The two Tool songs written about Bill Hicks
In the world of 1990s comedy, Bill Hicks was in his own world. Outside of being funny whenever he got up onstage, he had more than a few good points about the music scene, from the devil still owning all the excellent music to most of the most incredible acts in the world being high out of their mind when they wrote their classic hits. He may have called it as he saw it, but Tool were paying close attention to what he had to say.
Around the same time that Hicks was blossoming as a comic, Tool was hard at work turning metal inside out. After coming off of their debut assault Undertow, Aenema was where they started to spread out a little bit more, incorporating progressive elements into their music, like shifting time signatures and existential musings on society.
Although the band were avid fans of Hicks, they shoehorned some of his material into their songs, writing both the title track and the closer ‘Third Eye’ based on his comedy routines. While Hicks’ original routine had to do with California falling into the ocean and damaging the yuppies with oceanfront homes, Maynard James Keenan plays off of the same idea as he screams, “LEARN TO SWIM”.
The band eventually went on to sample one of Hicks’s recordings in the opening of ‘Third Eye’ before launching into the song. Bringing the album to an epic finale, the entire song contained a cerebral tone about opening your mind up to the world, which would go on to be explored further on the band’s next album Lateralus.
While there was a fan element to Tool’s admiration for Hicks, it became a professional friendship once Hicks met the rest of the band. Instead of the archaic drawing featured on the cover of Aenema, the original idea was to have a picture of Keenan as a humanoi being operated on by Hicks, which can still be found on the CD booklet for the album.
The overlap between mediums may have been strange for some listeners, but Tool were looking to take it to the next level once they got back on the road. After completing the album, the original plan was to have a joint tour with Hicks, a cross-cultural event between comedy and rock and roll. Though the band and Hicks had met and discussed it at Lollapalooza 1993, Keenan mentioned that the plans for any tour fell through after Hicks’s passing in 1994.
Nevertheless, Keenan mentioned the idea for the festival coming to pass but unsure about how the fans would take it, saying: “It was hard for us to be accepted. We would play somewhere and we’d have these moshing skinheads dudes saying ‘play faster,’ and we’d be like ‘listen slower.’ They came here to see us, I’m not sure why I’m supposed to give them what they want… Bill and I discussed this. It was early enough on in our career that we think we could at least weed out the people that didn’t want to see that, somehow resonate on that level”.
While the comedy-rock event might remain a tantalizing ‘what-if’ these days, Tool weren’t about to slow down. They were already halfway to Lateralus and were about to expand their musical palette even more.