Tool have been a massively popular and influential band, yet their output over the past 15 years is sparse: four albums in 16 years, the last two with five-year gaps between them.
Maynard James Keenan at Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 10th February 1997 (Image credit: Paul Bergen / Getty) “Well, we’re certainly not a hair metal band,” he muses. It’s not about the types of guitars, it’s just how it was made.” Maynard sighs, takes off his cap and runs his hand across his smooth pate. It’s not heavy as a genre or anything but the effect is similar. “It’s meaty, it’s really weighty shit, and I would compare us to something like that.
Well, see, Whitesnake are really more hard rock than heavy metal… An animated, lengthy and inconclusive discussion of what actually defines heavy metal follows, with Justin arguing that cult band TV On The Radio are real heavy music.
“Heavy metal just makes me think of Whitesnake,” says Justin. I guess I don’t really hear them as heavy metal.” But when I listen to things like Master Of Reality, I hear sort of heavy political rock’n’roll. But if Black Sabbath are a metal band, then I guess that we are, too. “Yeah, it’s all about language,” says Maynard. “I always think that we’re a heavy psychedelic band.”
“I can understand that maybe we’d get compared with Pink Floyd…” “It depends what you mean by heavy metal,” argues Justin. “I don’t think that we were ever a metal band,” says Danny Carey. They are unarguably heavy, and there are a lot of metal inspirations, from Zeppelin to Meshuggah, in their sound. Tool have often been lazily dubbed ‘the heavy metal Radiohead’, though whatever their roots and wherever they get filed in the record shop racks, you’d be hard pressed to describe Tool as a heavy metal band these days. “Radiohead are a band who just kept pushing things out and out, who took their success and used it as an opportunity to go further,” argues Justin. “Yeah, but I think that when Radiohead in the 90s started doing these long introspective pieces, that also set the stage for the Mars Volta and for a lot of bands like them,” nods Keenan sagely. “You listen to At The Drive-In and they were setting themselves up for the next thing, that whole Santana jam thing.”īut you could argue that without Tool there wouldn’t be a mass audience for what they do. I think that they would still be doing what they are doing without us,” says Maynard. Regardless of whether or not you actually hear the direct influence of Tool in these bands, they probably wouldn’t exist if Tool hadn’t been there first. They all agree, however, that they are big fans of The Mars Volta.
“All the time I’m told that this band or that band are inspired by Tool but as one of the biggest fans of this band, I have to say that I don’t get any of the emotional feel from them that I get from Tool.” “I don’t hear that,” says Justin Chancellor. There are also hundreds of Tool impersonators, bands such as Mudvayne who seem to lurk in their wake, providing vaguely acid-tinged metal with a touch of the enigmatic and esoteric when Tool are in one of their now-frequent retreats. The range of the new prog is immense and very diverse: from the emotional Mahavishnu Orchestra-plays-bossa-nova thrills of The Mars Volta to the snarling polar intensity of Opeth, they all, to some extent, owe something to Tool. Yet the most important bands around at the moment are all, arguably, neo prog bands. The term ‘prog’ still elicits sneers and lame jokes about wizards and elves. Tool, more than any other band, have been responsible for inspiring a new wave of hard rock that isn’t ashamed to call itself progressive. Tool at Club Lingerie in LA, Decem(Image credit: Lindsay Brice / Getty )