Maynard James Keenan on New Book, Tool LP: ‘Do I Seem Like a Lazy Person?’
“Most people want to hear the kiss-and-tell crap, the garbage on the bus. That’s boring to me.”
Can you think of a particular aspect of your life that was one of those hidden things that we might look forward to reading about in this book?
[Laughs] Nice one. Do you want me to go ahead and talk about it now so you don’t have to buy the book, or …?
[Laughs] Well, I’m just looking for a little bit to whet our appetite.
No, there’s just a lot of things that have happened in my life prior to music that have been talked about but not [told in] many details. So this book goes into more details and kind of gives you a timeline, shows you even more family history, going back to pre–Revolutionary War. So just a lot of things mapped out.
Did you learn anything about yourself or your family in the course of this process?
Absolutely, because you start seeing patterns. And I think that’s part of the exercise, as well. When you get to a certain age, you think you’ve learned everything, and when you start really putting these patterns together, you start seeing your own patterns of behavior, and it’s an opportunity to fix them, you know?
Sounds a little bit like therapy …
Yeah, artist therapy.
Presumably you’ve read your share of artist memoirs or biographies. What do you think makes a good or bad one?
It all depends on the reader, I suppose. Most people want to hear the kiss-and-tell crap, the garbage on the bus. That’s boring to me. “We threw a piano out a window!” That’s been done a million times before even Buddy Rich was around. Just a lot of things that you read in biographies, I feel like they’re just kiss-and-tell war stories. The ones I prefer are when they get more into the psychology and the decision-making process, not really who you know and “… then I met the president.” Those are boring. I’m more concerned about or more interested in crossroads, where the person in their story comes to a crossroads, and they make a decision, and you see the effects, the cause-and-effect process of those decisions.
Can you think of a particular biography you’ve read that had what you’re aiming for with your own?
Bowie, he had some solid memoirs. That’s the only one that comes to mind at the moment. But again, we’re trying to write this a little bit more, almost like you’re following a character through a story. If you’ve ever read John Crowley’s Little, Big, it’s quite a brain-teaser, a fantastic fantasy novel with multiple dimensional layers of story. So if I had to kind of put the book in perspective, it would be something like that.
“There’s always that perception that whatever you’ve done that’s the largest media-friendly thing in your life … that there was no life before.”
Since you said this isn’t written in the first-person, did you give Sarah carte blanche to talk to everyone else in your life?
Oh, yeah, we had lists and lists of people that I’ve come in contact with throughout my life, some of which are no longer living, so we couldn’t quite get their story. But yeah, a lot of it is shared paths, so when we’re talking to old friends of mine, we’re not really necessarily talking about me. We’re talking about the experiences we had with some other teacher, coach, elder … space, time, those kind of things.