Maynard James Keenan is one of the most recognisable rock stars on the planet. Even in a ridiculous wig or outlandish costume, no one is going to confuse the Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer singer with anyone else.
It wasn’t always that way. Back at the start early 1990s, Maynard was just another unknown LA musician trying to kickstart his career.
He’d arrived in the city from Michigan in 1988, following a brief stint in the military and a period at art college earlier in the decade.
It was in Los Angeles that Maynard, guitarist Adam Jones, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Paul D’Amour formed Tool in 1990.
Tool weren’t Maynard’s first band – he’d previously played bass and sang in local Michigan groups texANS and fronted Children Of The Anachronistic Dynasty.
In fact, Tool weren’t even his only band at the time. Around the same time they were getting off the ground, Maynard was pulling double duty as a member of comedy-punk pranksters Green Jellö.
Green Jellö were the brainchild of Bill Manspeaker, who founded the band in 1981 when he was in high school. They released their debut mini album Let It Be in 1984 (sample song title: I Got Poo-Poo On My Shoe). It was followed five years later by Triple Live Möther Gööse At Budokan, recorded live in Manspeaker’s garage and producer by future Tool associate Sylvia Massey.
Manspeaker proudly proclaimed Green Jellö to be “the world’s worst band”. Their gigs were a cross between punk rock shows, performance art and anarchic circus performances. Costumes, puppets and out of tune instruments all featured.
The band’s line-up was equally chaotic, with countless musicians coming and going, sometimes just for a few weeks or a couple of gigs. One of these was future Tool drummer Danny Carey. Another was Maynard James Keenan, who lived with Manspeaker at the so-called Jello Loft, an apartment-come-HQ on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Maynard was my roommate forever,” Manspeaker told The Aquarian website in 2010. “He was this guy that was my grumpy roommate that sold lizards for a living. He had a licence to buy pets. Me and him would go to downtown LA and we’d buy lizards in bulk. We’d buy 100 lizards every other day. And we’d go to the pet stores and he’d sell lizards. And that was his job.”
Danny Carey was already playing drums with Green Jellö. Manspeaker suggested his flatmate Maynard join them. “We were like, ‘Dude, we need another singer, why don’t you sing?’”
“Green Jellö looked like a perfect fit,” Maynard said in his biography, A Perfect Union Of Contrary Things. “Bill had an open-door policy, meaning I could come and go as I pleased. I was like, ‘OK, if I want to get involved in any of this, this might be the way.’”
Manspeaker claimed that Tool actually formed in his apartment. “We used to have these parties at our loft,” he told The Aquarian. “They just made up the band to play the parties, and they got signed right out of my living room.”
Both Green Jellö and Tool both scored a deal with newly founded label Zoo Records in 1991. The latter’s debut EP, Opiate, was released in March 1992.
Manspeaker managed to prise $60,000 dollars out of the label for his band. Rather than use it to record a traditional album, he instead funnelled the money into making a long-form video album, Cereal Killer.
Released on VHS in October 1992, Cereal Killer featured 11 tracks, each with a different home-made promo. Tool’s Danny Carey played drums on the album, credited as Danny Longlegs, while Adam Jones – a trained animator – worked on some of the videos.
One of those songs was a twisted version of the nursery rhyme Three Little Pigs, accompanied by a DIY Claymation video. The song itself featured lyrics that skewered wannabe LA rock stars, including a hick pig from the sticks (who lives in a house made of straw) and the nepo-baby architect offspring of a rich rock star named Pig Nugent (living in an expensive concrete house in the Hollywood Hills, naturally).
While Bill Manspeaker delivered the main vocals, he roped in three friends to provide the voices of the pigs: Primus’ Les Claypool, comedian Pauly Shore, and Manspeaker’s roommate-turned-sometime bandmate Maynard James Keenan, who had already performed the song live with Green Jellö. The three of them delivered the line “Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin” in comic falsettos.
Of the three, Shore was the biggest name thanks to his stint as an MTV VJ, while Claypool’s band Primus had scored a radio hit the previous year with their single Jerry Was A Race Car Driver. By contrast, Maynard was a relative unknown – Tool’s Opiate EP had barely caused a ripple.
That certainly wasn’t the case with Three Little Pigs. After Cereal Killer was released as an audio album in March 1993, a Seattle radio station picked up on the song and began playing it. Other stations followed, and Three Little Pigs eventually gatecrashed the US Top 20 and reached Number 5 in the UK. Somehow, this novelty punk-rap nursery rhyme had given Maynard James Keenan his first hit, beating Tool’s Sober to the punch.
“That was Maynard’s first hit song,” said Manspeaker, who was forced to change his band’s name from Green Jellö to Green Jellÿ after US dessert company Jell-O threatened him with legal action. “Of all of his incredible songs and all the gold and platinum records, that was his first. The guy that everyone is so serious about, it all started with ‘not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin’.”
As Tool’s career began to take off, Maynard spent less time in Green Jelly’s orbit. His regular band would go on to bigger and much less anarchic things, though the sense of humour that saw him squealing like a pig remained – something that was even more evident in his other group, Puscifer.
“Puscifer is his Green Jelly,” Manspeaker told The Aquarian in 2010. “It’s kind of funny. I’m sort of actually honoured.”
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