TOOL
                               BOSTON
                        Avalon, Feb. 15, 1994

        Maynard James Keenan, singer for Los Angeles' Tool, teetered like a
crippled vulture and pecked a ticket stub off of the stage.  "Twelve dollars
and fifty cents," he snorted.  "I wouldn't pay that to go to my own mother's
funeral."
        Hell, Keenan wouldn't be invited.  With his constant nasal bitching,
the tattoos up his spine and a mohawk that flops across his sweaty cranium
like tentacles, Keenan's no comfort.  Hunched over a mike, spewing vitriol to
Tool's paralyzing update of big-guitar rock, he's a greasy creep who has
found his calling.
        He's also a hair trigger that pissed-off Gen Xers love to squeeze.
Keenan and Tool's other components - guitarist Adam Jones, drummer Danny
Carey and bassist Paul D'Amour - have drilled into the black gold at the
heart of late-teen and twentysomething anger.  Their songs about the living
hell that humans create connect with the seething frustrations of an audience
who have seen the cynicism of their parents' generation devour the fruits of
opportunity.  (But not for Tool.  Their venting 1992 EP Opiate netted them a
spot on Lollapalooza '93, and they've racked up sales of 750,000 units for
their year-old album Undertow.)
        So when Jones wrenched the strings of his Les Paul into the tortured
riff of "Intolerance," Keenan's screaming "You lie, cheat and steal" was a
mantra for the crowd, which replied in a riptide of moshing, surfing flesh.
With a stop in between each number, it was intensity - not momentum - that
kept bodies boiling.  Throughout the 11-song set, Jones built Tool's snarl
around feedback and his arena-savvy lines, commanding both the dark mood and
the lurching beat of Carey's snapping double kick drums and D'Amour's
growling bass with undeniable authority.  Even as Keenan reveled in his role
as the band's mad mouthpiece, it was Jones' passionate guitars that delivered
Tool's nastiest bite.                                   --TED DROZDOWSKI