Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan recently snubbed the fan notion that the original Tool bassist Paul D’Amour quit. One fan in the Instagram comment section blasted the band for coming up with projects slowly and praised Danny Carey for being the creative mind. He also noted that Adam Jones couldn’t come up with anything good.
Maynard James Keenan responds
This comment from the fan didn’t sit well with Keenan and he responded:
“Bass player was fired, but cool story.”
In the past, the former Tool bassist Paul D’Amour reflected on the “frustrating” nature of the band’s lengthy creative process, explaining how his approach to creativity differed from that of his former bandmates.
It is noted that waiting for Tool albums to release comes with the risk of turning grey in the meantime, and the alternative metal behemoths stayed true to their reputation for the largest part of their career (even though there’ve been promises as of late that it wouldn’t take them another 13 years to follow up on 2019’s “Fear Inoculum”).
But the band’s original bassist Paul D’Amour suggests in an interview with Guitar World that it wasn’t always like that — at least not at the very beginning.
“It sort of took off; we went from zero to 100 in a matter of months”, the bassist recalls of first getting together with Maynard James Keenan, Adam Jones, and Danny Carey. He added:
“I think at the beginning of the band, we were all happy to be there. I’d written a bunch of stuff beforehand, and then those guys had some riffs. It was already kind of there in a weird way; we just had to sort of nurture it.”
Tool’s debut LP “Undertow” garnered success and it came as a surprise. D’Amour admits that the band did its best to “nurture” the magic it had. However, the “sophomore slump” that ensued as Tool went to work on “Ænima” really took a toll on him, the bassist adds:
“We nursed that for several years and multiple tours, playing those same songs, and all that success came. And honestly, I feel like all of a sudden there was this sophomore slump. People started overthinking all the parts, and I never was that way as a musician. I was always somebody that writes out of instinct.”
“When we got to writing ‘Ænima’, we spent a year and basically wrote five songs. That, to me, was so frustrating. And I think Adam was really in this moment where he was trying to find his voice as a guitar player.”
“He was just so unsure about everything, and playing the same parts over and over and over. And I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t!’ I really couldn’t deal with it, you know?”
