The actors who “totally inspired” Maynard James Keenan as a frontman
There were few bands quite like Maynard James Keenan’s Tool during the alt-explosion of the 1990s.
It was likely late at night that most metal fans first heard their progressive hard rock theatre. Famed for their arresting music videos for ‘Sober’ or ‘Schism’, Tool typically eschewed radio play for midnight viewings of the eerie stop-motion videos, depicting strange entities navigating shadowy worlds, scored by the heady hard rock heft the band would conjure from some intellectual ether.
Such lofty works could also rub the wrong way. Tool is often dismissed as a tedious indulgence proffering lyrical pretensions and mired in the fug of a perceived arrogance from their animated frontman. Yet, for the fans, grand cosmic narratives, twisting song complexity, and a respectable rejection of corporate giants saw the band win a fervently devoted base, enamoured with their unique mark on the metal world and beyond.
Tool’s heady and stimulating fodder needs a singer who can command attention amid the art-rock spectacle. Luckily, Keenan’s frontman duties involve an endlessly flamboyant wardrobe to hide behind, presenting some kind of surrealist character beamed directly to the audience, anchored on whatever conceptual fancy demanded in the moment.
Keenan’s live presence has been shaped by some unlikely sources. Reaching back to Saturday Night Live’s 1970s era, Keenan selected Bill Murray as a key influence among the likes of Henry Rollins and Devo’s Gerald Casale. “As far as being an eloquent asshole and prick, he’s amazing,” he frankly told Revolver in 2007. “He was recently busted for driving a golf cart drunk. That’s better than Axl Rose ever did. And Axl Rose wasn’t in Groundhog Day, so fuck him.”
Probably where Keenan gets his accused arrogance, his detractors may say. In the same feature, Keenan again reached back to the same decade’s comedy cohort for an SNL occasional celebrating Steve Martin’s live performances before Hollywood came calling. “He shreds on the banjo,” he exalted. “He has totally inspired me as a frontman, as a performer, and as a musician. I never saw him onstage other than on video, but he’s amazing with a crowd, and his stand-up albums were like rock records.”
Martin’s career had been lost to a string of bad movies across the last 30-odd years, but long before Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and Pink Panther remakes, Martin was an arch-absurdist playing live shows with his aforementioned banjo, juggling soft toy kittens and eternally pursuing an offbeat comedy style not too far away from Andy Kaufman’s surrealist anti-comedy.
Coupled with an early critique of showbiz, it’s no wonder Keenan took to Martin’s healthy piss-take of celebrity and keenly unorthodox bits, incorporating a touch of the absurd in his frontman duties with the Tool machine.
Comedy had guided Keenan’s life years before music. Reportedly, his early spell in the US Army and West Point Prep School studies were inspired by Murray’s turn as taxi driver turned GI John Winger in 1981’s Stripes, an effort pursued by Keenan to nab GI Bill funding of his art school ambitions ahead of his road to rock fame.
