In February 1997, I was nearing the end of a mostly worthless university degree and shared a house in Arnos Grove with four young men.
Most of my favorite bands seemed to give Newcastle-upon-Tyne a swerve, so the draw of studying in London was to see as many shows as possible.
A few of my university friends were obsessed with Tool, some time before all that business with the Fibonacci sequence. We often would hang out in the library so we could look at a fan-made website known as ‘The Tool Shed’. It didn’t even occur to us you could use it to help with our studies. Or anything else, come to think of it.
Five months after the release of Ænima, I found out that Tool were playing the now long-gone, much-missed Astoria Theatre on Charing Cross Road. Tickets were a tenner, so plans were made to visit the venue’s box office. There, you’d stand at a window in person, and pay for tickets with cash. If there were no tickets left there, you could always try Stargreen, a ticket agent which was a short walk up Oxford Street and opposite the fancy Palladium. Online ticketing wasn’t even a thing then. Some of you don’t know you’re born, actually.
The Tool gig was on a Sunday and the following day, four Bill Hicks albums would be released posthumously, marking three years since the comedian’s death aged 32 years old. Arizona Bay, in particular, would resonate with Tool fans. The Georgia-born comedian – and friend of the band – described his dreams of Los Angeles crumbling into the Pacific Ocean; this sentiment would be echoed on the song Ænema.
This was an exciting and expensive week.
The hours leading up to the show dragged and dragged. Minutes and hours were reduced to a slow crawl. Eventually, I walked to the tube station on Bowes Road and made the half-hour journey to Leicester Square, and wandered up Charing Cross Road towards the venue. I remember having a pint at the Coach & Horses, a pub nearby. I once saw Agnostic Front guitarist Vinnie Stigma before a Madball gig at the Marquee (now a Wetherspoon pub); he got into a heated argument with a local and was removed by his friend before the quiet pub turned into a Sunday matinee at CBGBs. Vinnie wasn’t mingling with Tool fans that day. He was probably having a heated argument somewhere on the Lower East Side in New York City, wearing a vest.
I fished my Tool ticket out of my pocket and was handed the stub by someone on the door. I went up the stairs and loitered around in the Keith Moon Bar and looked at all the merchandise I could ill afford. I wondered what songs they would play. I imagined what Maynard James Keenan would wear on this winter’s evening. I wondered how many vests Vinnie Stigma has worn.
I rarely watched from the ground floor as I am not blessed with height, and always stood on the balcony. But that day, something made me go downstairs. Maybe it was the courage found in the bottom of a plastic pint pot. I was almost 21 and living in London; of course I was going to go downstairs to watch a band on a Sunday evening, damn it.
I found myself near the barrier for the opening band. Lodestar were a new band fronted by Senser’s Heitham Al-Sayed and were a good fit for the night’s headliners. Heitham wore a black suit and his shirt collar was folded over the neck. The film Swingers had been out for six months and let’s just say that lounge culture style was very much in. The crowd, meanwhile, were largely dressed in baggy jeans, combats and a variety of black t-shirts. No retro-revival bowling shirts and baggy slacks at the barrier, at least.
When the (-) Ions intro tape crackled and pulsed into life, the floor began to get very busy. With Dutch courage levels low, I decided to go back to the relative safety of the balcony and watch from there. I kept going to the very top of the venue’s stairs where it was decidedly light on foot traffic and there was no-one at the bar. This would be the same bar where I’d find myself at a Symposium aftershow and drink lots of free Guinness and tequila, and discovered someone had been sick in my backpack while I slept on the night bus home.
I nursed a beer and sat with my back against the wall as they began to play Third Eye and Stinkfist and…
I couldn’t tell you what happened next. Maybe it was the vibration of Justin Chancellor’s bass against the wall or the darkened room or trippy visuals that made me want to rest my eyes for a moment or two.
Despite being exposed to at least 110 decibels for an hour, I slept soundly through Forty Six & 2, Undertow, Eulogy, Crawl Away, and H..
I completely missed Maynard subduing a stage invader and sitting on his back during Pushit. I didn’t even realise it was the gig I was at until a few years ago.
Merkaba. Asleep.
Sober? Apparently not.
Opiate. Sawing logs, mate.
I remember coming to during Maynard’s repetitive chant of ‘learn to swim’ from Ænema and quickly stood up as Maynard bid the crowd good night and it dawned on me: I’d slept through most of the gig.
This wasn’t a one-off. I later slept under a stage during a noisy Oneida show in a Brooklyn warehouse, but I put that down to jet lag.
I’ve researched why some people have an ability to fall asleep while listening to loud music. Experts say it can be down to high cognitive load and brain fatigue (no, because I was attending two lectures a week at that point); some say it can be down to entrainment (repetitive beats), but Danny Carey has never tapped out a simple 1-2-3-4 rhythm, ever. I’m sure of it.
Other people without a background in auditory neuroscience have suggested a few beers on an empty stomach, coupled with an atrocious sleep pattern, may be the reason why – but they are wrong.
Like the meanings behind many Tool songs, the whole thing will remain a complete mystery.
