the tool page

toolshed.down.net

breathe in union

This site is no longer being updated. See here for details. Follow me here and here for updates. Thank you for 22 great years.

ARTICLES

select a year

The Tool Page: An Article

Publication: Musiqueplus

Date: May, 1993

Transcribed by
Reid Lindsay (reid@hunterlink.net.au)


  page: 
 title: Maynard Keenan and Ken Andrews
author: 

MP: Adam, your guitar player, had to convince you to get in the 
band with him. Why were you hesitant? You didn't want to get into the 
music business?

MJK: It was more because I'm friends with him and I know how he lives. 
He's a pig... and I figured if I was going to live with him in a 
van traveling around in the country, playing shows, I just assumed 
that he couldn't be able to pick up his socks. It's just so messy... I 
can't... I can't live that way. I had him sign a contract that said he 
would clean up after himself. I still have the piece of paper... not 
here. I have it back [home], it's filed.

MP: Henry Rollins appears on the album, did he write his parts or 
did you suggest them?

MJK: That's actually a spoken word part I do there and I've always 
done. When we went into the studio, he came down and he read that part 
but he also wrote his own part to kind of paraphrase what I'd said. 
His part sounds better for him, the way he speaks, so it just sounded 
way better to have his part in there instead. So we put his there.

MP: Have you known him since a while?

MJK: We toured with him and we met that way.

MP: And you get along well?

MJK: Yeah... we did after he paid us back. He had a gambling debt for 
a while with us. He's kind of a bad poker player. He lost a lot of 
money... like $3000. Turns out he was losing the t-shirt money. He was 
borrowing from the merchandiser to play poker with us and he's really 
bad at bluffing. So we pretty much nailed him and that's actually how 
we got him to play on the album.

MP: You have total control on your images, your videos, your graphics 
and all that. Do you feel lucky to have that total control? Is it 
current for record companies to let bands do what they want?

MJK: I think it's more of a new thing, it's kind of come around 
recently. I think a lot of the younger bands are so fed up with the 
"machine" as it were that they're willing to take less money and work 
a little harder as long as they have more control and say over how 
they're presented so that they don't look like clowns.

Ken: There's no way for anything new to happen unless the bands do it 
themselves. I mean record companies aren't interested in doing 
something new. They're interested in doing something that makes money 
and it's always easier to make money if you're doing something that's 
not risky or not different.

MP: So you're saying that relationships between bands and record 
companies are changing?

MJK: The record companies still want to make their money, I mean 
that's not changed. I think that they're finding that sometimes the 
freshness and new ideas that a band has... they're welcoming them a 
little more but they're also not putting up as much money to get them. 
So there not as big a risk, see it's another risk thing again. They're 
really not putting that much money up there because they've already 
kind of given the back end of the contract to the creative control and 
then compromised on the money. So it works out in their favor, maybe 
they have a hit maybe they don't. A lot of record companies will sign 
ten bands and if one of them take off, then they've got it. So they'll 
take ten real avant-guard, crazy idiots, you know outfits and put them 
out there. If one takes off, then they've made all their money back 
and they don't care.

MP: [To Ken] You and Greg both play guitar and bass, right?

Ken: Yeah.

MP: When do you switch? How do you decide who plays what?

Ken: For writing purposes we switch constantly because it helps us 
finish things basically. We usually start on either instrument, get 
most of the song done and then when there's certain parts that we 
can't... we sort of hit a brick wall as it were or something, it helps 
to switch instruments. Like I'll have a bridge guitar part that I just 
can't come up with something, I just give him [Greg] the guitar. But 
for live there's only a few songs... I prefer to play the guitar live 
unless I really can't play the part, and sing and then I play 
bass. [laughs]

MP: You're touring for the summer. Are you planning to go in the 
studio in the fall?

MJK: We're not planning to go into the studio until we have songs to 
go into the studio with. Were not gonna try to turn on the oven before 
we have the ingredients to bake the cake.

Posted to t.d.n: 01/26/00 04:37:19