The album Maynard James Keenan never got to tour: “The show that people talked about the most”
Tool are one of the biggest sounding bands on the planet, as they package and parcel their branch of prog in a way which continues to stand out amongst the crowd.
The huge sound of the band is evident the moment you catch them performing live. Sylvia Massy, one of the band’s early producers, knew that she had her work cut out for her when she began working on Tool’s debut album, Undertow. It was one thing to understand how big their sound was on stage, but another thing entirely trying to work out how to get that on the album.
Eventually, she turned to experimental measures to try to get singer Maynard James Keenan’s voice as raspy as it is in a live setting. This meant sending the prog rock frontman outside and making him do laps until he was breathing heavily.
“After several attempts at one of those ten-second screams without a good take, and with his voice obviously wearing thin, I finally asked him to go outside and run around the block five times,” said Massy, “This would make him furious, but after doing it, he nailed those screams. He was pissed, and you could hear it in his voice.”
While her methods might have been unconventional, they helped Tool create their first, which would prove to be many great records. The band have always tried to push themselves creatively, which means layering songs on top of one another, writing using strange time signatures, and allowing bizarre concepts to influence what a song, or even an entire album, centres around.
Sometimes, that ambition led to them creating songs that simply couldn’t be toured, which was the case with their record Emotive, which was made up entirely of reimagined covers. The tool completely changed the music on these songs to the extent that they were barely recognisable as covers, as they decided to completely switch up the sound of the songs, but then leave the lyrics as they were. Keenan admitted that if he had just written new lyrics, they wouldn’t even be recognisable, but he and the band were adamant the album had to consist of what they considered modern renditions of classics.
“If I’d have just put new lyrics on it, it would have been a new album because the music is completely different than the originals. They’re not the originals,” said Keenan, “But the point was to revoice stories that had been told before us and be a catalyst for issues that we’d faced in the past and just reiterate those. That was the whole thrust of the album.”
While Tool might have reinvented a great deal of these songs, the fact remains that they were still covers, and so the album couldn’t really be toured. Keenan and the rest of the band had to set the record aside and work on more music that could be sold as original. While he understood the decision, he was sad that the band never properly got to play these songs for fans, as he knew how strong they were. Tool eventually played a show dedicated to the album, which showed how great they were live, but it’s still an LP they never got to tour.
“I had to go back to the day job so we didn’t get a chance to tour that record,” he said, “We did a bunch of shows last fall on the West Coast where we did one album each night, and of course, the album people were not super excited about was the covers album, Emotive. But that ended up being the show that people talked about the most once they saw it ‘cause we reinterpreted all those songs.”
