THE BIG INTERVIEW: MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN

For this issue, we were going to travel to the Merkin and Caduceus wineries in Jerome, Arizona, for our How-To feature and learn how to press grapes with Tool, Puscifer, and A Perfect Circle’s Maynard James Keenan, frontman-cum-vintner who owns the two award-winning wineries. The trouble was, the harvest came early, and our dreams of stomping on Nebbiolo grapes in a wooden vat with Keenan like in that beloved episode of I Love Lucy were dashed. Disappointed doesn’t even begin to cover it! We’d already bought a leopard headscarf, an off-the-shoulder blouse, and a peasant skirt and were ready to kick off our Puma sneakers and stain our feet purple.

What’s a magazine to do? Well, it was one of those propitious moments when the lightbulb just went off like an exploding flashbulb. Gene Simmons has been unemployed since last December, so we thought he might need a job. We got in touch with the bassist and asked him if he’d like to take over this month’s Big Interview. To our great delight he said yes, so on Devil’s Night, the Demon and Puscifer went head-to-head in a very personal interview that reveals as much about Simmons as it does about Keenan. I stayed on for a few minutes to make sure the cub reporter did his job, but to be honest, Simmons got away with asking questions that I never could. Let’s see who he’ll grill next!

As Maynard would say, “Here we go.’’

JAAN UHELSZKI: Gene is late. Not good for his first day on the job.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: Wait, are musicians late?

UHELSZKI: I think you can answer that better than I can. Since we’re waiting, what other truisms are true about musicians?

KEENAN: I can’t say always, but I can say 90 percent of the time the bass player’s drunk, the drummer’s late, and the guitar player is jealous of the singer. And the singer, of course, the world revolves around them. It’s because it’s generally true, they think that they are the band. But they are telling the story, so I could see how that poison could seep in [with the other guys], when you think you’re in charge and you can’t effectively tell the story without the other guys laying down the setting.

UHELSZKI: Hi, Gene.

KEENAN: Did you miss me?

UHELSZKI: Apparently not, Maynard. To start this off, when was the first time you met Gene? When you recorded “Calling Dr. Love” as part of Shandi’s Addiction, for the KISS tribute album Kiss My Ass, or had you guys met before?

KEENAN: I want to say it was right before then, I think. They were doing photographs for a reunion at the Green Jello studio in L.A., and I think right after that when we did Kiss My Ass.

GENE SIMMONS: Now I can hear you. [Appears on the Zoom screen, reappears with golden aura]

KEENAN: Did you hear all the insults I just threw out?

SIMMONS: Oh, I’m much older than you are, I’ve heard many more. But I want to start off by saying, Maynard, you’re going to be very popular in jail, I have a feeling.

KEENAN: Thank you very much for that. I think I will prepare accordingly.

SIMMONS: Of course these are semantics, but I’m not anti-semantic.... Well, I don’t know why it’s got this halo around my head, but it... [From the virtual background on ZOOM, which happens to be Electric Lady Studios, where KISS recorded their first album]

KEENAN: Because you’re royal and you’re angelic.

SIMMONS: You silver-tongued devil.

UHELSZKI: I’d like to start off this confab between you two by noting that today is Devil’s Night in Detroit. Did they have that when you were growing up in your part of Michigan, Maynard?

KEENAN: No, it was a pretty Christian area. I grew up in West Michigan, so anything involving the Devil was off the table.

SIMMONS: Which is a bastardization, as we all know, of the Jewish word “Shatan.” I used to be a theology major besides studying to be a rabbi and all that. Shatan is the choice of evil. Christianity, bless all of them, as they are wont to do, bastardized it, changed and made it the embodiment of evil, the horns and all that stuff. Satan, in Judaism, is a choice. Like those cartoons when you have a little angel and a little devil [on your shoulder]. That’s the Jewish version. The Christian version taken from the Jews is, “Let’s get a guy with a pitchfork.’’ By the way, in case you’re wondering, as a historical fact it’s truer now than ever before, do you know why all the chicks love Jesus?

KEENAN: Oh, here we go.

SIMMONS: Well, he’s hung like this. [Demonstrates Jesus on the cross]

KEENAN: Jaan, you asked for this.

SIMMONS: It helps since I've known this young man ever since he was in diapers.

KEENAN: Not my own.

SIMMONS: That’s very good. Ever since he was in diapers, not HIS own. That’s good. I’ll leave it at this. What’s 12 inches and Jewish? Nothing!

KEENAN: Or Irish. Same, same.

SIMMONS: Jaan, why are you leaving? Don’t you want to butt in anymore?

UHELSZKI: Maybe one more time. Maynard, you’ve described Gene as your mentor. What’s the lesson you’ve learned from him that you’ve applied to Tool? Now you’re on your own, Simmons.

KEENAN: Part of the reason for me getting into doing songs and writing songs was more because I just felt like I just needed to, it was just an itch that I needed to scratch. It wasn’t really something that I got into to perform and to be in front and to be the character. But as you get into it and all of a sudden you’re accidentally successful, you realize, “Now what? I’m here in front of eight people, I probably should figure out some way to blend my needs—which is to write songs and perform them but also entertain. Maybe the people are here for the songs, but they’re probably also here to be entertained. So going back to that beautiful, greatest-show-on-earth work ethic of KISS, just making sure that there’s a spectacle to behold. I feel like I kind of gleaned a lot of information and knowledge and inspiration from that.

SIMMONS: If you don’t mind, I just want to add a note or two, and that is, everybody’s got their own kind of personal reason for doing this, and that’s great. But I really believe, and I think you’ll agree, I hope, that “character” perhaps isn’t the word. Perhaps it’s “persona.” You are that person on stage and you are, off stage, you’re just bringing out the man-of-a-thousand-faces idea, which is when you go to a funeral, you act differently. When you go to a wedding or a strip club, you may act exactly the same, but you’re not pretending to be somebody else; you’re bringing out other versions of yourself.

KEENAN: Agreed.

SIMMONS: So when a boxer gets in a ring and the adrenaline’s flowing and the chest cavity expands, he’s not playacting, it’s just a different part of that persona.

UHELSZKI: Are you more you on stage or are you more you off stage or is it the same?

SIMMONS: You become, it’s Jekyll and Hyde. You do become that thing. You act differently, but I don’t think it’s more or less, it’s what’s going on right now. I just want to bring up a point. Scientifically we know that when you get into a fight—fight or flight—and again the adrenaline goes in and you’re going for the kill, your mind works completely differently. You’re not thinking of quoting Shakespeare or looking at chicks or anything, it’s all about the here and the now. Once the pressure of survival and whatever else is going on is off the mat, your eyes open up to the world—“I think I smell hot dogs over there,” that sort of thing. I don’t believe for a second that it’s more or less, it’s just who you are at that point. And for some of us, when we get off stage, it takes a while to lower your adrenaline. It’s like a fever—takes a while for the thing to go down so that you can engage. Eventually you become this other person. Jekyll and Hyde, they’re both the same person. Maynard, it’s your ball and your basketball—what do you say?

KEENAN: I think it’s that same equation where it’s like the diamond is the diamond, and all the facets, whatever facet’s reflecting light in that moment, that’s still part of you. You’re still part of that cut diamond, wherever you are.

SIMMONS: You own wineries but weren’t a big drinker or a wine enthusiast. Is that correct?

KEENAN: Correct. My wine drinking kind of went up after spending some time with Tool on the road in the mid-’90s, seeing different regions, different bottles, and then that made a lot of sense to me. Before then I didn’t ever drink a lot. I was pretty straight-edge all the way through high school and into the military, and I think I dabbled a little bit near the end of the military and when I went into college. Not to any extreme, but I do remember thinking, “Oh, man, drinking isn’t that hard.” Like I hear all these horror stories of drinking, and I didn’t realize that on the post the beer was 3.2 beer, it was like really low-alcohol beer. You’d go to the bar and all the booze is watered back because they’d had so many problems with military guys getting in fights and breaking stuff. So they learned and everything was watered back. I’m in the Army thinking, “Oh, yeah, I can drink. This isn’t anything,” and then you get out of the Army and your friends go, “Let’s go have a beer. ” I had beer in the Army and then you have a beer and a whiskey drink and you’re like throwing up on yourself going, “What is this madness?”

SIMMONS: You didn’t actually like the taste of beer when you first had it. I mean, it’s the color of pee, right?

KEENAN: It’s like you kind of fight through it. It just, yeah, it tasted awful...

SIMMONS: I just want to jump into this moment in your life, if you don’t mind. So music is starting to get ahold of you, your favorite bands and so on, whoever they are, and it grabs you in ways that perhaps religion doesn’t or politicians don’t, other authority figures, and something about these bands and what they look like and what they sound like all of a sudden becomes important. But instead of diving into that pool, you somehow wind up in the U.S. Army. I see a disconnect. How did young Maynard go, “Oh, I really like this thing over here, but I’m going to go over there”? Why the Army?

KEENAN: Army College Fund. I had my eyes set on going to art school and I just, something about my wiring, I didn’t think that going and getting a traditional job and saving up and then going straight to school with loans and Pell Grants right out of high school, it didn’t make any sense. My stepmother was my English and Spanish teacher, she had always said that education is wasted on the youth. She felt there are some basics that you need to have in your elementary and junior high school days, but then in that middle part is where you should probably be doing [something] and interacting and then come back to your education. So graduate high school, go do something, and then go to college. That inspired something in me.

SIMMONS: So you get out of the Army and the first steps you take as a civilian, now what are you going to do?

KEENAN: Well, before I went into the Army I told my friends, my plan is this: I’m going to go in, get my college fund to go to art school. After I get out of the Army, I’m going to go straight to the barber and get a mohawk because I’m going to art school. I said that to most of my classmates. Then when I actually did it they thought I lost my fucking mind. “I told you I was going to do this. Why are you acting like this is a shock to you?”

SIMMONS: And the year was?

KEENAN: Nineteen eighty-five, August 6th, 1985, at the mall down on 28th Street in Grand Rapids. I went with my JCPenney charge card that I got while I was in the Army. I went straight to the beauty shop and I told the beauticians there, “I need a mohawk.” They’re like, “I’m sorry, what?” I still had my dress greens on, my full Army uniform.

SIMMONS: And you get your mohawk, does that change immediately the way people interact and look at you? What was that like?

KEENAN: Hundred percent. People were thinking, “Who is this drug-addict Satan-worshipping weirdo? Even though I was a distinguished graduate in the Army and got an appointment to West Point and declined it, that’s who I am.

SIMMONS: I’m motivated by money and raw power. There’s just no two ways about it. But let me tell you something, at the core of it, the heart and soul is how it makes you feel. You get that vision of that big mountain over there and “I’m going to climb it" because the view from there has got to be like nothing in the world. So you get a taste of that, I’m assuming. As soon as you get the mohawk, all of a sudden you’re on stage. As Shakespeare said, the world’s a stage, we’re just all actors. And so you get the mohawk and all of a sudden this rush of emotion or certainly different feelings come into it because all of a sudden you realize you’re on a different path. So take us through that.

KEENAN: So my plan was always to go to art school, and then I started to excel in the military, to the point where I was on the edge of changing my mind, and then I got through all these tests, and in test after test I kept excelling, and then I ended up with an appointment to West Point. I’m going to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point and I’m going to be part of the corporation. I’m going to be part of the elite of the elite of the Army and in the armed forces. No doubt, there’s power there. There’s a sense, I could be pretty powerful, right? But then I got the appointment in my hand and the voice that came from my father, from my stepmother, from my mother, said, “Remember who you are!” I had five minutes to decide my future. I have to check the box that says, “Yes, I’m accepting this appointment and I’m going to go to West Point,” or I have to check the no box that says, “I’m sorry, I decline the appointment.” At which point, I’m going to disappoint all of my classmates and teachers and the mayor and everybody back home, not to mention my classmates at West Point Prep, because I know who I am and what I need to do. I need to go, “Okay, whatever else I think I’m good at or can do, I think I’ve got to do this.” Which is music. When I got into art school I did okay there. I started to kind of excel. But I think I had another one of those uh-oh moments where you’re in art school going, “Okay, so what am I going to do with this?” Some of my friends had bands around town, it was the punk rock scene. We were in West Michigan, and people were coming up from Chicago, up from Ann Arbor.

SIMMONS: What kind of punk rock was it? Black Flag kind of stuff or—

KEENAN: Yeah, Black Flag, some D.C. punk, but a lot of Detroit and Chicago kind of post-punk. Because by the time I was doing a little bit of music in Grand Rapids, Black Flag was about to break up.

SIMMONS: Around the time of Bad Brains?

KEENAN: Absolutely, yeah. I started to gravitate toward performance and writing songs, and there was a moment when a local band was like, “Hey, man, we need a bass player.” I started using some of my Army College Fund money that I was supposed to be putting in art school to buy a Steinberger knockoff—a Hohner, I believe, a headless bass. I had a huge, 18-inch Peavey Black Widow cabinet with a Peavey head on it, and I ran it through a RAT pedal. I thought it was pretty cool. They asked me, “Can you play bass?” I stepped up and just went, “Uh, yeah, sure I can.” But really, I just faked my way through a couple of months of punk rock shows.

SIMMONS: Wait, wait, wait—the fabulous name of that first band was?

KEENAN: Tex and the Anti Nazi Squad.

SIMMONS: Much better than Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys.

KEENAN: I don’t know, man, that’s a pretty good name. I was in it, and I was thinking this is kind of fun but, like, I feel like there’s more to learn here. I didn’t see myself as being a bass player per se, but throughout high school and the Army, I wrote a lot of words. I was writing a lot of poetry and just writing lyrics basically, but they were in the form of poems.

SIMMONS: Can you recall the very first attempt?

KEENAN: Yeah, I didn’t write any songs in TexA.N.S., but I did write a lot of poems in high school and through the Army, but I didn’t actually sing them. Then I discovered a little four-track Tascam, got a little mic, some pedals, and a drum machine.

SIMMONS: Me too.

KEENAN: And I was recording on four-track stuff. But Tex, the main guy from Tex and the Anti Nazi Squad, was a volatile, vulnerable character, and he would vanish. So we’re in the band like, “This is great, we’re doing this thing,” and then: “Where’d Tex go?” And he would just vanish for, like, six months. I said, “I’m not going to wait for him to come back, let’s just keep going [without him]. "

SIMMONS: There’s that evolution thing again, where you’re going to take no prisoners and jump into the deep end of the pool because you’re stepping in front of those guys who are nothing. It’s like that mohawk [all over again] where you decide to do that and all of a sudden this rush of attention [comes your way] and you’ve got to step up to that because when you’re in front of the stage, that’s a different thing. You’re going to be judged first on that front. And you kept the name?

KEENAN: No, I changed it to Children AD. I still had the mohawk. There’s a video out there [of it]. It’s the most dreadful, hilarious shit.

SIMMONS: And one of the very first songs that you had a hand in was called what?

KEENAN: “Twenty-Five Hours.”

SIMMONS: Any particular reason or storyline for that?

KEENAN: Just not enough time, want another hour in a day.

SIMMONS: So the first time you step in front of an audience, what happened?

KEENAN: It was a mall. Not the same mall [where I got the mohawk]. It was the City Centre in the middle of Grand Rapids, and I’m thinking, like, “We’re gonna slay, man. We’re gonna slay." And there’s literally people shopping at KB Toys and hobby and Hallmark stores.

SIMMONS: They’re not there to see you, it’s the great unwashed masses.

KEENAN: We’re playing the second-level area by the escalators in the middle of a mall, it was the most embarrassing thing. But I was like, “No, fuck it, I’m doing this. I’m going to sell this!” I think at that point I felt like that was something I wanted to do. Of course, it’s all hindsight, but I am from Akron, Ohio. Devo, Pretenders, and an endless list of crazy fuckers that came from the Cleveland-Akron area. If it was in the water, then it’s in me. Maybe that was in my DNA, to go that direction. But I think every kid has that. You watch Debbie Harry perform and you’re watching KISS perform. You just go, “I want to do that.” But I think a lot of people don’t necessarily go, “I can do that.” But I believed that I could.

SIMMONS: I’m not sure that’s accurate, and remember I’m on your side, not here to stir the pot, but you are a changed living thing on stage with a mohawk. You’re bare, like an open wound that’s very sensitive, and you don’t feel it until somebody pokes it. So when you get in front of people, you open yourself up to the possibility that people are going to hate you. What did that feel like?

KEENAN: It was terrifying, and it’s still terrifying. Every time it’s terrifying. I don’t care how many fucking times I’ve sang that song. “I’m going to fuck it up tonight. I know I’m going to fuck it up tonight. And maybe I didn’t fuck it up last night, but I’m certain I’m going to fuck it up tonight.”

SIMMONS: The nerves are on edge and you’re doing it and you may feel you guys were great or, gee, we gotta do this better or go back into the cave and rehearse, do all that stuff, that’s fine. But when you stepped off that stage there’s still more attention than if you were one of the shoppers going through that mall. This is confession time. Did you get more attention from the chicks?

KEENAN: Yeah, because I think at our core we want to be desired, we want to be seen. When you’re younger and you have the testosterone flowing, of course you confuse that attention with recognition, and you kind of chase it. Or it chases you.

SIMMONS: And you’re how old at this point?

KEENAN: I was like 21, 22?

SIMMONS: And by the way at the same time that you got the mohawk and decided to front Children AD, were you making ends meet? How were you making money?

KEENAN: Well, the Army College Fund was my monthly thing. I had gotten the Pell Grants, I’ve got a couple of student loans, and then the Army money was basically my month-to-month money. But there were so many expenses. [The instructors would say,] “Remember we asked you to get this specific kind of paper and this particular easel and these crayons and you don’t have it. I was like, “Yeah, I could, I had to get this Peavey Black Widow speaker.” And then you’re like, wait a minute, I have to feed myself. Well, ramen noodles it is, I suppose.

SIMMONS: So was your commitment to the band or to a chick?

KEENAN: It was a struggle to do both, for sure. Absolutely a struggle. Especially at a young age and you don’t quite understand the consequences. I’ve definitely had some regrets in my past days, but I think when I finally found a balance, I think it’s not about finding the almost fit, it’s about finding the right fit. When I finally met Jen, that was the right fit. I met her in 2003 and we got married several years later. It took me a while to pull my head out of my ass.

SIMMONS: In my case, I’ve been together with the mother of my kids, Shannon, for almost 41 years, and we finally got married when I was 62 years of age. But the first 29 years of the relationship, with kids and everything, anything you can imagine, if it moved I mounted it. If it didn’t move I’d work something out.

KEENAN: Please don’t cancel him yet, we’re not done with the interview.

SIMMONS: Oh, I’ve been canceled so many times, I don’t care. I’m starting a new hashtag, hashtag go fuck yourself. Everybody gets a free button. Equal opportunity. But I just want to say there are different motivations for creative people, artists, writers, rock stars, politicians, and everything. I understand, there are other considerations. I want to make the world a better place or I have music in me and I have to get out and share. But because you’re the male of the species you’ve got testosterone, and we can’t take Thursdays off. We manufacture hundreds and hundreds of millions of sperm every day.

KEENAN: Here we go.

SIMMONS: How important was the attention that you got from Tool? Because when you get off stage you’re getting attention not just from guys but from girls, and that’s a different kind of attention.

KEENAN: Tool is not necessarily a woman-friendly kind of music, so it wasn’t as much attention as if I was in Duran Duran or something like that.

SIMMONS: We took Rush out on their first tour and people started making fun about, “Can’t see a chick within a mile of them.” Geddy would bed down somebody now and then. It’s just the nature of it. If you were a dentist or a plumber the chances are pretty high the chicks aren’t going to be interested. Something about being on that stage.

KEENAN: Yeah. It changes the dynamic. I think they just become more attractive because they are good at what they’re doing and they are in control of their immediate environment. I think it’s just people in general when they are in their element they become, if they’re marginally attractive, they become very attractive.

SIMMONS: Somebody was bedding down Meat Loaf! There’s something about that stage. Does it bother you that people saw that projection of you—the you on stage—rather than you as a person? Did you want to be seen for yourself? Or liked for yourself?

KEENAN: Yeah, it bothered me, because that was when the reality check of understanding recognition versus attention came into play. There’s a relatively popular Perfect Circle song called “3 Libras” that covers that exact subject of, why the fuck are you here? You’re clearly not here for me. Let me just hand you the wig and the outfit and you can fucking go put somebody in it...

SIMMONS: I’m decidedly different. My mother was a concentration camp survivor at 14 and grew up in Israel and worked six days a week, making maybe 80 dollars a week and trying to survive, and support me. The only thing I was ever striving for was not to have that feeling in my empty belly. From the time I was a little kid, my main motivation is, I’m afraid of being poor. I’ve always been that way, and so to put it more bluntly, it never mattered to me [that people didn’t see the real me]. I don’t care.

KEENAN: At the core, I wanted somebody to see me. And I can’t deny that I most likely used the attention to my advantage on occasion, but at the core of it, I was looking for the right person. I wanted to find the person that saw me. That was my core motivation, and when I found her, all of that went away. There is no one else. When my wife walks into the room, there is no one else in that room.

SIMMONS: You know, if I was a girl I’d give you some, because that’s what I want to hear. I’m different. It took me a long time. I didn’t get serious about it until I was 62 because at the core of it, my father abandoned us, abandoned me when I was 7, and I’m the only child for my mother. We all have that DNA of our experiences through life, and then you wonder, am I the same? I didn’t want to become my father, so I never wanted to get married and have kids because I didn’t think I could handle it. Changing the subject, how many years has it been since you first started?

KEENAN: We started in 1991. It had to be right around then because you guys did a whole photo shoot at the old Green Jello studio on Sunset, and I remember Peter [Criss] was there. And you were helping him tuck the fat of his arm under when he was posing.

SIMMONS: Isn’t that sweet? [Laughs] When it comes to Tool albums, writing can take a little bit. Your fans seem to feel like you withhold Tool albums from them. Jaan made me ask that.

KEENAN: I don’t withhold it. There’s a difference between having to do it and having to want to do it—that balance. You want to do it, but you don’t have to do it. So then all of a sudden three years go by and you’re like, “Oh, fuck, we haven’t actually gotten together to write a song." Because you don’t have to. Your rent’s paid, you’re going on vacation, you’re buying art. You’re doing whatever. I just don’t think like that. I like to work, I like to do things. So that’s why there are other things, because those guys don’t think like I do, I don’t think, and so it just takes forever.

SIMMONS: Which guys?

KEENAN: The guys in Tool. Yeah, they go slow because of the age-old story— because they can. And so they do take their time and then all of a sudden a year goes by and they haven’t actually done anything, because they’re busy taking their time, but they don’t focus on it because they don’t have to.

SIMMONS: And the difference between Tool and A Perfect Circle?

KEENAN: Puscifer, A Perfect Circle? I just love what I do so I’m doing it, I’m in the middle of it. I’m always writing, I’m always doing things.

SIMMONS: What’s your writing process like?

KEENAN: I respond mainly to rhythms, and I will write a scat vocal to rhythms that are fed to me, so if [Tool’s] Justin [Chancellor] and Danny [Carey] and Adam [Jones] hand me a track or [A Perfect Circle’s] Billy [Howerdel] hands me a track or [Puscifer’s] Mat Mitchell will hand me a rhythm track with a keyboard or a synth, I will respond to what I’m hearing. And then I will take that scat and I will put it aside and I’ll try a different way to approach it to see if I can beat that original from the gut and first reaction to those things. And I kinda go through that process. That’s how I write, so once the guttural syllables have come out I will then listen to that track, my scat vocal that has no meaning, over and over and over again to find in it the figures of speech or the story that matches that cadence that matches perfectly or contrary or following or counter-following the rhythm and the melody of what’s happening.

SIMMONS: And vocally, where does melody come in?

KEENAN: Melody is in response to the rhythm and the melody of whatever the story is. That vocal melody is in response to what I’m hearing, generally speaking. I don’t sit down and go, “I have this melody in mind and now somebody will write to me,” or “I have these words in mind, somebody write to me.” I am always the person coming in and solving the puzzle that’s presented, and if you don’t present the puzzle to me, I cannot solve it.

SIMMONS: Are you surprised you’re where you are now, let’s say looking back on your teenage self?

KEENAN: I don’t think that my 16-year-old self would ever see me being both in a band and also a forklift operator [at the winery], I don’t think that my small Scottville, Michigan, brain could ever process that information.

SIMMONS: What do you think your job is...what are you here for?

KEENAN: Well, I feel like I’m here to not just solve puzzles but to arm people with the idea that they are capable of solving puzzles as well. Rather than just taking things as, these are rules and you just follow them to the letter or there’s punishment at the end over a rule you don’t understand, I think it’s more about kind of thinking outside the box and solving puzzles by looking at all aspects of it. So, if I had a legacy it would be hopefully to help inspire people to not just take things for granted and solve puzzles.

SIMMONS: What happened with your left hand, Maynard? [Points out Maynard’s hand in a cast]

KEENAN: I had a visitor coming, and I was doing my jabs, and the cartilage here was damaged, so I’ll be using the elbow and my feet instead of my jab now.

SIMMONS: When you said you had a visitor coming, for some reason I thought you meant Mike Tyson. And that he had come serendipitously to your school.

KEENAN: Actually, he did. I would not want to be, even now that he’s 58, I would not be in the way of those hooks. Oh my God.

SIMMONS: Somebody explained to me that it has a lot to do with not necessarily his weight and he trained hard, it’s how he’s built. It’s like a bulldog with a wide stance, his hips and everything. So the tall guys, you can push them over, something about the perspective, but the anatomy is such that when he plants his feet, you’re going to have to knock him out standing up. He’s just not going to fall over. You see other guys, taller, they just fall, you hit them and they fall right over. It’s an amazing thing. So speaking of 58, your 60th tour...

KEENAN: Sessanta. Sessanta. Italian for “60.”

SIMMONS: So you’re doing it again, you’re extending it one more year.

KEENAN: This show is a very unique show. It’s Puscifer, A Perfect Circle, and Primus, we’re all on stage at the same time. All three drums are across, the drum riser is elevated, all the back line is under the drum risers, and there’s two little lounges on either side of the drum risers up above the stairs. And so we’re all rotating, like one band will play three songs and then go sit down, the other band will play three songs, and we do that for about two and a half hours. And collaborations and we play on each other’s songs.

SIMMONS: And you’re going to be doing double duty with two of the bands?

KEENAN: Yeah, it was fun. But it also takes the right kind of band. It takes the kind of bands that are capable of making that kind of mental switch of like, “I’m going to turn it on for three songs and then I’m going to sit out for three songs and enjoy.” Because, of course, there’s always the theatrics, like we go back to the presenting a show, so even though there’s people playing, we’re doing other things on stage, too. We set a ping-pong table up for one of the songs.

SIMMONS: Oh, that’s great.

KEENAN: It’s a whole circus. It’s one of the funnest shows, tours I’ve ever done. And so that’s why we missed a bunch of cities. We didn’t get to go to the Northwest, we didn’t go too far northeast, so like there’s, we’re basically extending it because there was a Tool tour, then I had to jam Sessanta in the middle and then another Tool tour. So we’re going back to all the cities that we missed on the first round, so it’s Sessanta-ish. Sixty-ish.

SIMMONS: Here’s a quick question. Did the “ish” thing start on Seinfeld? I remember when I first heard it on Seinfeld, are you a Jew or are you Jew-ish? And then they started to apply the “ish” to other phrases. You think it started there?

KEENAN: I think it came before them, but I think that Seinfeld, he definitely locked that in going forward, so I’m going to give credit to Seinfeld.

SIMMONS: Maynard, I’ve spoken to other folks about you on a number of occasions, about how a lot of people follow the rules. In a lot of ways I do. My motivation is money, power, all that stuff. I just don’t want to be poor. Of course, that hasn’t been a real concern for a long time. But talking to Tom Morello, who I find has the same thing as you—there’s a deeper thing that you guys share, a kind of obligation to follow your own rules despite the fact that there might be a commercial, monetary punishment for that. So in that sense, you’re much braver than I am. Your coauthor Sarah said in an interview that “Maynard followed his own bliss and what he believed in, he stayed true to himself.” Not sure about you, but I am the enemy of mankind. But a friend to all women.

KEENAN: No truer words have ever been spoken.

SIMMONS: Somebody’s gotta be Darth Vader, and I’m happy to be it.

KEENAN: I’m cool with being C-3PO.