Maynard James Keenan – Black Sabbath, New Puscifer Music + More

On Thursday (April 24), Maynard James Keenan joined Loudwire Nights to celebrate the launch of the Sessanta V2.0 tour with A Perfect Circle, Puscifer and Primus.

He also spent some time talking about Tool‘s involvement in Back to the Beginning, the final show for Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath. Listen to the full conversation in the player near the end of this article.

“I was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, hanging out with Wolfgang [Van Halen] and some of the guys, I think even Robert Trujillo,” Keenan recalled to host Chuck Armstrong.

“We were on the travel over there and are just going, ‘Okay, well, there’s a rumor about the Black Sabbath show.’ I was like, well, let’s do something.”

Keenan’s initial thought was he’d go to Birmingham and collaborate with other artists onstage, similar to his experience at Ozzy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

“All of a sudden I’m at home and I get the call, ‘Hey, Tool’s been asked to do a song,’ and now I have to call back Wolfgang and those guys and go, ‘I’m going to do it with Tool, sorry,'” Keenan said.

As he shared that, Keenan admitted he wasn’t optimistic about Tool actually agreeing to do Back to the Beginning — and he wasn’t even sure if the event itself would happen.

“Initially we passed because I was like, I don’t know how this is going to go,” he said.

“I was like, hey, I guess I can hop on a plane and go over and do the song with a couple of guys, rather than dragging the whole band and going through all that. With Tool, nothing’s easy. Nothing is a simple decision. It always ends up being something difficult, so I didn’t think it was going to happen.”

For Ozzy and Sabbath, though, this ended up being a simple decision.

“But then everybody was like, yeah, let’s do it. Oh, okay. Let’s do it then.”

The Two Albums That Made Maynard James Keenan Interested In Music

Diving deeper into his love and appreciation for Ozzy, Keenan gave a tremendous amount of credit to Black Sabbath for him even being an artist.

“The reason I’m on a stage at all is because of Black Sabbath’s first album,” Keenan explained.

“It’s just timing, like everything in your life. You meet a band that you were really into as a kid and you’re all excited, but they don’t know. They were just playing songs. It’s all about where you were, how old you were, what was happening in your life.”

READ MORE: Amy Lee Says Evanescence Are Working On a New Record

Keenan explained that within six months, his aunt had introduced him to Black Sabbath and Joni Mitchell at the same time and that changed his life.

“That was just a moment in time,” he said.

“It was the right time. I’m sure there’s other music that was introduced to me around that, but I don’t remember what it was because it didn’t resonate. You know, all the celestial bodies didn’t line up at that moment for it to resonate. So that first [Black Sabbath] album resonated, Joni Mitchell’s Blue album resonated all within a very short period of time and got me more interested in music than I would have been just having heard, you know, the Jackson 5 or whatever.”

What Else Did Maynard James Keenan Discuss on Loudwire Nights?

• The challenges of the Sessanta tour: “It’s definitely a challenge logistically. I don’t want to use the word choreography, but you know, making sure that you’re not — when one person’s coming on with an upright bass and the other person’s leaving with a ping pong table, you’re not running into each other. You definitely have to be conscious, present for it to flow properly. With the level of musicianship you have, there’s no concerns there. It’s just more about getting along and making it work.”
• What he thinks the future of Sessanta could be: “I would like to keep a theme going on in some way, but it might be that somebody comes along and says, ‘Hey, can we take the name Sessanta and go out with our three bands to do the thing, like Lollapalooza in a way. I’m open to that idea for three different bands like Mastodon and Amenra and somebody else goes out and does it. Or just do it on their own. Just do it. That presentation of having the three bands on stage, all rotating around each other is a unique approach to playing live and it reinvents the way you think about live shows. I’m hoping that somebody picks it up and runs with it.”
• How he ended up singing “Crazy Train” at Ozzy’s induction ceremony: “I think what happened, this is me speculating, but [Sharon Osbourne] asked probably multiple people if they wanted to sing ‘Crazy Train,’ and I was the first to answer and now she had to backtrack on everybody else who was asked to sing it. Like, if I wanted to sing ‘No More Tears’? No. ‘Crazy Train’ or take the train.”

Listen to the Full Interview in the Podcast Player Below

Maynard James Keenan joined Loudwire Nights on Thursday, April 24; the show replays online here, and you can tune in live every weeknight at 7PM ET or on the Loudwire app; you can also see if the show is available on your local radio station and listen to interviews on-demand.