page: 17
 title: Yours Sin… cerely
author: Phil Wilding

“The only other time I immediately came in my pants was 
when I first heard Slayer.” (Kevin Kirk, The Heavy Metal Shop, 
Salt Lake City – Tool Comment Sheet)

Tool, after a ten-hour drive, have finally made Salt Lake City. 
As openers for the Rollins Band they’re criss-crossing a 
familiar interstate route. It takes tour manager Greg Dean a 
full half hour to wake slumbering Tool vocalist Maynard 
James Keenan (Paul D’Amour, bass; Danny Carey, drums; 
Adam Jones, guitar; make up the rest of the band) from an 
exhausted sleep. There may be a media buzz building with 
ferocity for Tool’s corrosive, bloody, aural onslaught, but 
Maynard still had to take his turn driving the van overnight.

“I’m just sticking my tongue in a cup of coffee,” mumbles 
Keenan from his Econo-lodge motel room. “My first of the 
day… ugh!”

Tool’s six-track Opiate album is the work of a band barely six 
months old when they signed a deal. All the more impressive 
when you consider that Tool are just another band from Los 
Angeles. Maynard, paraphrasing a long-held Tool philosophy, 
insists the reason for this stems from nothing more than 
their personal sincerity.

“Sincerity is the core. I know we are an LA band, but all we do 
is go on tour and leave there. We were just serious about our 
approach; we weren’t even looking for a deal. There were 
cathartic things happening while we were jamming – just an 
extension of us. That’s a sincere thing, and obviously if it 
weren’t then we’d be stuck in LA like all those other bands.”

Keenan is discontent with religion and the manipulation of 
others through cult of personality ideals – the Jerry Falwells, 
Robert Tiltons and George Bushs of this world.

“Those kind of people take the idea of manipulation to an 
extreme, though I’m often just as disgusted by the people 
who feel they have to be manipulated, or to believe in 
something, to get by. I have a hard time with the concept of 
God because I’ve been raised in the Christian Church. I don’t 
have faith in their idea of what God is; I think it’s a collective 
idea. That it comes out of the center of us…”

That we shouldn’t have to spend one day a week with other 
people specifically to worship?

“That’s big business: the corporations talking. That way they 
know where you are on a Sunday.”

But you’ve inked your deal with RCA/BMG. Won’t your first 
album be corporate fodder? Won’t you eventually be trudging 
the enormodomes with, say, Winger?

A chuckle. “MTV has a big hand in making rock stars and we 
don’t want to be rock stars, anyway. And beside, we’d end up 
in jail if we 

Posted to t.d.n: 03/11/02 21:46:47