Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan discussed almost fronting what would become Rage Against The Machine in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“Well, there wasn’t a Rage when I was working with Tom. I think he was working with Timmy [Commerford], perhaps. I can’t remember if Brad [Wilk] was drumming or not. This is very foggy at that time ’cause I didn’t know Brad yet, so you’d have to talk to Brad, find out if it was actually him. We actually were in a rehearsal space – this is after [Morello’s former band] Lock Up was dead and he was trying figuring out where he gonna go next, and so yeah, it was right around the same time all those things were happening. And I think just the vibe of where they wanted to go … I guess I had a little bit of that Green Jellö thing going on in me still, so I was looking for almost a Puscifer approach to music at that point. They were looking for a more serious approach, so I think that was pretty much immediate. If there was a consideration for that at all, it was very brief.”
He also discussed musicians today being ‘one-dimensional.’
“I think bands in general, not necessarily the ones I’m involved in, but I think [people in] bands in general are the ones who … they kind of have the discipline enough to learn how to play their instrument. And they have some kind of accolades or positive reinforcement for some achievements they might’ve had early on. Playing guitar, playing drums … so you know, as human beings you like that praise, you like those accolades. So you pursue it more to get more of those things. But in general, most musicians nowadays and in recent history, they lack the discipline outside of that one discipline. So in a way, they’re one-dimensional, so when success comes, they don’t have the faintest idea how to deal with it. And most of them implode. Most of them fall apart. They didn’t have the discipline back then – they just had the discipline on what their single focus was, whatever instrument it was.”
