Day 65: "Lateralus" - Tool (2001)
If ever I needed an incentive to get through writing about Muse yesterday, it was the knowledge that next in the pile was this album, which is so loaded with personal associations, gig stories and general musical interest that this blog entry might end up being three thousand words long before I decide to rein myself in. It's the seminal album by a band who's reputation is either a mould-breaking, hyper-talented band who defy classical genre classification, or a group of pretentious metal wannabes who's very name (along with Radiohead) was internet shorthand for identifying obnoxious music snobs in the mid 2000s. It's Tool time.
Listen to a dubiously legal version of me here
People like to think they are clever, especially adolescent men, and I was no exception. Certainly a large proportion of people, me included, love the way that revelatory moment feels when it lands on you out of the blue, when you realise that the thing you were already enjoying has a hidden layer, a deeper aspect to its presentation that makes you go "Oh, holy shit, how did I miss that." People like to get the joke, be in the know, on the inside of the secret world where they can look out and say "I know something you don't know. I now understand this on a deeper level than you do". I see it happening today with the "Rick & Morty" fandom, and their obnoxiously loud insistence that people who don't like it just aren't clever enough to "get it" has actively driven me to avoid it even though it's probably fairly entertaining. And the desire to share the clever thing you found soon changes to being a shibboleth to help you identify 'true' fans (whatever that means).
"Oh, you didn't know that if you combine the run times of tracks three and thirteen from Tool's "10,000 Days" album it adds up to the same run time as track 4, and if you combine tracks 13 and 3 together in that order and play it at the same time as track 4 it makes a different song? You're not a REAL fan."
It's easy to see why Tool fans, and by extension, the band itself, can have a reputation for being as obnoxious as those Rick & Morty fans back in the early 2000's. Around 2004, when I was a regular on the SomethingAwful.com Forums, a kind of precursor to Reddit except with more jokes and less tacit approval of child pornography and nazi racism (sorry, Reddit), the portmanteau "Tooliohead" was a kind of slur thrown around at the kind of mid-twenties self-serious idiot who liked his musical all deep and thoughtful, but also with guitars. I resembled that remark (and still do, to be honest). We were Pitchfork hipsters before Pitchfork hipsters were a thing.
For me, part of the appeal of Tool, apart from the prog rock/metal leanings which formed a seamless through-line from me listening to Pink Floyd growing up and Grunge and Metal as a teen, was that I enjoyed being challenged to think about what the songs were referencing, and being rewarded with weird insights into other topics - sometimes it would be like endlessly clicking the "related links" in a wikipedia article. I learned about the Fibonacci Sequence, and the work of Albert Hoffman on LSD and what "fisting" was for the first time listening to Tool (look, two out of three isn't bad). As music goes, its long-winded, occasionally impenetrable, and almost impossible to dance to, but this record remains amongst some of my favourite music on the planet. It's music for mournful contemplation, for when you're alone, half drunk and feel out of sync with the world. I'd declare "Schism" the greatest ever breakup song if Ben Fold's "Song for the Dumped" didn't have that title locked up for all time. They're not a band to listen to if you want cheering up, but when you're already heading towards a down cycle emotionally, Tool will at least get you there feeling like others have been there before.
One other aspect of their music is worth singularly commenting on before I move away from why I like it and talk about how I ended up liking it; this album (and Tool in general) have some of the best drums of all time thanks to their insanely talented drummed Danny Carey, who is so talented he has a specific type of Snare Roll which carries his name. When the band say "Hey, we've written a song where the time signature changes basically every 4 bars, is that OK?", he's the machine that makes the drum track not only work, but seem effortless. If you enjoy watching amazingly talented drummers, just type Danny Carey into Youtube and entertain yourself.
Having established that Tool are a band for pretentious music nerds and I am definitely OK with being a part of that group, let's handle how I came to own this album, and conveniently, it relates back to the SA Forums again. I'd joined SA in 2003, having spent a long time reading their forums for entertainment in my office at the University. One of my favourite hangouts on there was the "Traditional Games" subforum, devoted to board, card, and role-playing games of all kinds (to differentiate it from video games, which were in the "Games" forum), things I had more than a passing interest in at the time. I was particularly keen to join a fledgling league that was being formed by some of the forum-goers to play games on the FUMBBL site, which was a free online version of the then-defunct fantasy American Football game Blood Bowl. Unfortunately, I wasn't very internet-savvy at the time, and had no idea how to get access to the IRC channel the game was being administrated through. Somewhere in the thread it said "just message anyone in the league if you need help setting things up". I looked for someone in the league, and after a couple of tries, I came across someone who had their AIM details in their profile, and messaged them for help, and that's how I met Craig.
It seems amazing to me now that this was 14 years ago. Back then, in the fledgling days of Social Media, there was a lot of opinions thrown around - "Can someone you only know online really be your friend? How can you trust them?". But for me, from that fateful instant messenger conversation, I spoke to Craig, and through him his housemate at university, Tom, and his friend Toby, who were all part of the FUMBBL league 5-6 times per day. When we moved on from FUMBBL, we played the PC game "Dawn of War" together every night for months at a time. I got my first headset mic and we wend from communicating through text to actual converations over Teamspeak. We played World of Warcraft together, and I spent much of the time in my office when I should have been working talking to Tom and Craig on Messenger instead.
I don't remember exactly when Craig suggested I come up to Dundee to meet him, but it was towards the end of the University summer break and without thinking I hopped on a train. I had no concerns at all about meeting in person - we'd spoken so often that if it had been an elaborate ruse to murder me, I felt Craig and Tom had put so much effort in that they probably deserved the chance to kill me. Shockingly, none of that happened. I spent a couple of days hanging out in their student flat, we talked about games and played games and that was it really. Since that time we've cycled through dozens of different games, maintained our online friendship and seen each other as often as can be convenient given our relative distance from each other. However, it was during that visit to Dundee for the first time that Craig, being the kind of person he who loves to share and relentlessly enthuses about things he enjoys, burned me a DVD with hundreds of mp3s on it. Scattered on that CD, between the Amanaguchi, Nightwish, and 8-bit Chiptunes albums were "Undertow", "Ænima", and "Lateralus". Craig always quizzed me about whether I had listened to his musical recommendations, so I made a point of listening to all of them. When I got to Tool, I listened to those albums, then immediately went and bought Ænima and Lateralus on CD so I could listen to them in the car.
I've only seen Tool live once, and it was some years after that first trip to Dundee. They were playing at Manchester Arena, and Tom had moved back to Manchester after University, and Craig was in Newcastle starting his career in videogames. I saw tickets were available and rallied the troops, with me, Tom, Toby and Craig all getting tickets for the Friday night. I remember the timing was incredibly tight for me to finish at the University, race down to the train station in my suit, grab the train to Manchester, and meet up with the others in time to get food before the gig. Toby's Malasian family knew a great place to get Malay food in Manchester so he took us there, and the four of us ate one of the best meals I've ever had. The food was so good, Toby's mother made him promise to buy extra portions of everything to bring home with him. Meal done, and doors ready to open, we headed over to the area, Toby with his plastic bag full of amazing Malay food in tow.
It wasn't until we reached the arena doors that we realised the problem we had made for ourselves. Burly arena security were having people open bags and discard half-drunk bottles of water into already half-overflowing bins. Our Asian banquet didn't seem like it stood much of a chance. With no option but to try and brazen it out, we walked as a group towards the bouncers, hoping to breeze past them.
"What's in the bag?"
No such luck. Despite our pleas that the food was sealed and not for consumption on the premises, I was forced to watch as Toby emptied the delicious contents of foil container after foil container into the garbage. It was heartbreaking.
The gig itself was a strange one to say the least. The support band were Mastodon, another prog/metal act who's stuff I had heard bits of and liked. They were goddawful; or rather, the sound for them was. I've seen them live since, and they've sounded much better, so its possible the curse of being the support act, when the sound check and levels and everything are set up for a different band really messed with their performance, because they were dull and muddy and at times incomprehensible.
When Tool came on, things remained on the odd side. With a series of weird lights and mirrors at the back of the stage, Maynard James Keenan (their lead singer) spend the first half of the gig with his back to the audience, singing at the back of the stage. It was weird, and perplexing, and felt slightly, I dunno, disrespectful to the audience. I have my own personal axe to grind with the passivity of most British concert-goers, but the crowd were already crazy to see this show and it just seemed puzzling.
Regardless, I remember leaving the gig wondering if the trash can full of our delicious Malay food didn't end up having a better evening than we did.
