Why Howard Stern hates Tool: “They’re assholes”
For a long time, Howard Stern has been one of the most prominent supporters of rock music in all its forms. From throwing his backing behind new acts to offering a space to older artists trying to keep up with the times, The Howard Stern Show has been a force in popular culture for decades. Whilst the curly-haired New Yorker is known for his affable demeanour, one thing is clear: do not piss him off. This is something nerd royalty Tool found out first-hand.
In a show of how unwavering Stern can be, his hatred of Tool is nearly 30 years old. It all started when Stern and the Los Angeles band’s former label, Zoo Entertainment, failed to agree on a deal. This concerned using the quartet’s cover of the Led Zeppelin classic ‘No Quarter’ on the soundtrack of 1997’s Private Parts, the comedy movie based on the DJ’s first book of the same name.
Unfortunately, Zoo failed to convince Tool to agree to license the song to Stern before they promised it to him. In a reflection of the band’s unorthodox approach to their craft, they reportedly had a “no soundtrack” policy and refused to budge on it, regardless of being fans of Stern’s work. Accordingly, they pressured Zoo to renege on their deal with the DJ.
Stern assumed that this was a tactic on the band’s behalf to raise the price for licencing the song, and so he offered them a much larger sum of money. Even then, the band rejected his advances. This would be the final straw for Stern, and since then, he has refused to give his platform to the band and is on record as denouncing them with expletives.
When chatting to Rock Flash in 1997, Stern burned all bridges with the prog-metal pioneers, stating: “Fuck Tool and fuck Zoo. I don’t care if you print that. They’re assholes.” According to The Pit, only a day later, he instructed the producer of his show to remove all of Tool’s music from their on-air lead-ins.
This acrimony would then affect Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan’s other group, A Perfect Circle. It is said Stern rejected his request to go on his show to promote the band. When speaking to Metal Edge in 2007, Keenan claimed, “Howard Stern has been keeping me out of his studio for years. I’m not even in New York, and he’s talking about how I’m in the lobby wanting to come up to talk to him, and he says, ‘Get that guy out of here,’ and here I am, in LA.”
Allegedly, the tension is ongoing. After Tool released their long-awaited fifth album, 2019’s Fear Inoculum, Stern did concede that he enjoyed it. However, after Maynard James Keenan said on Twitter it’s a “bummer” that Justin Bieber is a fan of his group, Stern criticised the Tool leader for his response to the pop singer and, according to Alternative Press, implored Bieber to respond, and say they’d “be lucky to mow his lawn.”
