Rebellious. Secretive. Fractious. We went to LA for an audience with Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones, to uncover the inner workings of the band
Hours before showtime in Los Angeles, Adam Jones is making art. The Tool guitarist spends most of his days on the road like this, reaching into a box of coloured markers backstage and adding drawings and his signature to posters commemorating each night of the tour. Tonight also happens to be St. Valentine’s Day, and the first of two sold-out hometown concerts at LA’s Crypto.com Arena, but there is no entourage in sight as Adam happily draws away.
“I like doing it because I love drawing,” says Adam. He’s dressed in a black t-shirt commemorating the fictional shark fisherman Quint from Jaws. And on the wall behind him is a banner in the colours of the Mexican flag, with the image of two beefy masked wrestlers and the words ‘Lucha Bros’.
Adam is sitting just steps away from the concrete hallway where, in 2019, he finally met his personal guitar hero, Eddie Van Halen, who attended a Tool show that night in one of his last public appearances.
“If I had died right after that, I would’ve been happy,” Adam says. “That was incredible. Meeting your heroes is crazy.”
Adam and the rest of Tool have that same effect for much of the current generation of heavy music listeners. After a 14-year wait, Tool showed they were still at the height of their powers with 2019’s Fear Inoculum, an epic alt metal collection of deep, expansive songs that were soaring and filled with darkness.
The band – Adam, singer Maynard James Keenan, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor – have been bringing those songs to live audiences ever since, and will play the UK during May and June. The band remain a mysterious entity to most, but Adam is chatty and amiable backstage as he reflects on the band’s past and present.
What is it about the partnership you have with Maynard and the others that still works at this point?
Adam Jones: “One thing, we split everything four ways. We’re friends and we also let each other be each other. It’s such a relaxing, no-pressure kind of relationship. And then we’re all very different in tastes of music and what we do outside of the band, but when we meet as the four of us in the centre of this entity called Tool, it just works. It’s really magical and it is very rewarding. It’s very uninhibited. I have the best job in the whole world, you know?”
When Tool were finishing up this last record, a lot of people out there were impatiently wondering when it would arrive. Was that pressure on the band, or was it completely ignored?
“Most of the people that you hear from on those things – like, ‘When’s your next record?’ – when you do finish it, they’re like, ‘OK, when’
