C’mon, what rock music fan doesn’t like to believe that their favorite frontman gets “slam and bang” baked before every gig? I think I bumped into a few thousand Tool fans that likely love the suspicion of Maynard James Keenan’s pre-show ritual including ripping tubes through a WWI era gask-mask or nipping enough absinthe to make Marilyn Manson say “Daaaaamn!”
He must have been high. Sooooo high.
To deliver such a powerful performance that was so fundamentally tweaked out, all while being the most stripped down and bare-bones stage setup I’ve ever seen Tool unveil, somebody in that band has spent some quality time with one of the greatest drugs on the planet. I wonder which one?
The Tool show, from top to bottom, is designed to disturb the destroyed.
Credit to guitarist Adam Jones, who I’ve been told is the true brains behind all of Tool’s art, both on disc and on stage. For the visual tasty on the 10,000 Days Tour, they quite simply utilized an 8 foot, white wall of 8 divided panels as screens. The tripped-out visuals hunted down the band’s air-tight playing with laser guided precision. Even the sober found themselves lost in the dizzying kaleidoscope of blinking eyes, tunneling forward into more blinking eyes, into even more moving, blinking and perhaps judging, watchful eyes.
Errrrr … wait … maybe that “judging and watchful” part may have been the upshot of my wicked contact high. Thanks for that.
It’s clear that Maynard knows what it’s like to be sitting in the back of an arena, sky-high, wishing that the guys on stage would do something to acknowledge the fact that things look cooler when you’re baked. I’ve got to figure that’s the reason he arched himself backwards, with only his small-framed silhouette visible as his backlit image stood in contrast to the orange and red glowing screens. He swiveled his hips and swung his cowboy hat in vicious, rodeo-esque circles above his head for 4 minutes as his incredible band banged through ten tons of impressive pretension. His fluid body tricks were enough to make everyone take a closer look and wonder if you were really seeing what you thought you were seeing.
My favorite thing about Tool, or really any band that can successfully pull it off, is the 30 or so seconds of calculated feedback before a song starts. It’s like the climb of a roller coaster. You know something cool is coming, but you’re just not sure when or what. It’s such an enormous moment when the crowd is still and silent, locked by anticipation of what is next. Tool nailed that climactic build 3 or 4 times on Monday, with “Schism” being, by far, the coolest. That opening bass lick, I decided at that moment, is among the finest bass parts ever written, recorded and performed.
Conspicuous by its absence, “Sober,” was the only radio single left out of a very well-thought out set. Opening with “Stinkfist” was a strong move. It set the proper climate for their nearly two hour arrangement. Obviously the downside for anyone wanting quantity over quality, is that Tool’s songs fall somewhere, on average, in the 8 minute range when performed live. The resulting greater-than-average track length is attributed mainly to complex rhythm changes and an onslaught of changes in dynamics.
A nice touch by Maynard, who had been sick for the past ten days, was his decree that “some doctor told me not to play this song tonight, but after some of your pizza and bunch of alcohol … I say fuck it,” before offering up the chilling opening query of “The Pot.” The band’s assurance that the crowd would do its part during the impromptu call and response sections of that song was not only validated, but sounded hauntingly incredible, as echoes bounced about the ceiling of the Allstate Arena.
I’m confident that no doctor told Maynard straight out, “Don’t perform ‘The Pot’ tonight. It’s simply too unsafe. We don’t know what might happen out there.” Nevertheless, we got what he was going for. And it worked a whole lot better than telling us Chicago is their favorite city.
Also, I’ve never been a big fan of the ballad lighter raising ritual, only because it’s rarely properly pulled off any year this side of 1979. In fact, U2, Green Day and Fall Out Boy have all been known to encourage the green and blue glow of flipped-open cell phone screens to replace the natural glow of the $.79 Bic; a technological disgrace and slap-in-the-face to “Freebird” fans worldwide. Notwithstanding, last night was the first time I’ve ever been impressed by the spectacle of thousands of lighters in the air. It struck me as the crowd’s way of giving back a little visual indulgence to the band that had just pushed the limits of their eyes, ears and minds for the past 90 minutes. Nice touch.
Oh, and I’m terribly sorry to disappoint, but having passed by Maynard backstage an hour before the show, I can safely say that he wasn’t working on his buzz. No, in fact, his pre-performance prep was a gallon of water & a few hundred pull-ups.
But, for the duration of Tool’s both stimulated and stimulating celebration of “Musick,” I found myself free of that health-conscious image.
