Tool: the quintessential CD band
Band made the music format its own
By ANDREW DANSBY ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
June 16, 2010, 6:57PM
The CD — the slight, slender and silvery music vessel - is often spoken of disparagingly by audiophiles who love their vinyl, and it's almost a nonentity to those of the download generation. But for a bit more than 15 years the CD was, for better and worse, the dominant format for music consumption. During that period, though, there weren't many quintessential CD bands. Tool, for all the adulation and ridicule that it has inspired over the years, was admirably a CD band.
Of course, all music acts made CDs during that era between vinyl's decline and iTunes' rise. The CD was a default device, cheap to mass produce and easy to distribute and store. It was also portable. But the medium had a terrible effect on quality control. Artists who grew up in the vinyl era were suddenly making middling recordings that were significantly longer than an old-fashioned double album, stuffed with too many so-so 3-minute pop songs that would have been b-sides years earlier.
But Tool didn't spring from Side A and Side B soil. The band's four albums are fully committed to the CD format, the shortest being the first, 1993's Undertow, at 68 minutes; Aenima, Lateralus and 10,000 Days all top 74 minutes.
The CD was the ultimate canvas for what is often dismissively called progressive rock, a difficult-to-define genre marked by long songs, interludes, conceptual song cycles, weird time signatures and tempo shifts, long instrumental passages and a fair dusting of artistic pomp.
About the time grunge started to wear thin - the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes once told me he knew it was over when he saw a flier for a Seattle show featuring a band called Torn Flannel - Tool offered a theatrical alternative to alternative. How else to describe a 15-minute song called Disgustipated? For a different sort of disenfranchised youth, self-pitying repression was gauche.
The band's name said it all: The id, at least to an extent, was back. There's plenty of the re- quisite darkness in the music, but Tool's Maynard James Keenan is hardly humorless - he was a friend of the late Houston comic Bill Hicks, made appearances on TV comedy Mr. Show and, for good measure, named his vineyard (yes, he has a vineyard) Merkin.
Making progressive metal is just the way this Renaissance weirdo pays the bills.
Tool's advantage over prog's '70s practitioners - King Crimson, Genesis, etc. - was that the band didn't have to bend, fold, cut and cram its unwieldy songs to fit on two sides of a platter. It was the perfect fit of band and format, similar in spirit to an old Onion story about a stoner architect drafting an "all-foyer mansion."
Though some bemoaned the fact that the CD's small plastic case lacked the grand span of the old LP jackets, Tool found ways to make the package more interesting.
Incidentally, the Onion is one of the few publications to produce a lengthy Q&A with Keenan, a reportedly prickly but interesting rock eccentric from Ohio whose pre-Tool story includes stints in the Army and glee club.
The interviewer asked Keenan about the lavish package for 10,000 Days. It included a flap with built-in stereoscopic lenses that, when peered through, rendered the album's interior art three-dimensional.
"We had to look at the record company and show them, 'See, this is what we make when we tour. This is what we make on album sales. We don't need to make albums,' " Keenan said. "If they want to survive into the next millennium, they have to figure out a way, but we get to have fun with our album artwork, because they understand that it's something they have to do to be relevant in this new world order."
There have been a few other bands who played enthusiastically with the CD package, including the arty indie-rock band Menomena, which packaged one album as a flipbook and another as an interactive piece of rotating art. Dazzling as those products were, they didn't take advantage of the CD's mass producibility quite like Tool's albums did. With no radio airplay and often backhanded praise - rock critics often tread delicately around most things prog - Tool still managed to sell millions of its elaborately packaged and musically stuffed widgets.
So where does Tool go next? Vinyl is hip again, but that would seem like a step back as far as formats. What would happen if Parabol and Parabola were separated on different sides of an album? Undoubtedly something bad.
There's no limit to what might be done digitally, which becomes a problem: Who wants an infinite home of foyers?
But on a more serious note, as much as Tool is maligned, the band has nevertheless cultivated a listenership that takes in these albums as they were created by the artist.
Even the decision not to print lyrics in the albums seems a deliberate attempt to create a controlled environment. You sit and you listen.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/7057170.html
