Sarah Jensen - A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

Copyright 2016 by Sarah Jensen and Maynard James Keenan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2016 by Backbeat Books
An Imprint of Hal Leonard LLC
7777 West Bluemound Road
Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices
33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Printed in the United States of America

Illustrations by Ramiro Rodriguez

Book design by Michael Kellner

The Jan Keenan photo is from the 1972 Mason County Central High School yearbook. All high school sports photos and the mock election photo are from the 1982 Mason County Central High School yearbook.

Lines from Little, Big by John Crowley, published in 1981 by Bantam Books. Used by permission of John Crowley.

Lines from Burn About Out 1986 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

Lines from Orestes 2000 by Billy Howerdel and Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

Lines from Oceans 2011 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

Lines from The Humbling River 2010 by Maynard James Keenan. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-4950-2442-9

www.backbeatbooks.com

For Kjiirt

Foreword

A Punk Psychopomp

Maynard James Keenan is a mysterious fountain of constant creation. From his soul-searing lyrics and extraordinary music in multiple bands to his astoundingly delicious wine, he has permeated our culture like no other artist. He straddles guises and genres and makes us wonder what could fuel such original superhuman output.

Behind every extraordinary person is a crisis overcome. Most fans of Maynards work understand the significant impact of his mothers health and her faith. From the age of 11, Maynard was destined to be different, because his life at home set him apart from his peers. Both the creative artist and the shaman are classic outsiders to conventional society; their experiences of alienation, illness, and mortality give them a unique perspective, an altered state. This enables them to see what others cannot.

The native American Lakota people have a tradition of the heyoka , a contrarian, jester, or sacred clown. The heyoka speaks, moves, and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them. Maynard embodies both the trickster and medicine man archetype. Its not surprising that he lives in an area near Sedona where the kachina, the trickster god, and powerful natural forces are linked.

In my art for Tools Lateralus album, the flaming central point is the throat. I saw the magic of the word empowering the music and giving it a unique poetic depth and height. Maynard swims in those depths, so his songs become the soundtrack of the soul, the confession of our united unconscious bubbling forward. I once visited his house in Hollywood Hills and saw his amazing collection of sculptures by outsider artist Stanislav Szukalski. Maynards not only an artist, but he surrounds himself with eccentric and amazing artwork.

The rock star who writes songs sung by millions is a person of power. To ecstatically uplift packed stadiums around the world night after night is pure shaman magic. MJK is renowned for his uncompromising artistic integrity and a willingness to face frightening subjects. By luring listeners into the collective shadow, he guides us to face what is and what needs healing.

After all, why do we go to the rock concert or the shaman? The ecstatic leader is in contact with a higher level of creative spirit and becomes a channel of powerful transformative energies. We go to the show for a taste of that higher reality, the source of all things good, true, and beautiful. Without saying the word, we feel his love running through all he does. Maynards message points us back to ourselves, and the lesson of his life is our artistic challenge: Be positively inebriated with life, be true to yourself, spiral out, keep going, keep growing.

Alex Grey
Cofounder, CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
Wappinger, New York
February 2016

Prologue

The houselights dim and the crowd is on its feet, expectant. And when the man in the tailored Italian suit takes up his mic, they sway and nod in time to the drums and the bass and join him in every word.

He sings of the fires spirit, of the taste of ashes on the tongue, of the truth on the other side of the mirror. He sings of the desert that is no desert place but a land breathing, flying, crawling, dyingalive with spirits of the ancestors and the untold tales of children to come.

Colored spotlights sweep over the house in a wash of color and the players move in a balanced triad of solemnity and chaos and easeful laughter. The duets and solos and skits tell the story of deception and pain repeated for millennia, and are reminders too of the eternal human capacity for selflessness and joy. And the dance is a celebration of ancient peoples not so different, the audience recognizes, from themselves.

The video against the stage wall is their own soaring flight among a shower of stars, triggering in them a pitched weightlessness as they look down upon canyons and mesas, the landscape created by flood and wind, a place hostile and somehow welcoming, too. And their heartbeats are one with the spiral of guitar and percussion and bass and keyboards and the strong, clear voice of the storyteller.

The tales the band tells are a prism of gone faces and lost hours, visions and tears and destruction, and the sonic river gathers speed and then cascades in arpeggios of love and of hope. Red glitter drifts in the spotlights. The players and the audience move as one, and together they dream the dream.

Spirito Marzo believed in alchemy. He understood how a hard days work could transform weather and soil and fruit to a fine Barolo or Barbaresco. Hed spent his boyhood among the mountains and valleys of the Piemonte, where tending the vineyard was a matter of course.

Small, wiry, and jovial and as full of life as his name implied, hed captured the heart of Clementina Durbiano, a no-nonsense woman who wore her dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back severely from her square forehead. By all accounts, theirs was a happy union, strengthened by a shared zest for adventure and rosy hopes for their children.

In America, they believed, lay their fortune. Anything might happen in a place where people were creating lightbulbs and phonographs and something they were calling motion pictures. And in the spring of 1902, the liner La Bretagne embarked from Havre, France, with Spirito, Clementina, and their two-year-old daughter, Luigia Ernestina, onboard.

Their timing was less than perfect. Spirito had imagined a future in lumbering, and they arrived in Leetonia, Pennsylvania, to find most of its forests gone to coal mine construction, railroad ties, and paper. For a few years, he took what work he could at the remaining mills and the logging sites, until, lured by the promise of a better life in West Virginia, he packed up the family and moved to Richwood to work in a tannery there. The company house was just big enough for the growing family, but in the yard was plenty of room for games of tag and pom-pom pullaway, for a vegetable garden and grapevines trained up over the wooden fence.