“Eat A Dick”: Tool’s Maynard Keenan Has Harsh Words For Anyone Who Doubts The Impact Of COVID-19

Tool frontman Maynard Keenan has a clear message for anyone who believes he’s ‘getting paid’ to talk about contracting COVID-19 earlier this year: “eat a dick”.

Keenan popped up on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast last week (via Consequence of Sound)  ahead of the release of Existential Reckoning, his upcoming album with Puscifer, his supergroup side-project of which he’s the only continual member. During the 90+ minute chat, the two cover a lot of ground — including Keenan’s own experience contracting COVID-19 while Tool was touring Australia with this past February.

“I’m in Australia, we went out to dinner… and immediately food didn’t taste right, but this is now, this is all hindsight, right — I didn’t know at the time,” he says. “We didn’t know that these are the things you’re looking for, like immediately … I had to get on an international flight the next morning, fly to New Zealand.”

He explains that a doctor in New Zealand then said it was unlikely he had COVID-19 as he didn’t have a fever, although he had other symptoms and needed to rest between shows.

“So we got there, I was, like, four days in the hotel, ’cause we have four days off before the shows,” he  said. “So I was just drinking water, hot showers, taking care of myself, hot tea, just trying to get through it and it sucked. But you didn’t know yet … how bad this thing could have been. If I’d have known how bad it could have been, I would have been freaking out.”

He’s also far from 100 per cent clear now, telling Rogan that he has lingering symptoms and believes he has lung damage, which has convinced him he had the virus.

“Whatever cough I got in New Zealand, like every other day, I’ll have a coughing fit for, you know, for 10 minutes, coughing up stuff, so I have lung damage from it still.”

Later in the podcast, he reflected on the response he’s got since first speaking about contracting COVID-19 a few weeks ago.

“I’m still feeling residual effects of [COVID-19],” said Keenan. “I feel like there’s a bunch of people that … maybe I didn’t almost die, but I have friends who almost died. It was ugly. And then you have people going … apparently I’m being paid to say this. Eat a dick, dude.”

Tool toured Australia this February: in a review, Junkee writer Joseph Earp praised their ‘unparalleled musicianship’ and Manyard’s voice. Last August, the band released Fear Inoculum, their first album in thirteen years.

Listen to the podcast below — the discussion about Manyard’s experiences with COVID-19 take place around 15 minutes and then 52 minutes in.