Tool are so influential to us rock and metal fans that it’s easy to forget the band can be an acquired taste for others. For example, comedian Marc Maron recently explained why he doesn’t like Tool’s music, though he’s friendly with the band, on WTF with Marc Maron.
Thursday’s episode featured an interview with fellow comedian Nick Youssef, and Maron recounted his separate run-ins with Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan and Tool guitarist Adam Jones.
Still, Maron said, he feels he missed the boat on liking Tool’s music because he didn’t learn about the band until later. He also showed Tool’s connection to comedy. (Listen near the bottom of this post.)
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“That shit’s gotta be planted young, dude,” Maron tells Youssef of his distaste for Tool. “If it wasn’t planted in my weird, angry, adolescent head. … That’s where it happens, but I missed all that. So, there I was, like in my 40s, kind of listening to Tool. But they were comedy fans; they were [Bill] Hicks fans. There’s a painting of Hicks on one of their records.”
Affirming the references to Hicks in the music and liners of Tool’s 1996 album, Ænima — an image of the late comedian in one Ænima panel calls him “Another Dead Hero” — Youssef adds, “They have a clip of his stand-up in it. That’s how, weirdly, I found out about Hicks.”
Maron interviewed Keenan on WTF in 2013. “We had an extensive conversation about parrots,” he says. “He used to work at a pet store. ‘Cause I wasn’t a huge Tool guy. But I got the opportunity to interview him, so we ended up talking about pet stores and parrots.”
Plus, ”I sat next to their guitar player at AEW [Wrestling],” Maron says before Youssef confirmed it was Jones.
“I said nothing,” Maron says of the encounter. “We had a nice thing, but he knew who I was. But someone DMed me like, ‘That’s the guy from Tool next to you.’ And I’m like, alright, well, I can’t be like, ‘I liked Oculus,’ or whatever — I don’t know. What’s the albums’ names?”
Youssef responded that he was likely thinking of 2001’s Lateralus. And when he asked Maron if meeting the Tool members made him appreciate their music more, Maron said no. Listen to the full episode below.
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