I took my dad to the Tool concert at the new Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on 10 December (yesterday, technically, but just a few hours ago). Here are some thoughts.
The Nokia Theater is great. Really, really great. Great acoustics. Acoustics so good, with such a lack of echo, that you could whisper on stage and be heard by screaming fans. If you cranked the volume up to the level of a jet engine, your audience’s ears would bleed.
Actually, that last bit’s not hypothetical. This was the loudest concert I’ve attended in more than a decade. The theme seems to be quieter and quieter metal concerts, but Maynard seems not to have gotten the memo. The problem was, soundboard mixing was poor enough, and his tenor high enough, that earplugs would entirely squelch his vocals. So I went au naturel, auditorily. And I’m still paying for it. And checking for blood.
I wondered how song-y this concert would be, and how ambient. Final total? 30 to 40 percent songs, 70 to 60 percent ambient. It could be worse. And by “worse” I mean more ambient. And I want to elaborate on that.
First, a quote from the much-loathed (by me) Stephen Thomas Erlewine. In typically dismissive fashion, he once wrote:
Tool’s greatest breakthrough was to introduce dark, vaguely underground metal to the preening pretentiousness of art rock. Or maybe it was introducing the self-absorbed pretension of art rock to the wearing grind of post-thrash metal — the order really doesn’t matter. Though Metallica wrote their multi-sectioned, layered songs as if they were composers, they kept their musical attack ferociously at street level. Tool didn’t. They embraced the artsy, faux-bohemian preoccupations of Jane’s Addiction while they simultaneously paid musical homage to the dark, relentlessly bleak visions of grindcore, death metal, and thrash.
Blah blah blah, reviewer shit. But while being one of the worst (in terms of composition) things Erlewine has ever penned, it’s probably one of the best in terms of perception. Just strip out the pejorative adjectives and you’re left with something close to the truth: Tool successfully merged the artsy with thrash in a way that no one else I know of ever really did.
And they didn’t stagnate. Maybe if they had released an album a year, one could see a continuous arc. But they released an album every five years, and it seemed highly syncopated. When Undertow came out, it was at the furthest-bleak end of my listening spectrum, but I knew I had found something special. It was dark, moody, self-confident, catchy, and relentlessly honest. I yearned for the second album.
The second album didn’t disappoint. Ænima upped the ante everywhere. It was bleaker, moodier, more self-assured, possessed of more irresistible stuff than their first album.
I almost lost them at Lateralus. That’s a challenging listen, in the way late Radiohead is challenging. They start to embrace an anti-song aesthetic, which means each time you crack the album it has to be in album-sized bites, which takes commitment. Nonetheless, I worked on it, and it paid off.
Then last year came 10,000 Days. Am I about to give Tool too much credit? Perhaps. If an unknown band released 10,000 Days as their first record, I’d probably call it pretentious shit and move on. But not only had Tool really advanced on each previous incarnation, they were getting better faster than my ears were. In that time I went from appreciating Vs. and Beethoven to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Chopin. And their swing was wider. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. While Ænima is my favorite Tool album, I’m pretty confident it won’t always be. More preening does not necessarily equal more good, but again, they’ve earned their stripes, and they are not just any other band. They’re probably smarter than I am.
But that leaves me in a weird quandary. I’m not sure I really liked the concert. It seemed indulgent and almost didactic. This is probably just me. If you disagree with me, you probably have much higher standards and perception. Or much lower. I’ll let you decide which.
I was second-row behind the faux-pit. I was going to mention this earlier, but it didn’t seem to flow anywhere better than it does right here (poorly), so I thought I’d go ahead and just say it. This would be fine, except that I bought the tickets on the aftermarket, and paid through the eyeballs for them. Was it twice as good as third-row Dream Theater? I don’t think so. I’d probably be more able to give a more fair assessment of the concert if I had bought them for face value.
So, Tool. It was ambient. And the highlight was the portion where they brought a second drum set onstage. The bass and guitar held down a pattern. The band’s drummer played a complex drum solo in a different time signature. And the second drummer — now my music terminology leaves me — harmonized? Complemented? Somethinged the other two time signatures. There were three time signatures going on simultaneously, and I’m pretty sure they were relatively prime.
To assure myself it was not junk, I put on a baseline CD on the way home. The first one I happened upon was by the band Soil.
Do you know Soil? You’re not missing a lot in the way of innovation. You might be missing some in the way of listenability. They’re not so much Pantera-lite as Pantera-not. In another decade, they’d probably sound just like whomever was current whom they idolized. It would be unfair and cruel to call them The Lovin’ Spoonful to The Doors. They’re more like The Animals to The Beatles. Not quite early Aerosmith to Led Zeppelin. They’re competent but not special, is what I’m trying to say. I put on the record and compared. And Soil would start song after song, establish a riff, and then leave it unexplored. Everything felt half-assed and unfinished. My mental guitar would jump to the variations, the shifts in time signature, that I expected to hear. When my mind does that with Tool, I’m surprised, because my ideas aren’t as good as theirs. With Soil, I just get silence. They end their songs at 3.5 minutes apiece. That reassured me. As long as I can keep this concert experience relatively unfiltered, maybe I’ll be able to enjoy it five or ten years. Or maybe I’ll find a bootleg.
Oh, right, Surprise Guest (I wrote this post after I wrote its title, which is atypical.) I was with my dad, and he has a cane, so we took the elevator. And I stood next to Tom Morello. I waved to him (later I would regret I didn’t shake his hand.) As we exited the elevator, I pointed. “That’s Tom Morello.” My dad didn’t respond. “The best guitarist in the world.” He raised his eyebrows. “Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave.”
“Oh, then I’ve heard him too!” he said. “And he knew you recognized him.”
That alone was worth a good fifty bucks of the ticket price.
It’s now 11 December. My birthday. Hooray! I’m enough of a math geek to never think of it as anything other than “one day older”, but enough of an American to think “yea, presents!” So I’m going to go to sleep, and awake to the bizarre importance and attention we give to people on the anniversary of their births.
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