Puscifer plays with expectations
Twin Peaks in the desert inspires Keenan’s work
Maynard James Keenan is a funny guy. Seriously.
No, not when he relents and speaks with the media, something he admits seconds into the curt but surprisingly generous interview that is something that he doesn’t enjoy. And, no, it’s not something you can necessarily ascertain from the music he makes as the frontman for gloomsday, prog metal behemoths Tool or even rock supergroup A Perfect Circle.
But his ties to comedy and his ha-ha roots run incredibly deep. There is the band’s relationship with late standup genius Bill Hicks, whom Tool invited to open some of their Lollapalooza shows and who is featured in and credited on some of their albums.
And there is also Keenan’s early ’90s involvement in the rich California comedy movement, which saw him performing in a comedy-variety show, Tantrum, and rubbing funny bones with such notable names as Brian Posehn, Janeane Garofalo, Tenacious D, David Cross and Bob Odenkirk.
“In fact,” Keenan says, “I think I did a sketch one night that followed Simpatico, which was Will Ferrell’s troupe at the time. And I had no idea because of course he was wearing a rubber chicken mask, but I didn’t make the connection. I had to look online and it was like, ‘Holy s..t, I think I played with that guy.’ ”
So it is from that very fertile funny ground that grew the musician’s other, lesser known project Puscifer, a multimedia performance group.
You can actually trace it in its incredibly early, virtually in-nameonly form, to a brief appearance on Cross and Odenkirk’s brilliant mid-’90s HBO sketch comedy program Mr. Show. But it wasn’t until this past decade that Puscifer really became something more, “a catch all” for all of the elements of artistic expression that he’s drawn to, including, film, animation, music, performance and, yes, sketch comedy.
“This project has always been on hold basically because of technology,” Keenan says. “The things that I wanted to do in 1994 were just too expensive to do.”
No, though, it has been fully fleshed out and realized, becoming an ongoing creative outlet for the artist and a group of oftenchanging collaborators — he puts it into cinematic terms, calling himself the writer, producer and actor, but not the director — who have released a pair of albums and remix records, and embarked on several tours.
As to exactly what awaits local fans, he is adamantly vague.
“I don’t normally bring out any of that stuff,” he says. “You just have to sign on for it and take it in. Personally, I’ve said this before and I apologize if you’ve heard me say this before, but I kind of like it when a friend recommends a movie whose tastes that I trust. And he says, ‘Go see this, here’s the title.’ You just walk in the theatre and you don’t know if it’s a comedy, animation, a drama, a thriller, an action film — you have no idea. . . . You just go in and then you can completely enjoy the film not knowing anything about it
“Everybody’s so spoon-fed everything these days. If you see the trailer for a film, you’ve pretty much seen the film. . . . In a way we’re kind of bumping against that. ‘No, just come see it. If you trust what you’ve seen from us before . . . just come see it.’ ”
What you can be certain of is that the show will include songs from Puscifer’s latest album Conditions of My Parole, and will be built around characters — such as Keenan’s white-trash role of Billy D, as well as his cousin/wife Hildy and the cheekily named Major Douche — and stories from the Verde Valley area of Arizona. It’s the region where Puscifer’s music was conceived and created, where Keenan owns a winery, and not surprisingly it is place of great inspiration for him.
“As schizophrenic as it seems, it’s all about this place that’s basically Twin Peaks in the desert,” he says describing the murky theme of the album and show. “There’s all these characters and these scenarios that’s in the valley . . . that they might seem disconnected, but they’re all living under the same clouds.”
Musically, Puscifer and Conditions of My Parole are under an entirely different umbrella than what most Keenan fans might be used to. The record, a superb mix of electronic, country and pop, is a little more simply structured than much of Tool’s work, and is a little more melodic, a little softer as well.
Having his name attached to something so different is somewhat of Catch-22, he says, noting that while it may initially attract people to Puscifer, they come armed with perceptions that may not jibe with what’s happening.
“It makes it harder because the people that would recognize the name . . . they’re expecting something else. They’re looking for something that’s related to other things that I’ve done, other than just giving a listen on its own, separately.”