The Tool album Maynard James Keenan received death threats over: “Idiots”
No artist can manage to please everyone once they release an album. Even if they put their heart and soul into every note that they play, there’s a good chance that whatever they are working on could hit a sour note with the public or not be up to the standards that some people have for the group. Although Maynard James Keenan is out to please himself before anyone else in the crowd, he admitted that one Tool album was enough for people to make threats against his life.
There’s never a good reason to threaten a musician, no matter how much you might want to when your favourite artist decides to skip the encore expectation of playing their smash hit. But, for one album, it appears Keenan upset a small section of his fanbase so much that they threatened his life.
It’s hard to get all that worked up about a group like Tool. As much as the band have made a name for themselves as being cerebral prog metal icons, it’s hard to take them that seriously when one of their albums contains excerpts from comedian Bill Hicks and also contains a recipe for hashish cookies sung entirely in German.
Even if it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s easy to admire the craftsmanship half the time. An album like Lateralus is still one of the most important metal albums of the 2000s, and once they decided to take things in a more emotional direction on 10,000 Days, there was hardly a dry eye in the fanbase listening to tunes like ‘Wings for Marie’.
But as any Tool fan knows, the number one rule is developing a strong tolerance for waiting. While fans of D’Angelo had to wait years for him to release any new music, it felt like an eternity watching Tool go dark in the late 2000s and seemingly never return. Since they sat out the first decade of the streaming era, it felt like most of their best material was either behind them or the magic never returned.
They were still working on a new album, though, and it would take 13 years before they eventually released Fear Inoculum. That’s not to say that fans didn’t get restless, and drummer Danny Carey remembered that things got fairly tense between the group and their fans when putting the finishing touches on the album.
When discussing the record with Spin, Carey remembered that Keenan would get threatening letters from fans threatening to take his life if the record wasn’t out, saying, “He even told me he was getting death threats from these idiots out there. They just have no idea what our work ethic is. These things don’t happen, man. There’s no other record that’s going to sound like this Tool record. What you hear is what you get, and what you get is what it takes to get it done. And it’s not an easy process.”
This kind of wait should be expected for a band like Tool. Much like The Cure, Keenan and his bandmates aren’t just musicians or a band; they are artists, and they work at a pace that fits their expression. To push them into the uncomfortable space of continually producing more and more music into the world is to lose the very thing that makes them a truly special band.
While it’s hard to really gauge an album that’s only five years old, Fear Inoculum is still as pertinent as ever. The idea of using fear to make someone stronger on the title track feels like sage advice, and while ‘7empest’ was never confirmed to be about Donald Trump, it’s easy to see how pertinent it is today with history repeating itself.
Fear Inoculum may have been well worth the wait for some fans, but it’s understandable why fans want a shorter timeframe for the next record. I mean, it’s one thing to sit there and wait, and it’s another to take money out of one’s retirement account on the off chance that they will grace us with something new.
