The two albums that turned Maynard James Keenan into a musician
Musical awakenings vary from person to person. Perhaps the most unique goes to Maynard James Keenan from Tool.
For the majority of musicians, they realise that they want to make music when they hear somebody play something amazing, and they decide to emulate that sound. For instance, Bruce Springsteen first realised that he wanted to make music when he was in his mother’s car and heard The Beatles on the radio for the first time. It was a song less than three minutes long, but it’s all ‘The Boss’ needed to hear to understand what he wanted to do with his life.
“The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving,” he said. “I immediately demanded that she let me out, I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the bowling alley into the bowling alley. Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”
The same can’t be said for Maynard James Keenan, mainly because his band, Tool, were such a pioneer in their sound that there weren’t any bands that directly represented what they went on to make. Instead, his musical awakenings came in the form of two albums and a running track.
All three of these helped him better understand his unique sense of timing and his interest in the world of heavy metal. While there is a lot to unpack with a band like Tool, these are no doubt two of the most weight-bearing pillars that hold the band up.
The running track helped because when he was in gym classes at school, he realised he didn’t breathe in the same way that other people did. The standard pattern is in out in out, 4/4 if you will, the regular rhythm that those around him adopted and which is pretty universal. However, when Keenan was running, he found himself breathing differently, adopting various rhythms outside of the conventional time signature.
“I remember running cross country in high school, and everyone has their own breathing rhythms. It’s just supposed to be in out, right?” said Keenan. “But I found myself running when I was in high school, and I had odd rhythms, it wasn’t just in-out-in-out rhythm, I was actually running to the steps. So if you’re going over hill or downhill, in chuckholes or whatever, my breath would follow those rhythms, which is weird.”
So, he knew he had a penchant for strange rhythm, but how would that apply to music? When the Tool frontman was discussing the albums which resonated most effectively with him, two came up immediately, one of which embodies those strange rhythm patterns, and the other, which started the heavy metal movement. Both of these combined to create the foundation for the kind of musician that Keenan became. Joni Mitchell helped him champion those exciting breathing patterns; meanwhile, the Black Sabbath debut introduced him to the world of metal.
“I’m sure there’s other music that was introduced to me around that, but I don’t remember what it was because it didn’t resonate,” he said.
“You know, all the celestial bodies didn’t line up at that moment for it to resonate,” he added. “So that first [Black Sabbath] album resonated, Joni Mitchell’s Blue album resonated all within a very short period of time and got me more interested in music than I would have been just having heard, you know, the Jackson 5 or whatever.”
