TOOL

TOOL Frontman On Being In The Wine Biz - "People They Think I'm VINCE NEIL Coming In With A Bottle Of Vinegar"



Steve Baltin from Spinner.com spoke to TOOL frontman Maynard James Keenan recently about a number of topics including the state of the music industry, his inspirations, his wine business and more.

Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

www.Spinner.com: Do you think people have the same love for music today as previous generations of kids?
Keenan: "One thing that's not going to change is people like music. They're really inspired by music and even now with the digital downloading it's actually made it a lot more accessible to people who might not have heard stuff before because you had to buy the CD with this mysterious cover, you don't know what it's about. Well, now a lot of people are just passing around MP3s. 'Check this world music out, check out this country song, check out this GIPSY KINGS' - stuff you wouldn't normally have been exposed to because radio stations have pigeonholed themselves. They're not going to be diverse in what they're playing on their format. They're just going to play this. And some people are going to spend that $14.99 on a CD."

www.Spinner.com: With Tool and A PERFECT CIRCLE you say had to be more knowledgeable, 'cause what you were doing was different. Yet you found that audience. Was there a moment where you knew you had found that audience?
Keenan: "Yeah, over the years it's obvious there are people that have come around, and that's inspiring to kind of know, 'Oh, yeah, you guys are kind of getting it.' But then it starts to get to that weird Holy Grail level where at some point you go, 'Dude, we were just having fun. They were just songs. We inserted some codes in there just as a joke, but we weren't serious. We're not wearing masks in some basement chanting, nothing to do with any of that stuff. It's just us having fun.' And so when it becomes familiar, like most of my peers, we take off in different directions, and do something else to just have more fun in a different way."

www.Spinner.com: How did you get interested in the wine business?
Keenan: "Wine is just in my blood. I'm just a creative, restless person, and I like to challenge myself, and winemaking definitely takes patience, so this is teaching me patience. And the payoff when you open up the wine is immense. I have a history of winemaking; apparently my great-grandfather made wine in Northern Italy. So because I'm a person who believes in that intuition, that thing that brought me here, I want to believe, on some level, that history in my family was somehow speaking in my ear and brought me here to start this industry here, to pioneer this with Eric in this area."

www.Spinner.com: How do you find people perceive you in this industry?
Keenan: "They immediately just shrug and go, 'OK.' They think I'm Vince Neil coming in with a bottle of vinegar. Initially people go, 'Oh, you're in a band. It'll sell just because you're in a band.' Yeah, but it doesn't mean that people are going to take it seriously. So I have to try three times harder, work three times harder, and have three times as good a product for them to take it seriously."

Read more here.

Tool's upcoming Vicarious DVD arrives in stores on December 18th.