How Tool saved my world

For most of the eighties I'd given up on music.

Music had been a refuge for me as I was growing up, but for a long time during my early adulthood that world was desolate and forlorn, to me.

We didn't have an Internet back then, and in the backwater area where I lived the only radio stations were top 40--which means they'd pick the blandest, most inoffensive tunes in the top ten or so of the charts and play those songs over and over again. My loathing of Kenny Rogers stems from this time.

This was also the time of eighties pop. I have many friends who love this music but I detest it--to me it's emotionless, fake, overproduced tripe. Punk left me cold, too, when I could find any to listen to--I just didn't get it.  And don't get me started about rockabilly. There were some glimmers of hope--Irom Maiden was a nice discovery, and Black Sabbath getting Dio to be their new lead singer for example--but if I wanted to rock--and really rock, not Rick Springfield rock--I had to go with those insipid hair metal bands. A mostly unreasonable facsimile of what I was longing for.

So, for years I just quit listening to music almost entirely. It was too depressing.

As a consequence I lost touch with that world. As I said, no Internet, so if I wanted to listen to something I had to go out and find it. And I just didn't have the energy and the heart.

Also during this time I moved to Savannah to begin working at the job I hold now.

One day I realized that, as a single, heterosexual male with no girlfriend, I ought to at least go by a strip club. Which I did--there was one just up the road a bit--and had so much fun I went back again.

During that second trip I was getting a table dance from a lovely young lady who said her name was Hailey. The song she was dancing to was incredible--a dark, tense chord progression, vocals that went from a low growl to a scream of anguish. It was a three-minute festival of rage and pain.

It was the kind of music I have always heard in my own head. The kind of music I want to make.

I fucking loved it. I asked Hailey about that song.

"It's called 'Sober."" she said. "By a band called Tool. Isn't it amazing?"

Yes, it was. I bought that CD, and the one from before, and nearly wore them out (Undertow had just come out so there were only two Tool CDs available at that time. If I remember correctly.). I had rediscovered what music could be. I desperately needed something to hang onto during that time, and this was it--music that was worth something. Music that spoke to me. Music that was actually saying something real and passionately felt, not sticking to convential, overworn platitudes.

The girls at that club---and the DJs, too--figured out what I liked pretty quickly, music-wise, and they turned me onto Ministry, White Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, and many others. A whole wonderful world of incredible music that spoke to me on a level that I hadn't experienced since listening to some of The Beatles later music.

These days I still love Tool. How could I not? I've been going through a Scandinavian Goth Metal period for a while now--Draconian, and Tristania mostly--but I always come back to Tool. I hope, when you listen to my own music, that maybe you'll hear an echo of Adam Jones, Maynard, and company, in some of it. Being compared to those guys would be an honor.

So, let me take this opportunity to say it here for the world to see--to Tool: thank you for existing, guys. And thank you for putting color back into my life.