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Be positively inebriated with life, be true to yourself, spiral out, keep going, keep growing.
As an only child, I kind of lived in my head anyway, so I brought my friends with me, having many voices in my head. The glass-half-empty view of this is isolation. But the glass-half-full version is independence.
Every time I had to make an important decision, I could rely on my own instincts. I could rely on three voices: my head, my heart, and my gut. No outside noise can penetrate a solid sense of self-trust.
I knew in my heart that the universe is not that ugly and that nobody’s sitting in judgment. There’s just shit that happens, and if we all help each other, we can work through it.
Punishment by God for your behavior is not one of the things on the list of how the world works. What fucking God of love is that?
“As the new guy, you’re under scrutiny on so many levels,” he’d explain decades later. “You’re being watched by the jocks, the middle of the pack, the farmers, the brainiacs. The rule breakers, the rule followers, everybody’s watching to see what you’re going to do.”
Maybe—just maybe—there was only one story, an endless story with infinite variations, but one story all the same, populated with characters in a boundless array of costume and mask whose job it was to recognize and celebrate the mysterious tale they carried deep inside.
He made us care about what we were doing and helped me understand that teams are at their best when players, not coaches, hold each other accountable.
I started to put words together and people actually responded in a positive way. I felt like I was onto something. If people were going through some fucked-up situation, I’d get in my head and write about it. To see the look on their face when I somehow touched on what they were going through—well, you get a little praise for something, you follow up on it. And being from a family that didn’t communicate very well, it felt good to express myself.
It was easy enough to find one’s way through a maze, he reassured himself. Hadn’t he heard the secret once, the secret of always keeping the left hand against the labyrinth wall? No matter how many times one had to retrace one’s steps, no matter how much backtracking was involved, the method would always eventually lead to the way out. He wondered if the theory was true, and he wondered at the map he could devise that would include such touchpoints all the way to the exit.
Beal possessed the self-assurance and natural grace of his East Coast heritage. Both USMAPS dean and cross country coach, Beal required every action in the classroom and on the course be completed with alacrity and dispatch. Beloved despite his gruff manner and exacting expectations, the practical and unbiased Beal was ever willing to support the lonely, the discouraged, the CC in need of an ally.
He said he’d help people to a point, but if they weren’t helping themselves, it meant nothing. He’d go, “I have 10 percent for everybody. You need to do the other 90.”
Eye of the Needle Waking from a bed of nails I slowly lift my tattered sails Against the cruel and cutting winds. I march the world in seconds flat And use the ball to hit the bat. I’m free of rights, moralities, and sins. Drawing pictures you can hear, I squeeze a river from a tear And move a mountain breathlessly at will. I stroll atop the estuary In a world so sanguinary, Loving not the death but just the kill. Holding whispers in my palm, I bring the troubled waters calm. From deep within the plum, I pull the pie. I make the fox run from the rabbit, Impossibility my habit, Passing in and
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the key to success was to first prepare the scene, like a stagehand dressing the set, and then to step confidently into it.
CHILDREN OF THE ANACHRONISTIC DYNASTY 1987 Based on our being merely average in the field of “Corporate Middle-Class, T.V. watching, American-Consumerism” . . . We . . . the CHILDREN, have reached the following conclusions/predictions…out of need. What need? Well, we needed to know why things don’t work . . . why we cure cancer with cancer and pursue peace by building bombs. We needed to know why we know the ozone is the problem by manufacturing and producing #28 X-tra strength sun screen by Tropical Blend. We needed to know why we, in our advanced state of space travel and genetic research,
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When thousands of people gather in a circle in a three-hour silent prayer, that shit’s powerful. Think about all we could do if we were just quiet and agreed on something. Imagine marching on Washington with 30,000 people not saying a word and then one person coming forward and saying, “This is what we want done.” When we open our mouths, we screw it all up and assert our agendas. But if you’re quiet, you feel the energy you visualize. You don’t feel it until you shut up. All these people holding hands were dead silent for hours. And even in that wonderful moment, I become aware that I’m
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Anahata, the only sound not made by one thing striking another, Anahata, the creative hum of the universe, the silence containing the antecedent of all things, Anahata, an echoing stillness rising over a meadow in North Carolina.
They spent long hours discussing—and arguing—Campbell’s views on various belief systems, but found common ground in his more practical theories. The ultimate goal, Campbell insisted, was not to discover the meaning of life, but the experience of life, to listen to one’s heart and to fearlessly follow one’s passion.
I came at Joseph Campbell from a “fuck Christianity” perspective. I was really into what he had to say because I loved the idea of undermining the fundamentalists. It was an interesting jumping-off point after being in the middle of all that shit as a kid and watching people make decisions based on what seemed illogical. But Campbell turned out to be somebody who could actually give me the facts about mythology and archetypes and break apart the dogmatic views of religion in a way I could understand and appreciate. Professor McCaffrey really pushed us to see beyond the obvious and see the
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As skeptical as he was of the ability of the hierophant and the hanged man to foretell his future, he entered into a sort of Pascal’s wager with the gnostic: Even if magic were humbug, he’d lose nothing by believing. And if a nugget of alexandrite in his pocket really could increase his creativity, he’d choose to trust its powers.
“I know on some level, most likely all that is bullshit,” he’d later admit. “But I’ll buy into it because it puts me in a headspace that anything’s possible. If you’re an artist and don’t believe in some kind of magic, your art probably sucks.”
If you have your sight and your speech and your hearing and you’re able to move and walk, you’re able to grab things, if you don’t take advantage of that, it’s probably because you haven’t watched somebody lose it. I’d witnessed people that can’t do that—or were able to do that and then became unable to do that, and that instilled in me a sense of responsibility to use my talents, not bury them.
You go to psychics and tarot readers not to have some miracle ghosts speak from beyond and tell you what to do. You go for clarity, almost as a meditation. The answers are within you, and if you get out of the way, you can hear them. You answer your own questions.
“One of the central feelings of sophisticated modern people is that they somehow missed out on participating in a magical world,” Crowley explained in a 2014 interview. “We only find traces of it in songs and stories and poetry. But we’re always disappointed, because we’re not really in it. And experiencing that magic through movies and books is worse than never having it, because we get exiled when the book’s over.
Maynard walked the three blocks from the loft to his classes in scene preparation and character analysis, voice and movement and visualization techniques he’d need to bring convincing realism to his roles. “No matter what your scene is,” he explained, “it has to be about your mother being run over by a truck. You make it real by making an emotional investment, by going to the memory of something that puts that ‘look’ behind your eyes.”
“I’m at the back of the room watching those bands and criticizing everything they did,” he would remember. “They clearly wanted to be up there. But they didn’t have a need to be up there.”
If he were ever to take his place in the spotlight, Maynard knew, his act would involve more than superficial leaping about. He had stories to tell—decades of stories—and an aching need to tell them. His was an instinctive drive to transform pain and loneliness to riffs and chords, an imperative to translate fear and disappointment and plans gone awry to words and rhyme until sadness and anger dissipated in pulsating sound that beat in rhythm with his soul.
Imagine a table with only one leg.” Boots Newkirk’s class never knew what life lesson he had in mind when he began his lectures. He stood a copy of the 11th-grade history text on end and laid his grade book off-center across its top. The class burst into nervous laughter as his shaky construction collapsed across his desk. His message that long-ago day had been on the importance of friends—or, more precisely, on the absurdity of depending upon one best friend, one girlfriend, one significant other whose inevitable abandonment would result in locker slamming and tears. Better to build a
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It was that tipping point where you either become a serial killer or a rock star.
When I was on the high school cross country team, I’d walk or run the entire course before the race. I’d identify the hills, the pitfalls, the puddles and mud, the choke points and the opportunities. I’d make the courses my own, even though I’d never set eyes on them before. And that’s what I’d do now.
He’d make sure the pieces were in place—the budget, the equipment, the devotion to a common mission—and set out with military precision the rules they must keep if they were to succeed.
Five days a week, he told them, rehearsals would begin at 11 a.m. sharp. “I wasn’t going to accept any excuses,” he recalled. “No ‘I gotta do laundry’ or ‘I’m too drunk.’ If I was going to do this, I didn’t want to be fucking around....
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“In order to write effectively, you have to write from the spot you’re standing in,” Maynard would explain. “You have to tap into the pure emotion of where you are, but also the broader picture, the Joseph Campbell of it all.”
His collection of Campbell and Jung held a prominent spot on his bookshelf, and on the rare nights when the parking lot was quiet, he lay in his bunk and read of the characters that populated dreams and legends: kings and peasants, giants and gnomes, gods come down to earth in the guise of serpents and great birds. He’d come to recognize the Shinto priest and the African Bushman, the ancient Pima Indians and Noah and his sons as no different from the leathered punk in the mosh pit or the hipster who sulked in the shadows of English Acid. They must all in the end come to terms with love and
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“Every step of that journey is an entire story in and of itself,” Maynard would explain. “Every five minutes of a life is a story if you tap into the archetype that transcends the individual and connects to everybody.”
And songs could do that, he knew, distill a story to its metaphorical essence, provide a useful allegory to spark understanding and a safe distance from which to work through one’s dilemmas.
He knew, too, that he must exorcise the judgmental voices that echoed in his memory, voices of his third-grade teacher, the short-sighted supervisors at the pet store, old friends threatened by his Mohawk. A jou...
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“I felt the band was something special from the very first time the four of us played together,” Danny would recall. “The hair on my arms was standing on end. It had a power I could feel instantly, the flame of those guys. I told them I wouldn’t charge them rent anymore and that I would play. I’d do this for myself because I loved playing that kind of music.”
Within the parameters Maynard insisted upon, the group nonetheless discovered freedom, a creative leeway to experiment at will within the messy disorder of half-memorized guitar riffs and in-progress verses in a true punk atmosphere of egoless collaboration.
Not that individuality was compromised for the sake of the collective. Quite the opposite. The band members not only respected their own strengths, but, attuned to each other’s every nuance, drew instinctively from the collective energy to complete fully formed songs sometimes in as little as a day, a week at the most. “Everybody was really open about letting an idea go and just be drawn and quartered and turned into something ...
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“It did have a different sound,” Danny said of the band’s music. “I just didn’t think it would ever have any commercial possibilities.”
“Toolshed” seemed entirely fitting, a name that brought to mind the shadowy outbuilding where a menacing uncle might bring a young charge for a beating—or worse. It implied the mystery and terror of the themes that wove through the emerging songs, the recurring motifs of violence and outright horror, the pain and tears necessary for healing to begin.
Less was more when it came to a name, Maynard knew. His merchandising work at Boston Pet had taught him that much. Paring the name would lend space where multiple meanings might arise. Lop it in half and the word could mean whatever one wished: the right gizmo for the job or a blind and unquestioning follower. It might evoke the image of an implement digging deep to touch a nerve or a midnight spin down Sunset Boulevard in a Corvette ragtop. And if the name was a double entendre, it couldn’t hurt.
Maynard spoke the word aloud, whispered it, sketched it in his notepad. It was a fine name for a band, they all agreed, a name with pleasing mouth feel and eye appeal, its elongated open vowels bounded by sturdy consonants. A one-syllable name that left...
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Tool’s debut performance had been a collective release of sound and emotion, a wave of contagious energy that swept the party guests in words and rhythms, driving and terrifying and familiar and continuing relentlessly into the morning.
“I’ve never been more surprised in my life,” Tom would recall. “Tool was awesome from day one. It was unbelievable.”
People would complain and tell me I was wasting paper. I would show them the other flyers and ask what they were all about. Of course, they didn’t know, because there was too much noise on the page for them to remember any of it. But ours sunk in.
“It was a surprise, I’m sure to all of us,” Danny would say of the band’s sudden popularity. “We had so many musician friends trying to make it, but we knew we had something really special. I didn’t even care if we made it or not.”
Business was business, Maynard insisted. There would be no freebies, even for those claiming to be record company reps. “If they wanted to be a part of what we were doing, they could pony up their six bucks and go listen to the tape,” he would explain. “I didn’t need their record deal. I just needed to be up here doing this.”
The goal of most new bands was the record contract, the golden prize at the end of the dive bar tunnel. Maynard had watched too many of them hand out demo tapes like candy tossed from a float in an Independence Day parade, hoping against hope their work would fall into the hands of an eager A&R rep.
