Chords for Adam Jones | How Tool Started

It's very strange because I met Maynard, you know, he moved out to LA and through mutual Libertyville friends,
you know, Tom Morello and a bunch of other people that, you know, still all hang out together.
_ Maynard was dating this girl from Libertyville and that's how he and I met and we just hit it off instantly.
Libertyville's the rock and roll center of the universe, man.
It is and it's this underground secret.
But he and I like hit it off like just, you know, driving on his car listening to Metallica and, you know, watching Italian horror movies and_ That's great.
Yeah.
And he's also just this person who's very driven and that's this thing I realized like I have always done really great things
because I kind of surrounded myself with people who are motivated, people who are heroes.
And I just kind of feed off that, you know, and it makes me want to work harder and do what I do better.
And Maynard's one of those people, he's just whatever he's doing, he's got to do it right.
And he's got his own kind of structure.
I don't know if that's from the army or if that's just kind of, you know, or something, you know, off about his personality.
_ But I really got off on that.
And at some point, you know, we had talked about just goofing around with music and I had no idea he could sing.
And we were friends with all the Green Jello people.
Like I used to help the Green Jello people on the day, you know, they had these costumes and they used to drive around.
Like a Gwar type vibe, right?
What's that?
Green Jello, Gwar type vibe.
Yes, yes, yes.
But more like, you know, Saturday morning cartoons, serial commercial.
What was their tune?
You know, their big hit was Three Little Pigs.
Oh, Little Pig, Little Pig, let me in.
That's Maynard.
Oh, is it?
Stop by the hair of my chin. Really?
That's Maynard.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
So he had joined that, he had met those guys through me.
And I had, you know, done makeup effects for so long and worked on movies.
And so I was like their hero because they were finding like these, you know, cat piss couches and taking the foam and carving the foam and making these costumes.
And I was like, no, no, no, you can do a sculpture and cast it and two part foam and paint it like this.
And so at some point, you know, Maynard and I were talking about, let's start a band.
It'd be fun just to, you know, mess around.
We had some other friends and then Maynard just slipped me this tape.
He goes, yeah, here, check this out.
You know, this is something I was doing back in Michigan.
And I was like, okay.
And it was a band he was in.
And I put it on and my hair stood up on my arms.
And I was like, you can sing, Maynard, you can sing.
And he knew it.
He knew it.
He just didn't have the confidence, I think, to kind of go, yeah, I'm a good singer.
So our band kind of started out like this, you know, just, you know, just for fun, just this therapy, fun band.
So we started jamming and we started trying to find people to jam with us.
And in those days, it was really hard.
The glam metal was kind of just at its tail end.
Just late 80s then or?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
89?
Yeah, yeah.
And kind of this, you know, more like, you know, really underground sound started coming out, which I would say is kind of grunge now.
And to me, all that kind of stemmed from the Melvins.
So the point was when we started Tool, we weren't trying to get signed.
And it was really hard finding other people to jam with because, like I said, you know, when you look through, I don't know in your day,
but looking through, you know, this, you know, like the listings, it was like, you know, oh, I'm into rad.
I'm into this.
I'm into that.
And so it was all, you know, we kept jamming with these guys that were very pretty, who had hairspray hair out to here and, you know, _ really nice jeans tucked in cowboy boots.
And that was the big one.
And I'm not making fun of that.
It's just that's the era and it's big influence on me. _
But we just weren't connecting.
And _ through Green Jello, _ Maynard, they moved into this big space and it was by where Danny Carey lived.
And Danny Carey, it was a commercial space and Danny Carey was one of the two drummers in Green Jello.
Oh, really?
Yeah, Green Jello had two guitar players, two bass players and two drummers.
And then they had like 60 people in there.
Yeah.
And just great.
Maynard, I was going to say that was amazing.
But anyway, long story short is we kept asking Danny to jam with us.
And at that time, Dan was in like, he was in a couple TV bands, which are bands that they'll be filming like a sitcom and the TV band will play between the shots to keep the audience warmed up.
Yeah, yeah, it's cool.
Maynard and I, Maynard called me and goes, hey, the drummer from Autograph is going to jam with us.
And _ we were really excited.
So we were jamming at Danny's studio and that's where the Green Jello people would play.
And Danny let us jam there.
And the guy blew us off.
Oh.
Yeah, he didn't show up.
And so we had been asking Dan to jam with us.
And he was like, no, I don't have time.
So we're like, Dan, come on, this guy blew us off.
Just walk in the next room.
He's like, all right, I'll do that one time, you know.
And he jammed with us and then he was like, hey, we should do this again, you know.
And it was just really incredible.
And then we found Paul Timore.
He was a friend of a friend of mine.
And he had moved down from Seattle and he was like a really good guitar player.
But he said he was just totally sick of playing guitar.
He wanted to just play bass.
We're like, okay, let's jam because we need a bass player.
But he kind of played the bass like a guitar, which was kind of cool, like chords.
_ And so that's how it started.
And like I said, we all had day jobs.
I really enjoyed that.
And then there was some point where we got signed as a band [F] and we laughed.
We laughed so hard when we got our first record offer.
Because we were just like, what?
Because we thought A&R people and record people are not really a lot of times have their pulse.
I mean, some of them do have their pulse on what's [N] happening, but most of them don't.
It's just this business thing and it's a lot of old guys with ponytails. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ And so it started with one and then it turned into three.
And then we kind of went, oh, maybe we should do this.
And I think it went up to seven or nine.
Because once a few of the major record labels approached someone, they all get in on it.
They know something we don't know.
And so that's when we started taking it seriously and going, okay, well, let's try this. _
And then I was, I don't know which movie I was working on.
I was working on Jurassic Park.
I was sculpting dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
And I went to my bosses and my foreman and I said, _ I want to go do this.
And they were like, yeah, go do it, dude.
You can always come back.
And then [B] my other guys I know who were just, it's end all, be all doing what they're doing.
They just thought, oh, yeah, go screw up your life, Adam.
_ Mr.
Rockstar. Yeah, exactly.
And it really worked out.
But it worked out because we _ did things our way.
Tom helped me out a lot with talking about the business.
Because he was already signed at that point.
He was signed.
He was in this band called Lock Up.
And he was like the best thing in the band.
He's just an amazing guitar player.
And then he moved on to Rage.
And so Tool and Rage kind of came up at the same time.
And then Green Jello and other bands that we knew, we kind of learned from their mistakes on what they did.
And the one thing we learned was, _ if we took less money, we got more control.
And the people signing us thought that was great.
I signed this band for no money.
But they can't make a move without us.
We have that artistic freedom. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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