No phones, 13 years, one No. 1: how Tool won by refusing

Walk into a Tool show and you'll be asked, politely and then less politely, to put your phone away. Hold it up to film and security may walk you out, with no refund. It is one of several things Tool have refused to do, and somehow every refusal has made them bigger.

Watch the show, not your phone

Before a 2019 show in Cleveland, the venue emailed ticket holders a version of the same message: "We respectfully request that you please watch and listen to the show, not your phone. You will be ejected from the show without the opportunity to return and without a refund if you violate this simple request." It wasn't a bluff. Reviewing the Denver show that October, Westword's critic watched security throw out a man a few songs in, for starting to film.

There is one release valve. Near the end of the night, Maynard James Keenan often gives permission to film a single song. In San Francisco in 2022 he announced: "You can now pull out your stupid phone things and film this song if you really need to." His reasoning, in his own words: "That way you get to have your souvenir that sucks that you're never gonna watch."

He doesn't always wait for security. At a 2024 show in Los Angeles he stopped mid-song to tell a fan: "Put your fucking phone away, dickhead, seriously!" Guitarist Adam Jones puts it more gently: "Just keep your phone in your pocket, enjoy the show."

The show itself rewards the attention. There are no followspots and no live camera close-ups; Keenan often performs facing away from the crowd. On most nights the set is split by a 12-minute intermission, with a countdown on the curtain, after which drummer Danny Carey returns alone for a drum and gong solo.

Thirteen years

Tool's fourth album was called 10,000 Days. It came out in 2006. The next one, Fear Inoculum, arrived on 30 August 2019: 4,868 days later, less than half its predecessor's title, but long enough that a generation of fans grew up waiting for it.

Part of the delay was a legal fight. In 2007 a friend of Adam Jones claimed he had helped create the band's artwork; an insurance company then sued the band, and the band countersued. "The fans are pissed at us," Jones admitted to Rolling Stone in 2014. There were injuries too, including Carey being hurt in a scooter crash. Jones said in 2015 that the legal problems were finally over.

The streaming holdout

For two decades Tool's music wasn't on Spotify, Apple Music or any other streaming service. That ended on 2 August 2019, four weeks before the new album, when almost the whole catalogue went online at once.

The reaction was immediate. Within hours, all five of their releases were in the iTunes top 10. On Billboard's next charts, Tool held the top two places on the Top Rock Albums chart, with Ænima at No. 1 and Lateralus at No. 2, and four of the top five, a first for any act. They also had 15 of the 25 places on the Rock Digital Song Sales chart, including the entire top 10.

Keenan later admitted the holdout had cost them: "We missed 20 years of reaching two generations of people to understand what it is that we do."

The No. 1 that beat Taylor Swift

Fear Inoculum entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1, with 270,000 units in its first week, 248,000 of them actual album sales. That was the biggest week for any rock album in over a year, and it pushed Taylor Swift's Lover down to No. 2 in its second week. Billboard noted it was a now-rare No. 1 without any concert-ticket bundle to boost sales. The physical CD helped: it came with a built-in screen and speaker and sold for around $45 to $50.

The title track, at 10 minutes and 21 seconds, had already become the longest song ever to reach the Billboard Hot 100 when it entered in August 2019. Keenan, five years later, on what happened next: "the big surprise when we ended up bumping Taylor Swift off the chart for her second week."

In January 2020, the album's song "7empest" won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance, Tool's fourth Grammy after "Ænema", "Schism" and the packaging for 10,000 Days. Accepting it, Carey said: "I'd like to thank all the gods because I don't think it's a good time to piss them off."

Lateralus and the Fibonacci sequence

Tool's love of patterns is part of the legend. The chorus of "Lateralus" moves through time signatures of 9/8, 8/8 and 7/8. Carey told Spin in 2001 that the song was first called "9-8-7", and that it turned out 987 is one of the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two before it. Fans have since charted the syllables of the verses rising and falling along the same sequence: one, one, two, three, five, eight.

The art is half the point

Tool's refusals extend to how they look. Adam Jones worked in special effects at Stan Winston's workshop on films including Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 before the band took off, and he directs Tool's videos, almost all of them in unsettling stop-motion. Since 1999, the visionary painter Alex Grey has created the artwork for Lateralus, 10,000 Days and Fear Inoculum, and his artwork has appeared on the screens behind the band on tour.

Even the packaging became an event. Ænima came in a lenticular case whose images shift as you tilt it; 10,000 Days came with built-in stereoscopic glasses for its 3D art; the Fear Inoculum CD had a screen and a two-watt speaker. In an age of streaming, Tool kept giving people a reason to buy the physical thing.

On stage

After "Stinkfist", the songs they've played most are "Forty Six & 2", "Schism", "Ænema" and "Sober". Their busiest year on the road was 1993, the year of their breakthrough, when they were promoted from the second stage to the main stage at Lollapalooza. They went on to headline Lollapalooza in 1997 and 2009.

The 1993 Lollapalooza run produced one of the stranger moments in their history: the comedian Bill Hicks introduced them in Los Angeles by asking the 10,000-strong crowd to help him look for a contact lens he had "lost". In 2001 they played a ten-show run with King Crimson, and they played more than 200 shows across 2006 and 2007 alone.

A modern Tool show runs to about two hours. On the 2024 tour, the typical night opened with "Third Eye" played from tape, ran through "Fear Inoculum", "Jambi", "Rosetta Stoned", "Pneuma" and "The Grudge", broke for the intermission, and ended with "Invincible" and "Stinkfist". Then, as the lights came up, the PA played ABBA's "Dancing Queen".

If you go, go properly: leave the phone in your pocket, watch Adam Jones' visuals, and wait for the song you're allowed to film. Then decide whether you really need to. Our guide to concert etiquette has the rest of the unwritten rules.

Tool sit at one extreme of touring. At the other, the Eras Tour played 149 nights in 21 months, and in 2005 My Chemical Romance played 233, as our look at the busiest touring years shows.