Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk discussed the band’s early days, when they were briefly fronted by Maynard James Keenan, who went on to reach success as the voice of Tool.
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As you may or may not know, after Tom Morello left his old band Lock Up in 1990, he began jamming with Maynard, Brad, and Tim Commerford. Maynard soon went on to join Tool, the other guys joined forces with Zack de la Rocha, and the rest is history.
Anyhow, Wilk said on Let There Be Talk about the Maynard period:
“We were also playing with Maynard, Tom and I were jamming with Maynard at this time… [He] was fucking unbelievable. It was such a great time in music.
“Cut to meeting Zack for the first time – he comes in, I think he had a beanie on. He comes from a total punk-rock background, but is also super into hip-hop. He was really branching off into hip hop, he wanted to do hip hop.
“I just remember starting a song, starting to play a beat, and from the second I kicked in with the beat, the dude was richter, like jumping off my fucking drum set.”
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Asked if the group then told Maynard it wasn’t going to work out, Brad replied:
“Maynard was already playing with Tool as well. Maynard might have said, ‘I’m going to go do this thing with Tool…’
“The four of us get together, I remember already feeling the stuff with Zack. I remember playing and feeling like, ‘Holy shit, whatever is happening here is a classic case of we are greater than the sum of our parts.’ Whatever was happening sonically, musically, everyone was in, like right from the start.”