This week, we’re paying tribute to everyone’s favorite Jui-Jitsu practicing, Jungian psychology studying, winemaking multi-platinum selling vocalist extraordinaire, the one and only Maynard James Keenan, who will be celebrating his 60th birthday this coming Wednesday.
To kick things off, we’re throwing it back to the very infancy of his music career with this incredibly visceral performance from 1992. Here, we find a relatively young Tool playing at JC Dobbs in Philly (a small divey venue that hosted many legendary performances from up-and-coming bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam back in the day). Still, it’s Maynard who steals the show here. Sporting his trademark early-90s era mohawk (which somewhat recalls Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs), his whole vibe is borderline terrifying in its intensity, as his steadfast delivery builds steam throughout, culminating with his epic “DIE!” scream and violent/spazziness to end the performance, it’s truly awesome (and somewhat harrowing) to behold. Maynard and Tool were only getting started at the time of course, and would go onto evolve their sound dramatically in the coming years, but if you enjoy their more primitive (but no less compelling) hard-hitting early years, it doesn’t get much better than this:
