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Read more: Ten Slipknot songs that don’t fit with the rest of their catalog If they wanted any more control, they’d have to dissolve the band and get jobs in national security. There was even a point where the band wanted to be interviewed together so one personality wouldn’t overtake this story. AP photographer Chris Toliver was denied a request to shoot individual portraits because the band didn’t want just one member ending up on the cover. After the compilers of the Led Zeppelin tribute album Encomium haggled with Tool over the length of their projected contribution (an 11-minute-plus version of “No Quarter”), the band walked. The band refuse to do commercial-radio edits of their lengthy singles despite their label’s cajoling (“Every Pink Floyd record I ever heard, I never once said, ‘Hey, this is a really long song it’s not radio friendly,’” Jones quips). Tool have turned down high-profile opportunities such as soundtrack offers and appearances on Saturday Night Live. Jones, who has spent six years working in stop-action animation, creates Tool’s maverick videos-which almost never feature the band. The band will tell you that they are only there for the music. The members of Tool don’t owe explanations to anyone: not to the record company, management, critics or fans. Sure, Ænima is epic and at times sounds self-absorbed, but the disc has more substance than anything on the Billboard charts.īut if you are looking for specific insight into Tool-the band’s modus operandi, the je ne sais quoi, if you will-you’ll have to look elsewhere. Ænima offers the brooding energy of “Stinkfist” Keenan’s accelerated diatribe on credibility-police officers, “Hooker With A Penis” the portentous metal of “Eulogy” and the epic “Third Eye.” There are also plenty of in-jokes as segues (“Die Eier Von Satan” is a German recitation of a Mexican wedding-cookie recipe sonically modified to give the feel of an industrial-rock Nuremberg rally). ) Read more: Tom Morello on Tool’s new album: “Mysterious, deep, sexy and very Tool.” If Keenan were King Of America, each home would own a copy of Peter Gabriel’s Passion.
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Produced by David Bottrill and clocking in at 77 minutes, it’s a harrowing collection of atmospheres and musical tributaries that doesn’t fit into tidy little slots like “metal” or “alternative,” or the grandfather of all musical categories used when your songs run over five minutes, “progressive.” (When Tool were asked if there were one band common to their individual record collections, Carey and Jones settled on King Crimson and the Melvins. Three-and-a-half years in the making, Ænima was released in 1996. Manager and Lollapalooza co-founder Ted Gardner installed Tool on the second stage of Lollapalooza ’93 for a few weeks before he graduated them to the main stage. Not that any of the million-plus owners of Undertow thought specifically in those terms regardless of the music’s air-punching/headbanging aspect, there was a tweaked aesthetic at work. Consider if Black Sabbath had been formed by literate art students rather than a bunch of British working-class blues growlers. The music inside the package was as claustrophobic and textured as the album artwork-graphic images of an obese woman, X-rays and grimy portraits of the band that scream homage to macabre photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. Tool’s full-length debut, Undertow, was released in April 1993. The quartet’s synergy of atmospheric metal riffage and Keenan’s idiosyncratic vocal style was welcomed by audiences friendly to the stylistic inversions made to hard rock by bands such as Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. (Incidentally, that’s Keenan singing the falsetto phrase “not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin” on Jelly’s only hit, “Three Little Pigs.”) Later that year, Tool signed with Zoo, who released their cement-mixer-heavy EP Opiate in 1992. Jones and Keenan formed Tool in 1991, enlisting Paul D’Amour to play bass and workaholic drummer Carey, who was holding down a straight nine-to-five job while playing with Carole King, Pigmy Love Circus and local country bands, as well as with comedy-metallers Green Jelly.