In the garage at the storied Grandmaster Recorders studio in Hollywood – it’s a trendy restaurant now, the heathens – there’s a wall full of bullet holes and a helpful piece of graffiti above. It reads: ‘Tool shot me here’.
This damaged concrete wall is producer Sylvia Massy’s fault and this is how it happened.
Massy had worked on the band’s 1992 mini-album Opiate and her professional reputation as an engineer, mixer and producer led her to work with Prince at Larrabee Sound Studios. She was offered the opportunity to work with him at his Paisley Park complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota, but she declined.
“I wanted to do the Tool record,” Massy told Grammy. And Tool wanted to work with her again, too.
“Working on Opiate with Sylvia Massy had gone so well we decided to use her again, and we also had the same assistant producer and engineer, so it was a real similar vibe,” drummer Danny Carey told Revolver “But because we had a little bit of success with Opiate, we didn’t feel like we had to get in and out of the studio in three days or we were gonna be broke, so we took about three weeks recording it. We had enough faith in the success that was gonna be coming to us that we decided to take a little bit longer, and it shows.”
Part of Massy’s method of working was to simply capture the band’s live energy in a studio setting and offer outlandish creative ideas throughout the recording process.
I even suggested we buy two old upright pianos and record them while they were being destroyed with sledgehammers and a shotgun.
Undertow producer, Sylvia Massy
“Some of my suggestions were accepted and some were rejected, and I am always OK with that,” Massy explained. “I suggested we record a transient Peruvian flute band and hide it subliminally in a song, they went for that.
“I suggested we keep and use all of Maynard’s heavy breathing,” she adds. “They went for that. I even suggested we buy two old upright pianos and record them while they were being destroyed with sledgehammers and a shotgun. They went for that.”
Keenan, who’d previously spent time in the military, was the perfect choice to try out Massy’s idea. Wearing ear defenders, the vocalist discharged a pump-action shotgun into a derelict upright piano which was stood next to the studio’s garage wall.
This wasn’t a simple thing to do. In fact, Massy later drew up a technical setup blueprint for the mic placements and the shot spread in a diagram titled ‘How to Shoot a Piano’.
Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett also took a sledgehammer to what remained of the piano carcass.
“There were other odd sonic experiments on Undertow, as well – including on Intolerance, where Jones used a vibrating Epilady hair remover to achieve some truly wild guitar noises,” Haskett told Guitar Player.
Both Keenan and Haskett’s destructive efforts were recorded and sampled on the closing song Disgustipated (a made-up word first uttered by Popeye in E.C. Segar’s original Thimble Theatre comic strip in 1935).
The nightmarish song appears as track 69 on CD copies of Undertow – yes, yes, we get it – and follows the song Flood after 59 silent tracks. It’s disorientating, like half-hearing a strange film during a nap. There’s fevered talk of crying carrots being harvested and the sounds of sheep. The repeated refrain of ‘This is necessary! Life feeds on life!’ was inspired by their 1992 performance at an anti-vivisection benefit at the Hollywood Palladium which featured Keenan firing a shotgun inside the venue (the rounds were blanks).
“[The crowd] thought we were assholes,” Keenan told Revolver. “Of course, we were amused with ourselves, and that’s all that really mattered.”
The song is followed by the sound of crickets and a similarly odd monologue left on an answering machine by someone named in the album liner notes by ‘Bill the Landlord’. That’s Bill Manspeaker of Green Jellÿ, who owned the Los Angeles loft where Maynard lived.
Places like Reddit are full of fans pontificating about the album closer’s true meaning – ‘it’s about religion’, ‘it’s about veganism’, ‘were any carrots actually harmed?’ and so on – but if you scratch beneath the surface, this 15-minute experiment is simply the sound of a singer letting off steam by firing guns at a piano because someone said it would be a fun idea. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?
