This kind of blind worship is part of what makes the Tool experience so amazing.”Īdd to all of that the fact that Tool singer Maynard James Keenan recently called fans of his band “ insufferable people.” Do you know what most fans thought? They thought it was funny. And instead of regarding band members as egotistical jerks, fans view them as mysterious and humble. Far from feeling slighted or ignored, fans are supremely excited when an album comes out and are willing to pay as much as necessary for the rare live show. Tool gets away with things that would cause lesser bands to be written off or completely forgotten: There have been huge gaps between album releases (up to five years), infrequent tours, high ticket prices and band members who have been known to play in the dark and barely address the audience. But all of this somehow works in Tool’s favor. In fact, the band inspires so much respect from its audience that it’s nearly creepy. “Tool can do no wrong in the eyes of its fans. As some genius put it nearly a decade ago: This is truly an against-all-odds success story for the band. The reason why Tool is so successful now twenty years later is because the people who became fans back then somehow managed to stay fans. I'd only ever thought of Tool fans on the whole as being nearly obsessive or religious in their love for the band. I expressed this thought to a friend and he said, “Duh, everybody knows that Tool fans are stupid white trash.”īut I didn't know that everybody thought that at all. These were people who were out to rage and then possibly smoke some meth. For the most part, these were not people who appeared to be thinking deep thoughts about the universe and synchronicity and fractal vegetables. Nearly all of the people in attendance were Busch-chugging, thick-ball-chain-necklace wearing, violent-at-any-moment aggro young men who were super pumped on adrenaline. I'd go to Tool shows and feel overwhelmed by the audience. (And possibly even pretentious people.) But the more Tool fans I met the more wrong I felt about that assumption. (Ideas basically proven by using Alex Grey's art on their album covers and drummer Danny Carey's admitted occultist leanings.) Also, this was a time when we barely had the internet (!) so most of these revelations were passed on from person-to-person, which just served to heighten the band's mystique.īecause of all of this, I'd always thought that Tool was for smart, thoughtful people. Even in 1996 there were already rumors that the members of Tool were into exploring psychedelic realms and sacred geometry.
The lyrics were dense and you could spend hours unraveling and attempting to decode the possible meanings behind some phrasings. There's a bunch to talk about when it comes to Tool, really. I thought the other 90s “boy music” that they liked was mostly okay (Deftones were cool but I had no love for Korn) but we didn't talk about those bands nearly as much: it was always Tool, Tool, Tool. The Basement Boys fancied themselves quite the teenage intellectuals and they'd sit for hours and debate the merits of an album, a song or a drum solo. I thought that some parts of the Undertow album were alright, but that all of Ænima was awesome. My group of dude friends (now grown men who I still affectionately refer to as “The Basement Boys” because we always seemed to be hanging out in someone's unfinished suburban basement) introduced me to Tool right before the release of Ænima in 1996. As a teenager in the '90s, my favorite albums were by Nirvana, Elastica, Otis Redding, Echo & the Bunnymen and, weirdly, Tool.