Former Rage Against The Machine drummer Brad Wilk discussed he and Tom Morello playing with Tool singer Maynard James Keenan before meeting Zack de la Rocha in a new Let There Be Talk interview, and he described how ‘unbelievable’ Maynard sounded. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“We were also playing with Maynard, Tom and I were jamming with Maynard at this time.”
“So we were jamming with Maynard, who was fucking unbelievable. It was such a great time in music. Cut to meeting Zack for the first time, he comes in, I think he had a beanie on. He comes from a total punk rock background, but is also super into hip hop. He was really branching off into hip hop, he wanted to do hip hop. I just remember starting a song, starting to play a beat, and from the second I kicked in with the beat, the dude was richter, like jumping off my fucking drum set.
It’s just the four of us in a room, it’s real, and I was so excited to find somebody that had this feeling, and at that time even moreso, like his life depended on every fucking syllable that came out of his mouth. It was all off the top of his head, bouncing off the fucking ceilings. I just remember being completely blown away by that. That was the start of it, Zack knew Tim [Commerford].”
He was then asked if they then told Maynard it wasn’t going to work out.
“Maynard was already playing with Tool as well. Maynard might have said, ‘I’m going to go do this thing with Tool.’ So cut to Zack bringing Tim in, I got this guy who plays bass. I remember the first time all four of us played out in the valley, Sun Burst Studios. The four of us get together, I remember already feeling the stuff with Zack, and then bringing Timmy in. I remember playing and feeling like holy shit, whatever is happening here is a classic case of we are greater than the sum of our parts. Whatever is happening sonically, musically, everyone was in, like right from the start.”
