TOOL TRIVIA
Trivia
At the 62nd Grammy Awards in January 2020, "7empest" from Fear Inoculum won Best Metal Performance. Justin Chancellor and Danny Carey were there to accept it, and Carey thanked "all the gods", reasoning that it was no time to anger them. The title track, "Fear Inoculum", was also up for Best Rock Song that day, but lost to Gary Clark Jr.'s "This Land".
In high school Adam Jones was a good friend of Tom Morello, later the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, and the two played together in a band called Electric Sheep. Morello's mother, Mary Morello, was Jones's homeroom teacher. Their careers then went separate ways: after art school Jones went to work in a Hollywood special-effects shop.
Before Tool, Adam Jones worked in film make-up and effects. He created the "Freddy Krueger in the womb" make-up for A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, and at Stan Winston Studio he worked on the small-scale and full-size sculptures of the Dilophosaurus known as the Spitter for Jurassic Park, photos of which he shared on Instagram in 2022. The stop-motion techniques he picked up in that world run through Tool's videos from "Sober" to "Vicarious".
The members' memories of how Tool came together do not match. Danny Carey told an interviewer in 1997 that he first noticed Maynard James Keenan when he heard him yelling at his neighbours across an alley, thought it was a singer's voice, and brought him to Adam Jones, who was putting a band together. Keenan's authorised biography tells it another way: Jones had heard a cassette by Keenan's earlier band, C.A.D., had seen him on stage and spent months urging him to work together.
From the late 1980s Danny Carey drummed for the comedy band Green Jellÿ. Maynard James Keenan also performed with them, and sang backing vocals on their hit "Three Little Pigs". Its claymation video, directed by Fred Stuhr, features Carey on drums and Keenan in occasional appearances. Stuhr went on to direct Tool's stop-motion videos for "Sober" and "Prison Sex", with input from Adam Jones.
Of Henry Rollins's spoken-word part on "Bottom" from Undertow, Maynard James Keenan claimed in 1993 that Rollins did it to pay off a poker debt of about 3,000 dollars, money he had been borrowing from the merchandise takings to keep playing. Rolling Stone, retelling the story, notes that Keenan is known to embroider a tale. The band's real bond with Rollins dates from 1992, when Tool opened for the Rollins Band on tour.
Most of the Undertow artwork is Adam Jones's work, including the red ribcage sculpture on the cover. Because the package included nude photographs of a woman and a man, Wal-Mart and K-Mart refused to stock the album, and the band had to sell it with an alternative cover as well. The pig on the back cover, standing among upright forks with "undertow" along its side, was Jones's pet, Moe. He was never actually shaved; the letters were added to the photo afterwards, and Moe lived to an old age on the desert ranch of Scott Reeder, the bassist of Kyuss and the Obsessed.
When "Prison Sex" came out as a single, the label, without asking the band, had children's T-shirts made with Tool's wrench logo, which Adam Jones points out is a phallic symbol, to send to radio stations, because Nirvana had done something similar with great success. Jones recalls Maynard James Keenan spelling out to the label that the song is about sexual abuse suffered as a child, and the shirts were never sent. MTV also refused to show the song's video.
The comedian Bill Hicks, thanked in the Undertow liner notes, was a favourite on Maynard James Keenan's tour stereo. Hicks wrote back to thank the band for the CD they sent him, but had not noticed his name in the notes until Keenan rang to tell him. A friendship followed, along with talk of making something together. In August 1993 Hicks introduced Tool at Lollapalooza in Irwindale, California, and drily asked the people at the front to search the dusty mosh pit for his missing contact lens. He died in February 1994, and Tool dedicated their next album, Ænima, to him.
Accounts differ on why the original bassist, Paul D'Amour, left Tool in 1995. Danny Carey said in 2015 that D'Amour, a guitarist at heart, had wanted to bring in another bass player even before Undertow so that he could move to guitar. D'Amour himself pointed in 2024 to the frustration of a year of writing after Undertow that produced about five songs, adding that nobody needs ten years to make an album. He played on the demos of "Pushit", "Stinkfist", "Ænema" and "Eulogy" for Ænima, and has played bass in Ministry since 2019.
When Justin Chancellor was first invited to audition for Tool in 1995, he turned it down on the spot out of sheer intimidation. His band Peach had supported Tool in London and, with help from Tool's people, played four shows in Los Angeles, and his brother was a friend of Matt Marshall, who had signed Tool. Peach had since broken up, and Chancellor had started a new band, Sterling, with his school friend Ben Durling, which had been offered a deal by Beggars Banquet. When his brother heard he had said no, he came over on the Tube and shouted at him until he reconsidered. Chancellor called back, and was sent a demo tape with early versions of "Pushit" and "Eulogy" to learn.
MTV judged the title of "Stinkfist", the first single from Ænima, too offensive and aired its video as "Track #1". Fans complained about the censorship, and Matt Pinfield, host of MTV's 120 Minutes, shook his fist as he introduced the clip and urged viewers to buy the album. The video was also nominated for Best Short Form Music Video at the 40th Grammy Awards, in 1998.
The Melvins were on the 1998 Ozzfest tour because Tool told the organisers they would not take part unless the Melvins did. According to Buzz Osborne, Tool wanted at least one band they liked on the bill, while the Ozzfest people were firmly against having the Melvins. Adam Jones later played with Osborne during Tool's break at the end of the decade.
The title track of Lateralus is built around the Fibonacci sequence. Maynard James Keenan arranged the syllable counts of his lines to follow it, and the song moves between 9/8, 8/8 and 7/8. Danny Carey says it was first called "9-8-7" after those time signatures, and only afterwards did they realise that 987 is a Fibonacci number. Justin Chancellor remembers writing a bar of nine, then eight, then seven, and calling the song "987": he pictured something that keeps getting shorter until it folds in on itself like a spiral.
Alex Grey, the painter behind the Lateralus booklet, has admitted that he never heard the music while working on it. Adam Jones had approached him at an exhibition in Santa Monica with the idea of a booklet printed on clear pages laid one over another, and Grey, taken with the idea of layering, built in symbols meant to resonate with each member. He went on to work on two more Tool albums and wrote the foreword to Maynard James Keenan's authorised biography.
The 10,000 Days CD has stereoscopic lenses built into its package for viewing the 3D pictures inside. Its art director, Adam Jones, said he had been a fan of stereoscopic photography all his life, belonged to the Southern California Stereoscopic Club and wanted the package to reflect the 1970s artwork he loved. On 11 February 2007 it won him Best Recording Package at the 49th Grammy Awards, his first Grammy in his own name; the award goes to the art director.
What held up Tool's next album after 10,000 Days was a lawsuit that began in 2007, when a friend of Adam Jones's who had worked for the band claimed credit for artwork. The band expected their insurer to handle it, but the insurer refused and then sued the band, and the fight dragged on for years. On the day the trial was due to begin, the case was moved to a courthouse in North Los Angeles, and under a new judge it was settled in the band's favour in early March 2015. The judge's name was Randy Rhodes; not the guitarist Randy Rhoads of Ozzy Osbourne fame, but Jones still credited "the power of metal" with acting as the band's guardian angel.
On 2 August 2019 Tool made the records they had released only on CD and vinyl available for download and streaming, with a tongue-in-cheek statement from Maynard James Keenan about the end of the BetaMax and Laser Disc era. On Billboard's charts dated 17 August, Tool held four of the top five places on Top Rock Albums, the first act ever to do so, and the entire top 10 of Rock Digital Song Sales, beating the eight of the top ten that Queen had held that March.
"Fear Inoculum", released on 7 August 2019, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 93. At 10 minutes 21 seconds it was 24 seconds longer than the previous record holder, David Bowie's "Blackstar", which made it the longest hit in the chart's 61-year history and the first to run over ten minutes. It was only Tool's second Hot 100 entry, after "Schism" in 2001.
Fear Inoculum knocked Taylor Swift's Lover off the top of the Billboard 200 in September 2019. Looking back in 2024, Maynard James Keenan called the band's long refusal of streaming a mistake: he had wanted to make the move twenty years earlier and raised it every year, and in his view they missed reaching two generations, which is why so many people had no idea who Tool were when the band bumped Swift in her second week. He still listens on CD and vinyl himself, but sees streaming as the gateway to them.
The limited CD edition of Fear Inoculum, conceived and directed by Adam Jones, came in a tri-fold pack with a rechargeable four-inch HD screen, a two-watt speaker, a USB charging cable, a 36-page booklet and a download card, for 45 dollars. At Vintage Vinyl in Fords, New Jersey, more than fifty people queued on release day, and the shop sold out within three hours of opening even with a limit of one per customer. Jones says the number seven kept coming up while they recorded, with many of the riffs he and Justin Chancellor brought in falling into sevens, and the CD holds seven tracks.
In 2022, for the thirtieth anniversary of their first release, Opiate, Tool issued "Opiate²", a reworked and extended version of the title track, together with a short film of more than ten minutes. Adam Jones made the film with the visual artist Dominic Hailstone, whose credits include Alien: Covenant, and it was the band's first new video in fifteen years. The two also made the films shown on stage on the Fear Inoculum tour. The Blu-ray of the film came housed in a 46-page art book of behind-the-scenes photographs and interviews.
Danny Carey has drummed in a number of bands outside Tool. He joined Pigmy Love Circus in the early 1990s before Tool claimed him, and was back with them in 2004 for The Power of Beef, their first full-length album in more than a decade. Volto, his band with John Ziegler and Lance Morrison, began as a bit of fun playing covers at a jazz club and released the album Incitare in 2013. In Legend of the Seagullmen, whose album came out in 2018, his bandmates include Brent Hinds of Mastodon and, on guitar, the film director Jimmy Hayward.
Danny Carey, who grew up in Paola, Kansas, once saw his father conducting a Masonic ritual with a large sword, and when he took up the drums at thirteen he noticed himself making similar movements. Alongside his percussion studies he delved into geometry, science and metaphysics, and his fascination with sacred geometry is why he draws arcane shapes on his drum heads. He has likened what Tool is about to a lunar rather than a solar current.
Tool at first turned down Back to the Beginning, Black Sabbath's farewell concert in Birmingham, England, on 5 July 2025. The event's music director, Tom Morello, kept trying, and asked Adam Jones to play a song with him and Billy Corgan. Once Jones had agreed, it emerged that Maynard James Keenan and Danny Carey were already booked to play with other artists, so Jones put it to the band's team that, since they would all be there anyway, Tool might as well play. On the day Tool performed "Forty Six & 2", "Ænema" and Black Sabbath's "Hand of Doom", and Jones and Carey also played in a supergroup set with Morello, Corgan, K.K. Downing and Rudy Sarzo.