Publication: The Canadian Press (Toronto)
Date: November 1996
Transcribed by Derek Sweet (dsweet@acs.ucalgary.ca)
The Following is an article posted in my local newspaper.. the guys preatty deluded about a COUPLE of things.. most of it he seems to have a firm grasp on though.. ----------------------------------------------------------------- TOOL TALES ---------- Band wants fans to think for themselves author: Betsy Powell An Internet site devoted to the band Tool warns fans to take anything the L.A. metalmen say with a HUGE grain of salt. "A lot of it is made up," comes the caution. "Be careful when you choose to believe something they are telling you." Like the band's assertion that it subscribes to a philosophy called Lacrymology, "the study of crying," which it claims to have discoverd in a 1940s book called The Joyful Guide to Lacrymology. Some particulars, however; need not be submitted to a lie detector test. Tool formed in 1990, signed a record deal the following year and in 1993 released its first full-length album, Undertow. Next came a spot on the second stage at Lollapalooza, and a couple of innovative videos spread the wod. Undertow was certified platinum in Canada for selling 100,00 copies. Last month, Tool released the follow-up Aenima, which debusted at No. 2 on Billboard's Top 200. A tour is now under way. So can singer Maynard Keenan be trusted to give straight answers? In one credulity stretch, Keenan is quoted in a media biography as saying the band spent two years in the south of France writing Aenima and recorded it on an eight-track in 3 days. And it's anyone's guess wheter his mother is dead or alive. Rolling Stone magazine reported in its Nov. 28 issue Keenan was 11 when his mother died. But the deep voice on the line from a Chicago tourstop says otherwise. (???) "I was talking about schildhood traumas and he (the writer) asked something about my mother." According to Keenan, he was asked "did someone die?" to which he replied "You could say that." Assumption made. Keenan's mother is dead. A "But that's not the case," said Keenan, who's content to leave it at that. Mind games, murky truths, hidden meanings, lyrical puzzles and outright fabrication are Tool's stock in trade, and on the surface are there to entertain. But they also exhort a central tenet of Tooldom: Think for yourself and don't be a sheep in the herd. "beliefs are dangerous, beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead." reads the liner notes to Aenima, and album of dark, complex songs served in a meaty soup of traditional guitar-bass-drum sounds with chunks of unearthly samplings thrown in. Tool explains by contrast. Die Ayer Von Satan sounds like Adolf Hitler spouting his hate propaganda in German as a crowd cheer in the background - but the lyrics are as harmless as a nursery rhyme, though Keenen urges the literal translation tbe left out of the story because "you kind of take the mask of Batman." It's the only time his voice left its subterranean register. (???) Then there's Message to Harry Manback, not a song but a sinister message left on an answering machine set over a melancholy piano track and gull noises. "Uf you don't know Italian or English, you see the Message to Harry Manback as very passionate, a beautiful love poem for a friend. In contrast the other song sounds like a militant, fascist rally but in fact is..." The blank is left unfilled at Keenan's request. ---------------------------------------------------------------- How dramatic.. I don't know.. Im baffled at some of the stuff discussed here.. What's with these 6 paragraphs on his mother.. like seriously.. I can't understand why the author thought that was something SO nessesary to discuss.. the author seems to think it's his voice in Die Ayer Von Satan too.. I don't know.. there was research done.. but nothings new cause everything came from toolshed.down.net.. Derek Sweet