The story of Tool

Four outsiders in Los Angeles

Tool's singer was born James Herbert Keenan in Akron, Ohio, on the seventeenth of April 1964, the only child of a Southern Baptist couple who divorced in 1968. In 1976, when he was eleven, his mother Judith suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm that left her paralyzed. She would live with the consequences for twenty seven years, and her long illness runs through Tool's music like a hidden thread. As a teenager he moved to his father's home in Scottville, Michigan, which he later called the best move he ever made. He wrestled in high school, and his father was one of the team's coaches.[1] [2]

After graduating in 1982, Keenan joined the United States Army, partly inspired by Bill Murray in the comedy Stripes, and partly hoping the G.I. Bill would pay for art school. He served as a forward observer and then studied at the West Point prep school, where he wrestled, ran cross country and sang in the glee club. It was in the Army that he started calling himself Maynard, after a character he had invented in high school. He turned down a place at West Point itself, went to art school in Grand Rapids, then moved to Boston to design interiors for a pet store, which transferred him to Los Angeles in 1988.[1] [2]

Adam Jones was born on the fifteenth of January 1965 in Park Ridge, Illinois. He grew up playing violin and then double bass in an orchestra, and in high school he played bass in a band called Electric Sheep, with a guitarist named Tom Morello. Jones turned down a film scholarship, moved to Los Angeles and learned sculpture and special effects. He worked at Stan Winston's workshop and on films including Terminator Two, Jurassic Park, Batman Returns and Predator Two. Those years taught him the stop motion tricks that would later define Tool's videos. Paul D'Amour, a guitarist from Spokane, Washington, had come to town for the same film industry dream.[1] [2] [3]

Danny Carey was born on the tenth of May 1961 in Lawrence, Kansas. He started on snare drum at ten, played jazz in high school and at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and along the way read deeply into geometry, metaphysics and the occult. After a spell in Portland he reached Los Angeles, where he did session work for Carole King and played in the country band Wild Blue Yonder with a young Jeff Buckley. He also drummed for the joke rock troupe Green Jellö, where Maynard sang backing vocals, voicing one of the pigs on their hit Three Little Pigs.[1] [2] [3]

Keenan and Jones met through a mutual friend in 1989. Jones heard a tape of Keenan singing and pushed him to start a band. Keenan was reluctant, but he had spent months at the back of Hollywood clubs criticizing every act he saw, and friends finally told him to do better himself. Carey happened to live upstairs from Keenan, and Tom Morello introduced him to Jones. Carey sat in on their jams, he said, because he felt sorry for them when the drummers they invited never showed up. A friend of Jones brought in Paul D'Amour on bass, and by 1990 Tool was complete.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Opiate, Undertow and the first fights

Before Tool, Keenan had been part of the same circle as Tom Morello, who was building Rage Against the Machine. Morello later said Keenan taught him drop D tuning, the low, heavy guitar tuning of the Seattle bands. Morello and drummer Brad Wilk jammed with both Keenan and Zack de la Rocha and weighed which of them to ask to sing, eventually choosing de la Rocha. Tool, meanwhile, made a 1991 demo tape called seventy two eight twenty six, with early versions of Sober and Crawl Away. It got them signed to Zoo Entertainment in November 1991, after almost two years of playing clubs around Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 1992 Zoo released the Opiate EP, produced with Sylvia Massy, who had met the band through Green Jellö. The label told them to lead with their heaviest songs, so Opiate is their most direct, pummeling record. Two songs were recorded live at the Jellö Loft in Hollywood on New Year's Eve 1991. The first video, Hush, protested the censorship campaign of the Parents Music Resource Center. The band stood naked in a white room, mouths taped shut, with parental advisory stickers over their groins. Tool then toured with Rollins Band, Fishbone and Rage Against the Machine.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The debut album Undertow came out on the sixth of April 1993. It was recorded in the fall of 1992 at Sound City and Grandmaster, again with Sylvia Massy. For the closing track, Disgustipated, Keenan fired a shotgun into an old upright piano in the studio's parking lot, and Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett attacked it with a sledgehammer. Henry Rollins himself added a spoken passage to the song Bottom. Jones fought off a mix engineer who wanted to trim the songs down to radio length. Walmart and Kmart refused to stock the album because of its nude photographs, so the band issued a plain barcode cover and offered the original art by mail.[1] [2]

Tool deliberately kept their faces out of their videos. The stop motion clip for Sober, directed by Fred Stuhr with creatures designed by Adam Jones, follows a small, haunted figure through a decaying house and a mysterious box. It became an MTV fixture and won Billboard's award for best video by a new artist. The follow up, Prison Sex, was a much harder watch. Keenan and Jones explained that the song is about the cycle of child abuse, told from the point of view of someone repeating the harm done to him. MuchMusic judged the video too graphic, and MTV pulled it after a few airings.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the summer of 1993 Tool joined the Lollapalooza tour and were moved up from the second stage to the main stage by their manager, Ted Gardner, who had co-founded the festival. Tool had thanked the comedian Bill Hicks in Undertow's liner notes. At the Los Angeles area show, Hicks introduced the band, then asked the huge crowd to help him look for a contact lens he had dropped, and thousands of people obligingly looked at the ground. The exposure helped Undertow go gold that September and platinum in 1995. It has since gone triple platinum.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A new bassist and Ænima

In 1995 Tool had its first and, as of 2026, only line up change. Paul D'Amour left during the early work on the second album. Carey said D'Amour had wanted to play guitar almost from the start. D'Amour later said he felt boxed in and wanted a bigger creative role. He went on to the psychedelic pop band Lusk and much later joined Ministry. His replacement was Justin Chancellor, born in England on the nineteenth of November 1971, who had played in the band Peach when they supported Tool in Europe in 1994. He beat candidates including Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder and Jane's Addiction's Eric Avery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Before Ænima was finished, Tool lost a friend. Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in February 1994, aged thirty two, and the planned collaboration between him and the band never happened. Ænima, released on the seventeenth of September 1996, was dedicated to him. Its closing track, Third Eye, opens with samples of his stand up, and the title song and the lenticular map under the disc both nod to his routine imagining Los Angeles sliding into the Pacific and Arizona getting a coastline. The title blends anima, the Jungian word for soul, with enema, a cleansing flush. The album was produced by David Bottrill, who had worked with King Crimson.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ænima debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, selling one hundred and forty eight thousand copies in its first week. The lead single, Stinkfist, ran into censors again. MTV renamed the video Track Number One, and radio shortened it. Matt Pinfield of MTV's 120 Minutes told complaining fans there was nothing he could do, while waving his fist in front of his face. The song Ænema won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1998. Kerrang later ranked the album among the most influential records ever made, and it went triple platinum in 2003.[1] [2] [3]

Touring began two weeks after release and ran across America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In July 1997 Tool headlined Lollapalooza, earning praise from the New York Times. In 1998 they co headlined Ozzfest beneath Ozzy Osbourne, on one condition: that the Melvins come too. Buzz Osborne of the Melvins said Tool simply wanted at least one band on the bill that they liked. The Melvins' slow, crushing build ups had shaped Tool from the start, and Osborne would join them on stage more than once.[1] [2]

Lawsuits, A Perfect Circle and Salival

Zoo Entertainment had become Volcano Entertainment by the time Ænima came out, and the label went through repeated ownership changes. When Tool looked at offers from other companies, Volcano sued in the summer of 1997, claiming twenty five million dollars and later raising it to forty million. Tool countersued, arguing the label had failed to pick up its option and that they were free. After eighteen months the two sides settled in December 1998. Tool got a new three album deal and, in effect, its own imprint through Volcano. Soon afterward the band fired its longtime manager Ted Gardner, who then sued over his commission.[1] [2] [3] [4]

While the lawyers worked, Keenan found another outlet. Billy Howerdel had been Tool's guitar technician through the Ænima tour, and had lodged in Keenan's North Hollywood house, where he played him his demos. Howerdel had first imagined a female singer, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, but she was unavailable. Keenan offered himself instead, and in 1999 they formed A Perfect Circle. Their debut, Mer de Noms, entered the Billboard 200 at number four in May 2000, then the biggest opening week for a debut rock band album, and went platinum.[1] [2] [3]

The rest of Tool kept busy too. Adam Jones played with the Melvins, and Carey drummed with Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys. Rumors that Tool had split grew loud enough that Keenan complained someone had grabbed all the web addresses for song titles the band had mentioned. In 2000 the band answered with Salival, a box set with live tracks, a cover of Led Zeppelin's No Quarter, and a DVD of their videos. An old hidden joke track sneaked onto some rock stations, where DJs played it under a fake title suggesting Maynard was dead.[1] [2] [3]

Salival also carried a sticker promising the next studio album on the seventeenth of April 2001, Keenan's thirty seventh birthday. It slipped by a month. The Zeppelin cover had first been meant for the soundtrack of Howard Stern's film Private Parts, but Tool pulled it, and Stern, who had championed the band, criticized them for it. The band was also openly critical of file sharing at the time. Keenan told an interviewer that the people hurt most by pirated MP3s were not the record companies but the songwriters themselves.[1] [2] [3]

Lateralus and the spiral

In January 2001 Tool announced a new album called Systema Encéphale, with a list of twelve odd song titles. File sharing networks quickly filled with fake files carrying those names. A month later the band revealed it was all a ruse. The real album was Lateralus, recorded in Hollywood and North Hollywood with David Bottrill between October 2000 and January 2001. It came out on the fifteenth of May 2001 and entered the Billboard 200 at number one, selling over five hundred and fifty five thousand copies in its first week and knocking Destiny's Child off the top.[1] [2] [3]

Lateralus runs about seventy nine minutes. Carey explained that the disc manufacturer would only guarantee seventy nine minutes, so the band left themselves two seconds to spare. The title track is built around the Fibonacci sequence. The syllables in its lines follow the sequence, and the main riff moves through bars of nine, eight and seven beats, a nod to nine hundred and eighty seven, a Fibonacci number. The artwork by the visionary painter Alex Grey used transparent pages that peel back the layers of a human body. Critics called it a puzzle box, and Kerrang named it its album of the year.[1] [2] [3]

The first single, Schism, is famous for its shifting time signatures. One analysis counts forty seven meter changes, and the band joked that it was in six and a half. Chancellor said its twisting bass riff came from simply noodling until he could not forget it. Schism reached number sixty seven on the Hot 100 and won the 2002 Grammy for Best Metal Performance. At the podium Carey thanked his parents and Satan, and Chancellor thanked his father for sleeping with his mother, in slightly blunter words. The ten minute Parabola video starred the musician Tricky and featured Alex Grey's animated imagery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The high point of the Lateralus tour for the band was a run of shows with King Crimson in August 2001. MTV called them the once and future kings of progressive rock. Keenan joked from the stage that fans now knew who Tool had ripped off. Carey said hearing Crimson's Discipline album in 1981 had changed how he thought about rhythm. The tour ran into late 2002, and guests sometimes joined them on stage, including Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, Buzz Osborne and Robert Fripp himself. Then Keenan went back to A Perfect Circle for its second album, Thirteenth Step.[1] [2] [3]

Ten Thousand Days and a mother's long illness

Keenan's mother Judith died in 2003, at fifty nine, after twenty seven years living with the effects of her stroke. That is roughly ten thousand days, and it gave Tool's fourth album its name. The title also points to the orbit of Saturn and the astrological idea of the Saturn return, a turning point in your late twenties. Keenan said this time he wanted to sing about personal things. The two part centerpiece, Wings for Marie and its sequel, carries her middle name. Earlier songs had drawn on her too, including Jimmy on Ænima and Judith by A Perfect Circle.[1] [2] [3]

Ten Thousand Days came out in North America on the second of May 2006, recorded without David Bottrill for the first time since Undertow, and engineered by Joe Barresi on a recommendation from Buzz Osborne. It sold five hundred and sixty four thousand copies in its first week, doubling Pearl Jam's new album, and went to number one. Jones experimented with a guitar pickup sealed in a brass tube, and played a talk box solo on Jambi. The dark ambient artist Lustmord added the storm to the title track. Reviews were favorable, but cooler than they had been for Lateralus.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The packaging became a talking point on its own. The CD sat in a thick book with built in stereoscopic glasses, so Alex Grey's artwork and the band photos jumped out in three dimensions. Grey said his cover came from a vision during an ayahuasca journey. Jones, a lifelong collector of stereo photography, won the 2007 Grammy for Best Recording Package as art director. The singles did well on rock radio. Vicarious debuted on Keenan's forty second birthday, and The Pot became Tool's first number one on the Mainstream Rock chart in 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour began at Coachella on the thirtieth of April 2006, with Isis and Mastodon in support. In early 2007 Carey tore a biceps in a scuffle with his girlfriend's dog and needed surgery, which forced several shows to be postponed. He was back by April. At Bonnaroo in June 2007 Tom Morello joined them for Lateralus. The live show was built to hide the band. Keenan stood on a riser at the back, often facing away or into the dark, while hours of video made by Jones, Chet Zar and others played on huge screens.[1] [2] [3]

Thirteen years of waiting

After more than two hundred shows, Keenan's attention turned elsewhere. His project Puscifer, a name first used for a fake band in the very first episode of the comedy show Mr. Show, released its first album in 2007. He also poured himself into winemaking in the Arizona desert, founding Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards in Arizona's Verde Valley. After his mother's death he scattered her ashes across one of his vineyards and named a Cabernet after her. The documentary Blood into Wine followed his partnership with the winemaker Eric Glomski. Meanwhile Jones, Carey and Chancellor wrote instrumental music and waited for their singer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A lawsuit slowed everything. In 2007 a friend of Adam Jones claimed he deserved credit for artwork the band had used. Then the insurance company Tool expected to defend them sued the band over technicalities, and Tool countersued. In 2014 Jones told Rolling Stone the fight was costing millions of dollars and draining the band's creative energy. Carey said the stress spilled into every part of their lives as people now had children and other priorities. In March 2015 Jones announced the case had been settled in the band's favor.[1] [2] [3]

There were other setbacks. In 2013 two members were hurt in separate accidents, and Carey later said a motorcycle crash had cracked several of his ribs. Keenan described the material at one point as lots of noodles in a basket but no finished dishes. Fans grew so impatient that when Jones joked at a fan event that the record was done and coming out the next day, a website ran it as news. He later said the band would not settle for anything less than their best, however long it took. Keenan also returned to A Perfect Circle, whose album Eat the Elephant arrived in April 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Recording finally began in March 2018 with Joe Barresi. Keenan cut his vocals during the autumn grape harvest at his winery, so Barresi and engineer Mat Mitchell traveled to Arizona and worked around his winemaking hours. Keenan later admitted the band had kept second guessing itself, and that a version they had in 2011 might have been fantastic too. On the fifth of May 2019 Tool played two new songs, Descending and Invincible, at the Welcome to Rockville festival in Jacksonville, Florida. Days later they confirmed the album would arrive on the thirtieth of August.[1] [2] [3]

Fear Inoculum and the streaming flood

Tool were one of the last major holdouts from streaming, because their record deal predated it. On the second of August 2019 their catalog finally went online, and the effect was startling. On Billboard's rock album chart, Tool held four of the top five places, a first for any act. Undertow reached a new Billboard 200 peak of number nineteen, and Opiate charted for the first time ever. On the rock digital song sales chart they held the entire top ten. Keenan later said he regretted not moving to streaming sooner, since it had kept the band from new listeners.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of August 2019 Tool released Fear Inoculum, their first new song in thirteen years. At ten minutes and twenty one seconds, it became the longest song ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100, beating David Bowie's Blackstar. It was also Tool's first Hot 100 entry since Schism. The record stood until André 3000 released an even longer track in 2023. The album's title and themes deal with growing older and wiser, and the number seven runs through its riffs, rhythms and lyrics.[1] [2] [3]

Fear Inoculum came out on the thirtieth of August 2019 and entered the Billboard 200 at number one with two hundred and seventy thousand units, the biggest week for a rock album in over a year. It was Tool's third number one. Remarkably, it was sold only as a download or as a limited CD costing around fifty dollars, packed with a four inch video screen, a speaker playing a bonus track, and a thick booklet. That edition sold out at once. Alex Grey again provided the art, and critics were broadly delighted, though Pitchfork felt parts of it were overworked and others undercooked.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty sixth of January 2020 the album's closing track won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance. It is called Tempest, spelled with a seven in place of the T, and runs over fifteen minutes, built around riffs Jones had carried since the nineties. The title track lost Best Rock Song to Gary Clark Junior. Months later the COVID pandemic forced Tool to cancel its 2020 North American tour. Carey said the band had no record deal anymore and might simply release an EP. In October 2020 Jones, Chancellor and Carey released an instrumental, The Witness, to launch Jones's signature Gibson guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Hard news, old friends and the next record

On the twelfth of December 2021, Danny Carey was arrested at Kansas City International Airport after a disturbance involving an airport employee. The citation alleged that he jabbed the man in the chest with two fingers while repeatedly shouting a homophobic slur. Video from outside the airport showed him telling police he was the drummer from Tool and just wanted to go home, before he was handcuffed. He was charged with a municipal assault violation and released. Tool declined to comment. In January 2023 prosecutors dropped the case.[1] [2] [3]

Weeks later, on the twenty eighth of December 2021, Ted Gardner died at seventy four. The Australian manager had co-founded Lollapalooza and steered Tool through their rise, before the bitter split and lawsuit over his commission in 2000. In March 2022 Tool marked Opiate's thirtieth anniversary by releasing a new, much longer recording of its title song, called Opiate Squared, with a video by Dominic Hailstone. Paul D'Amour, meanwhile, had joined Ministry as bassist in 2019 and played on their albums Moral Hygiene and Hopiumforthemasses.[1] [2] [3]

Away from Tool, the members kept restless. Keenan, a longtime student of Brazilian jiu jitsu, received his black belt in January 2024. Once, when a fan invaded the stage during the song Pushit, Keenan calmly took him down and held him in a choke without squeezing, still singing. In 2024 Carey toured North America with Beat, a band playing nineteen eighties King Crimson music alongside Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Steve Vai. Puscifer kept releasing records, with Keenan appearing in character under a string of odd aliases.[1] [2] [3]

As for Tool, Carey said in 2022 that the next album would not take thirteen years. In early 2026 he said the band was working on a lot of new songs, with 2027 as the goal, possibly alongside a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. In May 2026 Jones claimed Tool had been asked to open the Sphere in 2023, but that what he called band politics got in the way, so U2 opened it instead. As of 2026 the band plays festivals and keeps writing. The four members of 1995 are still the line up, more than thirty years on.[1] [2]

Tool's legacy is out of all proportion to their five albums. They proved that songs over ten minutes, odd time signatures and art made from flesh and dread could sell millions and top the charts. Critics credit them with shaping bands such as System of a Down, Deftones and Korn, and singers from Chevelle and Breaking Benjamin. Loudwire named Lateralus the best hard rock album of the twenty first century. Before Fear Inoculum they had already sold more than thirteen million albums in the United States. They have won four Grammys, and still let the music, not their faces, do the talking.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Tool

Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones. Jones heard a tape of Keenan's voice and talked him into forming Tool in 1989. Their partnership is the band's spine: Jones as art director, video maker and riff writer, Keenan as lyricist and melody maker who writes only after the music is done. It has not always been smooth. Producer David Bottrill claimed early Schism lyrics were about tension between them, and Jones later blamed band politics for a missed Sphere booking. Yet more than thirty years on, both remain in the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel. Howerdel was Tool's guitar technician and lived in Keenan's house, where he played him demos. Keenan offered to sing, and in 1999 they formed A Perfect Circle. The balance shifted over time. Keenan pushed for mellower sounds on Thirteenth Step, sessions grew tense, and Keenan admitted it was hard for a former guitar tech to live in the shadow of a famous singer. They have kept returning to the band, including for Eat the Elephant in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Tool and Bill Hicks. Tool thanked Bill Hicks in Undertow's liner notes, which he did not even notice at first. A friendship followed, and in 1993 he introduced them at Lollapalooza with his famous contact lens gag. Plans for a collaboration ended when he died of pancreatic cancer in February 1994. Tool dedicated Ænima to him, sampled him on Third Eye and built the title song and packaging around his vision of Los Angeles sinking into the sea.[1] [2] [3]

Adam Jones and Tom Morello. They were high school friends in Libertyville, Illinois, playing together in Electric Sheep, with Jones on bass. Neither had formal guitar lessons, and they learned from each other. Both moved to Los Angeles, where Morello introduced Jones and Keenan to Danny Carey. Morello also jammed with Keenan and considered him for Rage Against the Machine before choosing Zack de la Rocha. He later joined Tool on stage several times.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tool and Buzz Osborne. The Melvins' slow, crushing songs shaped Tool's sound, and Jones counts Buzz Osborne among his biggest influences and closest friends. Tool insisted the Melvins join them on Ozzfest in 1998. Osborne played on their No Quarter cover and the live You Lied, Jones played with the Melvins, and it was Osborne who recommended engineer Joe Barresi for Ten Thousand Days.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tool and Alex Grey. Adam Jones discovered the visionary painter Alex Grey around 1999. Grey created the layered anatomical art for Lateralus, the three dimensional cover of Ten Thousand Days and the art for Fear Inoculum, and co-directed the Vicarious video. He has said much of his Tool work grew out of visions during psychedelic journeys. His images, like Net of Being, have become part of the band's identity.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tool and Ted Gardner. The Australian manager and Lollapalooza co-founder managed Tool through the nineties and moved them to the festival's main stage in 1993. In 2000 the band dismissed him, and he sued over his commission. Gardner later returned to Australia and managed other acts, including Rose Tattoo. He died on the twenty eighth of December 2021, at seventy four.[1] [2]

Tool and Volcano Entertainment. Tool signed to Zoo Entertainment in 1991. Zoo became Volcano, which sued the band for up to forty million dollars when they looked elsewhere. The 1998 settlement gave them a three album deal and their own imprint. That deal predated streaming, which is one reason their music stayed off streaming services until 2019. Fear Inoculum completed the contract, and Carey said in 2020 that the band no longer had a record deal.[1] [2] [3]

Danny Carey and Maynard James Keenan. Before Tool, they were both in the chaotic joke rock troupe Green Jellö, Carey on drums and Keenan on backing vocals, including a pig's voice on Three Little Pigs. They also lived in the same building, with Carey upstairs from Keenan. That proximity helped put Carey behind the kit when Tool's invited drummers kept failing to turn up.[1] [2] [3]

Tool and Sylvia Massy. Sylvia Massy met Carey and Keenan while producing Green Jellö for Zoo Records. That led to Tool's Opiate and Undertow, her major breakthrough as a producer. She recorded Keenan's shotgun blasts into a piano for Disgustipated. Decades later she produced the debut EP of Lesser Key, a band featuring Tool's original bassist, Paul D'Amour.[1] [2] [3]

Maynard James Keenan and Courtney Love. In the mid nineties Courtney Love called Keenan a media whore, and he said he considered it a distinction. After watching what he called the tornado around her, he made Free Frances Bean T shirts, a joke about her young daughter with Kurt Cobain. The shirts became so popular that he began giving them away.[1]

Rare facts about Tool

• Before Tool, Adam Jones made the Freddy Krueger in the womb effect for A Nightmare on Elm Street Five. He spent years in Hollywood effects shops. He also sculpted a skull for the Predator's ship in Predator Two and built a zombie head on a spike later used in Ghostbusters Two.[1]
• Maynard joined the Army partly because of Bill Murray's comedy Stripes. He hoped the G.I. Bill would pay for art school. He served as a forward observer, went to the West Point prep school, then turned down West Point itself.[1]
• The name Maynard came from a character Keenan invented in high school and adopted on a whim in the Army. He was born James Herbert Keenan. The nickname stuck so completely that it became part of his stage name.[1]
• Danny Carey once played in a country band with Jeff Buckley. Before Tool, the band Wild Blue Yonder included Carey, Jeff Buckley and John Humphrey. Carey also did session drumming for Carole King's album Colour of Your Dreams.[1]
• Maynard taught Tom Morello drop D tuning. Morello recalled Keenan tuning Morello's Telecaster down for him in Keenan's Hollywood loft, which was full of birds and reptiles. Morello went on to use it in Rage Against the Machine.[1] [2]
• Adam Jones kept his amplifier head in a refrigerator while making Undertow. He used a rare 1976 Marshall bass head he could never replace, and believed chilling it on days off would keep its parts from aging.[1]
• The pig on Undertow's back cover was Adam Jones's pet, Moe. The word undertow looks shaved into its side, but the letters were added to the photo later. Moe lived to old age on Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder's desert ranch.[1] [2]
• On most North American CDs of Undertow, the hidden closing song sits at track sixty nine. Tracks ten to sixty eight are short silences. The hidden song, Disgustipated, is the one featuring the shotgunned piano, and it is left off vinyl copies entirely.[1]
• Ænima's segment Die Eier von Satan sounds like a furious German speech but is really a cookie recipe. It was read by Marko Fox over industrial noise and crowd roars. The recipe leaves out eggs and adds a pinch of hashish, and the title is a German pun on eggs.[1]
• Message to Harry Manback is a real angry answering machine message from an unwanted houseguest. An Italian guest who had been thrown out of a house Keenan shared left the abusive message. Tool set it to calm piano and seagulls. A second message later appeared on Salival.[1]
• On the Ænima vinyl, the segue Useful Idiot ends in a locked groove as a prank. The sound of a skipping needle gets louder, and on vinyl it truly never ends until you lift the arm yourself.[1]
• The Lateralus interlude Mantra is the slowed down sound of Keenan gently squeezing one of his cats. It opens the Schism video too. Elsewhere, Carey sampled himself breathing through a tube to imitate chanting monks on Parabol.[1] [2]
• Early pressings of Lateralus misspelled the title track as Lateralis. The instrumental Reflection had also originally been called Resolution, until three months before release.[1]
• Parabola was played in space as a wake up call for an astronaut. It woke Robert Behnken aboard the Space Shuttle during mission STS one thirty.[1]
• The song Jambi is named after the genie on Pee-wee's Playhouse. Carey said Chancellor's bass line reminded him of the children's show. Keenan thought of its wish granting genie and wrote about wishes.[1]
• A drum kit made from melted down cymbals exists in only three copies, and Carey owns one. Paiste built it from recast bronze cymbals in the late nineties. Carl Palmer owns another, and the third is at Paiste's Swiss headquarters.[1]
• Justin Chancellor went to Tonbridge School, where his band covered Sunglasses at Night. The school band was called Slice of Life and played in the boarding house dining room. He later studied at Durham University.[1]
• For years Tool refused to print their lyrics on any album. Keenan felt people would not look beyond the surface. Fear Inoculum was the first album with printed lyrics, included in its CD booklet.[1] [2]
• MTV ran the Stinkfist video only as Track Number One. The veejay Kennedy would sniff her clenched fist before introducing it, while Matt Pinfield waved his fist at the camera.[1]
• The Pot never got an official video, so fans adopted a French animated film instead. A video was reportedly shot in 2006 but never surfaced. A fan edit set to René Laloux's short Les Escargots became the accepted version.[1]
• Keenan once carried business cards with the name Jesus H. Christ printed on them. He dislikes celebrity worship and guards his privacy fiercely. He has also used a paintball gun to chase trespassers off his property.[1]
• Keenan played Satan in the cult film Bikini Bandits. He also posed as Charles Manson for a magazine photo essay and said Manson was harder, because people know what a real man looks like.[1]
• Keenan's winery is named after a symbol of commerce, but his vineyard is named after a pubic wig. Caduceus refers to the staff of Hermes. Merkin Vineyards takes its name from a merkin, a hairpiece for the groin.[1] [2]
• Keenan recorded his Fear Inoculum vocals around his grape harvest. Producer Joe Barresi and engineer Mat Mitchell traveled to his Arizona home so he could sing between winemaking shifts in 2018.[1]
• After Tool joined streaming in 2019, they held the entire top ten of Billboard's rock digital song sales chart. No act had ever done that. Queen had held the previous record with eight of the top ten.[1]
• Fear Inoculum reached number one without any of the ticket bundle tricks common at the time. Billboard noted it sold without concert ticket offers or merch bundles, mostly as a pricey CD with a built in video screen.[1]
• Vicarious premiered on radio on Keenan's forty second birthday. It debuted at number two on both the modern rock and mainstream rock charts. Salival had earlier promised Lateralus for his thirty seventh birthday.[1] [2]
• Adam Jones performed The Star Spangled Banner at WWE's SummerSlam in 2011. The wrestling event was in Los Angeles. In 2025 WWE said Jones had also played guitar on entrance music for the Lucha Brothers.[1]
• Schism was Tool's only Hot 100 hit for eighteen years. It reached number sixty seven in 2001 and was blocked from the top of two rock charts by Staind. Fear Inoculum finally joined it in 2019.[1] [2]
• As a boy, Keenan was such a Kiss fan that his parents worried about the band's name. He sculpted Gene Simmons's head in art class, and by the time Tool formed his Kiss collection covered most of a wall in his loft.[1]
• Undertow is the only Tool album released while Bill Hicks was alive. When Tool sent him the album, Hicks thanked them for the music without noticing he was named in the liner notes.[1] [2]
• Carey studied tabla with Aloke Dutta, who plays on Salival's live Pushit. Carey triggers tabla sounds live from electronic pads, and recorded the tabla solo on Right in Two himself.[1] [2]
• The Opiate EP was named after Karl Marx's line about religion and the masses. Its themes include censorship and organized religion. It was reissued for its twenty first anniversary in 2013 in just five thousand copies.[1]
• On their 1998 Ozzfest slot, Tool insisted the Melvins join the tour. The organizers tried to talk them out of it. Buzz Osborne said Tool wanted at least one band on the tour they actually liked.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.