Tool’s lead vocalist, Maynard James Keenan, not only shuns the spotlight, he often performs in random positions — facing the wings or upstage wall, for example — instead of looking out to the audience. There’s a bit more light illuminating the other band members, but the visuals accompanying a live Tool concert are designed to support of the music and its overall vibe, not serve up a larger-than-life display of performing band members. Tool’s guitarist, Adam Jones, plays a key role in the creation of the band’s visuals, for both its music videos and the video seen during the band’s live shows. The band members do not appear in the music videos, either. Instead, the viewer sees a mélange of abstract and representational forms that help serve as each show’s narrative while emerging as their own form art.
Breckinridge Haggerty
Video Designer & Director
“I started with Tool as the lighting crew chief 1998, and I was developing an early form of DMX-controlled video on the side. I had the opportunity to demo the system for the band twice in 1999, and got the call a few months later. I was LD for Queens of the Stone Age at the time, and had to let that job go and shift my focus 100 percent towards Tool’s video. The first show with my “NEV” video system was May of 2001 at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, and in 2002 I was promoted to Video Designer/Director. My primary role with Tool is designing the video show, but I have also designed both lighting and video when Junior (Mark Jacobson) wasn’t available.
“The content for Tool’s video show has been a work in progress for close to 20 years at this point. I am very lucky to have such a deep library of genius original content to work with. The biggest contributor is the band’s guitarist, Adam Jones who directs all of the music videos, and other huge contributors include Meats Meier, Chet Zar, Matt Santoro and especially Camella Grace whose work and influence is everywhere. I build a lot of the non-specific psychedelics for backgrounds and transitions to glue it all together, but the images you remember (in the middle of the night in a cold sweat) were probably from the mind of Adam, Meats, Chet, Matt or Camella. Junior and I met with Adam (Jones) early on to find out what he was thinking for this leg. He usually has very specific things he wants us to implement, and then we weave the show around those ideas. Adam always wants us to add something new to keep the show fresh for repeat customers, especially if we’re going back to the same area again.
“The band doesn’t use any sort of click or track, so Junior and I both have to stay busy to keep in time with the music. My programming style varies from song to song. Some are sequential cues in a stack, others are spread out on multiple handles for busking. Most are somewhere in between. I use the MA Lighting VPU media servers with an HD-SDI router plugged in to the HD-SDI inputs. The router and other HD playback devices are DMX-controlled through my own NEV9 control software. All parts of the video system and content are designed for improvisation. No timecode or timed sequences are used.
“[Junior and Adam added lasers] as soon as the 10,000 Days tour got going. Junior contacted Howard Ungerleider at PDI to supply the lasers, and Scott Wilson came out to program and run the show. Scott’s work has been a big part of every show since then. All three of us, Junior, Scott and I do our best to make a coordinated look. Thankfully we all have similar ideas about what looks right, so it doesn’t take long for the show to pull together. It’s a very positive collaboration, and it really never stops. We continue to evolve the show every day.”
Mark “Junior” Jacobson
Lighting Designer & Director
“When I started with Tool in 1996, they had an idea as to what their overall tone should be, but they had been using a rotating number of local L.A. friends to do their lighting, with mixed results. Their tour manager at the time (Pete Riedling — now their manager) had worked with me on a couple of other tours and thought I could help make the band’s vision more cohesive and “tourable.” He invited them to a few shows to see what I was doing, and after meeting with Danny (the drummer) and Adam (the guitarist); they both decided I had the right mindset to help them formulate their look.
“In keeping with their veiled artistic process, a lot of what was discussed has stayed unspoken outside of those meetings, but since then, they’ve mostly entrusted me to come up with the lighting look of the shows with little additional suggestion. The biggest curveball came in 2001 when Maynard (the vocalist) requested that he no longer be lit. He has his reasons, so that has been a directive I’ve followed to this day.
“Adam has always been the band’s visual eye, and he does tend to bring in ideas that he’d like to see incorporated, although often it’s more of a concept or an emotion he would like conveyed and he leaves the nuts and bolts of it up to us to achieve. Lasers were something I had wanted to incorporate back in 2002, as they had a song or two from that album, Lateralus, which seemed to beg for them. It wasn’t in the budget back then, so we waited. The album 10,000 Days, which they released in 2006, had some more songs that really felt like they wanted lasers, and the band were planning to go bigger, so I pitched them to Adam and he was immediately on board. They do a great job of filling the space in the arena and bringing the vibe of the show right to everyone’s seats.
“Lasers used to be green or red years ago, but with the newer technology Scott is able to make them do almost anything. I have given a few suggestions of things I would like to see, but for the most part he comes up with all of it and “sells” the idea. I don’t think there have been many (if any) things I wasn’t sold on, so he is mostly on his own to create and has a really good sense of the Tool look. As lasers are kind of a specialty, you wouldn’t want to over-do it, so we kept them out of the first third of the show, and try to keep an eye on the pacing. Scott is very patient, which helps.
“Since a lot of the lighting cueing is manual, with room for improvise, I tend to select the fixtures that are the most responsive to real-time operation. The dimmer in a fixture is the most important feature to me. I need the light to be able to react to subtle changes and also be able to punch when it needs to. I’m still sold on the [Martin] MAC 2000 wash for those reasons. Using one fader, I can slowly pulse it or sway it, and then deliver a sharp punch or blackout. The MAC 700 Profiles are mostly on the curved trusses. They needed to be somewhat compact, and they provide a lot of features and intensity for their size. I added in the [Vari*Lite] VL3000 spots a few legs ago because Vari*Lite has always excelled in the quality of the beam. The look of the gobos and the zooming are just unmatched. I was looking for a larger beam to cut through the rest of what was up there, and after trying another fixture type in 2006, we went towards the [High End Systems] Showgun and stayed there. It works well to change the scale of what you are looking at.
“PixelLine 110 is still my go-to backdrop light. When they came out, they were the first LED batten I’d seen that was useable light instead of an effect to look at. I also like that there is a master dimmer channel for each fixture. Not all LED strips have that, and you can program some unique effects by putting a wave on the individual cells as well as another simultaneous one on the whole block of 5. We used to also use them as footlights for the band, but have since replaced those with MAC 301s for greater flexibility.
“The band members have been fairly good about giving us a potential pool of songs for each tour leg. The songs we know will be there almost every night get the most cued-out attention; we are always adding and changing things as the tour progresses. Having several independently operated departments (lights, video, lasers, and motion) gives us some flexibility to add and subtract elements, but also requires communication…The different departments don’t communicate as much as we probably should, though we do get together on most of the overall objectives. There are checks and balances, I suppose. Many of the songs have a color set that I can be a bit stubborn about, especially the older ones, so Breck will tailor the video to try to match it. If he has clips that he feels strongly about, I will also try to meet him on that.
“Some of the underlying structure of this show dates back to 2006, which is one of the reasons I’m still using a Series 1 grandMA for control. Comfort and time are the other two reasons. We’ve moved things around and created constantly evolving versions of it, but some of the core still remains. Breck made the leap to a grandMA2 last year and undertook the task of re-writing his entire show. He was also moving onto the MA VPU as video servers, so it was a complete overhaul. I will hopefully make the grandMA2 step with Tool the next time they tour. I almost did it this time, but the lead-in and pre-production were just on the edge of being too short. We had some new faces on the production crew this time, in part because it was a short run and some of the regulars had other obligations, but they’ve all made it happen every day.”
Tool 2014 Tour
Crew
Video Designer/Director: Breckinridge Haggerty
Lighting Designer/Director: Mark “Junior” Jacobson
Video Crew Chief: Phillip “Oberon Sempiternal” Keller
Video Techs: Jason Lowe, Kenneth Kaiser, Joseph Wolohan
Lighting Crew Chief: Justin Freeman
Lighting Techs: Adam Walden, Oscar Canales, John Travis Edwards
Laser Artist: Scott Wilson
Laser Tech: Lucas McIntyre
Production Manager: Matt Doherty
Tour Manager: Steev Toth
Production Coordinator: Kim Van Loon
Stage Manager: Mark “Kahuna” Candelario
Motion Control: Eric Pelletier
Head Rigger: Michael “Knuckles” Dunn
Rigging Tech: Andy O’Toole
Lighting/Video Co: Delicate Productions Inc.
Lasers: Production Design International
Rigging: Show Distribution
Trucking: Upstaging Inc.
Gear
Lighting
1 grandMA1 lighting console
23 Martin MAC 2000 Wash fixtures (w/PC lenses)
26 Martin MAC 700 Profiles
16 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
12 Martin MAC 301 LED wash fixtures
12 Martin Atomic 3000 strobes w/Atomic Colors
12 JTE PixelLine 110ec fixtures
6 High End Systems Showgun 2.5 fixtures
6 Clay Paky Sharpys
4 Martin MAC Auras
2 Altman UV fixtures
2 Hazebase Base Hazer Pro Hazers
Video
1 MA grandMA2 console
4 MA VPU media servers
2 NEV9 HD-SDI Systems
440 Everbrighten BR15 LED tiles (15mm)
10 Revolution FlexMesh 50 panels (50mm)
4 Christie HD20K-J 1080 DLP projectors
2 Da-Lite RP screens (13.5’x24’)
For more tour photos of Tool by Steve Jennings, go to www.plsn.me/TOOL2014Extras.
