“If you take it out, I’ll break your hands”: The album that stays in Maynard James Keenan’s CD player
Most artists never forget when they were turned on to their favourite artists. Compared to everyone else who listens to whatever they find catchy as they go to work or at a party, this is when artists went from looking at music as a passing fancy to the most important thing in their lives. Although most people would expect Maynard James Keenan to have some of the heaviest riffs imaginable in heavy rotation, he always kept this staple of hard rock close to the chest.
Because looking through his discography, Keenan never liked being tied down to one single genre. Sure, Tool scans as a metal band on paper, but going through each record they made, nothing sounded as primal as Undertow, Lateralus was unlike anything else that any metal band had touched, and even when they came back, Fear Inoculum was enough to lull the listener into a trance.
That’s before even getting into the side projects he has, like A Perfect Circle. Despite the band being Billy Howerdel’s vehicle, hearing Keenan’s voice work off the digitised sounds on Thirteenth Step was head and shoulders above what Tool had been doing. Aside from the borderline gothic tone of the group, though, nothing could get in the way of the pure magic behind early hard rock.
Regardless of his mysterious persona, Keenan was never a snob about being a metal fan. His heroes were always the titans of rock and roll like Led Zeppelin, but in terms of raw aggression in rock and roll, there was no other band that could touch what AC/DC were doing in their prime.
While it was tragic to see Bon Scott drink himself to death before they hit their peak, his shining moment came a few years before on Powerage. Despite not being the best albums for singles, tunes like ‘Riff Raff’ were the blueprint for what metal would become, whether that was the thousands of hair metal bands that built their entire career on it or the early sounds of Guns N’ Roses.
Keenan’s approach to metal had gone much further than AC/DC’s brand of rock and roll, but he wasn’t about resorting to physical violence to hold onto the record, saying, “I drive my Toyota, my truck, and that’s always going to be AC/DC’s Powerage. That’s what’s just lodged in there, and it won’t come out. It will come out, but it won’t come out. If you try to take it out, I’ll break your hands.”
At the same time, what makes AC/DC the go-to record for someone like Keenan? Elsewhere, he has spoken about his love for bands like Kraftwerk or Blonde Redhead, so hearing him rely on traditional hard rock should get monotonous. Granted, that’s if someone didn’t know what band they were working with.
Even though they claimed to be rock and roll, AC/DC were the best example of when rock and roll started getting nastier, and with only one listen to Powerage, there’s normally a transformation that the listener goes through that speaks to the animalistic side of their brain. Most people can try to write a symphony in a few minutes whenever they make a record, but once they drop their inhibitions and get rocked by AC/DC, the world seems a bit more exciting when the music stops.
