The Haute Critique

--- The Haute Critique would like to welcome a new contributor, XT Force. XT Force is a culturally obsessed author whose work has appeared in numerous print and online publications. His warped outlook has given him a perspective that is unique among contemporaries. Currently, he meanders much of the east coast. ---

Lined up outside last week’s Tool show at an arena in Charlotte, I found myself  surrounded by the expected throng of metal afficionados. But though this was my third time seeing the band, it somehow took me this long to realize that this group came nowhere near comprising the largest core of fans. Not even close. No, it was only now that what had been under my nose the whole time made itself apparent, somehow, that there was one segment of the population Tool spoke to above all others: hippies.

On the surface this would seem to make no sense. Far from embracing shrieking guitars and relentlessly aggressive rhythms, your average peace loving pothead would be expected to flee the scene as quickly as his open toed sandals would allow. Provided we thought much about them at all back when they first flashed on the scene, we would have dismissed them and Sober as one hit wonder footnotes. Even when their second full lenght, Aenima, debut in 1996 and brought with it a stranglehold on radio, chances are there weren’t too many Deadheads or Phish Phans cross pollinating this field of worshippers.

But something strange started to transpire around the turn of the century, both to and because of the band and its fans. Disinterested for the most part in short, catchy singles, Tool began branching out into extended instrumentals that were as trippy as they were bizarre. Their CDs also began featuring artwork straight out of a head shop. And with Radiohead fast slipping into the “My First Keyboard” simplicity of their past few regrettable releases, most of the other legitimate jam bands on hiatus and the decidedly non-head-friendly vibe of the Bush years polluting our air space, Tool somehow stood tall as the last vestige of the 70s vinyl experience, the let’s throw the record on and separate our seeds on the album cover while we stare at the artwork years.

Seeing them in concert takes this experience one step further. Drummer Danny Carey sets the table with some amazing rhythms that are clearly inspired by tribal music, down to and including his use of non-Western instruments such as the tabla. Green and orange lasers shoot across the arena to a chorus of stoned cheers - the air is nothing if not thick with pot smoke here, leaving the question of contact high no question at all, whether you’re packing or not - and if it seems at times that the band, shockingly for a metal group perhaps, is stealing some pages from the Pink Floyd handbook, then so be it. Considering Floyd have played just one show in the past fourteen years, it’s high time (ahem) someone took up the slack.

At one point two spaceships descend from the ceiling, fanning the crowd with purple and white spotlights. A pack of men in lab coats rushes onto the stage, where they hastily assemble a second drum kit in the middle. This kit is then lit up with an eerie light that can only be described as making it glow with a color I’d term Alien Spaceship Green. Singer Maynard Keenan, who, mind you, spends the entirety of the show behind the band, engulfed in shadow that renders him essentially unseeable, mutters something about the lasers, then says, “let the transformation begin.” Then the two percussionists launch into a long narration of interlocking rhythms and back and forth soloing.

Far out, man, far out.

Running continually throughout the show, too, are the mind bending visuals on a pair of video screens. Heavy on “eye” imagery, for whatever reason, one clip has a camera slowly closing in on one man’s pupil, which upon further inspection has another face inside it, the pupil of which has another, and so on.

Far more interesting, however, is the artwork of Alex Gray, who designed the packaging for both Lateralus and 10,000 Days and whose craft is broadcast extensively here. With the latter, most recent release, fans were given stereoscopic glasses to view these psychedelic faces spiraling into infinity -and if that’s not an excuse to sit around baked, then I don’t know what is.

Lost in all this, occasionally, is the music. Rest assured, however, there are enough fist pumping singalongs from the early days to keep the metal maniacs satisfied, though upon closer inspection the lyrics in these are more warped than you might suppose, from an ambiguous ode to heroin (H.), to my personal favorite, Aenima, which has Maynard spewing “fret for your latte...fret for your hairpiece,”and wishing a bomb would fall on California so that everyone would learn how to swim. Still, like the music, his lyrics took a decidedly stoner-friendly turn somewhere around the third album, and this is likely the primary reason the cannabis contingent came aboard in droves. With each effort he becomes all the more enigmatic, and that allows the listener, particularly when under the influence of mood-enhancing substances, to interpret them any way he likes. If there’s one theme uniting 10,000 Days it is constant references to being in a “better place” mentally and to seeing us all “on the other side.” Today’s modern hippie needs a fresher, more topical message than the old peace-n-love jam bands can deliver, and Tool, for all intents and purposes, are the new messiahs of bringing it.

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