and scarves, tied bundles to their sleds, journeyed down the snowy peaks, and met their neighbors in the valley, where they exchanged food and supplies.
“When it came time to get married,” Maynard would explain, “they picked a partner who could handle that trek.” And Spirito, like so many others, chose as his wife a strong, capable woman he’d met on the wintry path. He chose Clementina Durbiano, a woman of the journey.
Through the narrow streets they rode, to the edge of town and up a steep incline that brought them face-to-face with the house. Its stonework had crumbled, its windows were long shattered, the roof was black with decay. But this was the house all the same, the house where Maynard’s great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, and grandmother had been born, where Marzos and Durbianos had celebrated Christmases and opened their windows to the first springtime day, where they’d told stories and sung songs and shared a glass or two of Spirito’s wine.
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