Maynard James Keenan had a vision – to create a vineyard near his Northern Arizona home that would offer an appealing vintage for wine connoisseurs. The obstacle-filled exploits of the Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer frontman, along with his vineyard partner Eric Glomski, were chronicled in the documentary Blood Into Wine. The critically-praised film opened in over 100 cities last winter, and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It also features comedians Eric Wareheim, Tim Heidecker, Patton Oswalt and Bob Odenkirk plus Milla Jovovich who worked with Keenan as part of Puscifer.
I discussed the documentary during Keenan’s tour with Puscifer, his music/theater project that has its roots in the LA alternative comedy scene. After his two musical projects — Tool and A Perfect Circle — Puscifer offers a no-holds barred, confrontational, multi-media presentation laced with comedy. Onstage it combines live music, theatrics and video production. For Keenan the goal isn’t merely to entertain audiences but to live up to his concept of creativity. Past reviews have described Puscifer live as a “performance art spectacle” that confronted “preconceptions of what to expect from a rock show.”
Typical of the busy state of Keenan, since that tour, a string of dates with Tool took place this summer followed by an announcement of fall shows with A Perfect Circle plus news of him working in the studio with Tool. But, as shown in Blood Into Wine, just like a good vintage, these newest creative endeavors will emerge when the time is right.
JPG: What came first, did you decide to move to Arizona and then decided to get into the wine business?
MJK: It takes awhile for you to really sink into where you are. I didn’t know it would even be a possibility. I moved here in ’95 and I started breaking ground for vineyards in 2000.
JPG: Your partner Eric Glomski, did he or someone else come in to do soil samples and say…
MJK: Someone came out from UC Davis, but generally speaking, depending on where you are, unless somebody’s been doing it there for awhile, nobody can really help you ‘cause there’s things that are happening here that don’t make any sense. They don’t occur anywhere else, which is good because if it was exactly the same soil, exactly the same weather, exactly the same problems, the wine would be exactly like someplace else. And that’s kind of the point. I’m sure you’ve had it. Local growers around your area, for whatever produce and, depending on where they’re growing it and how they’re growing it, some of it’s better. Just a perfect site.
JPG: There are wineries all over the country, Northeast Ohio, western New York…do you still go to such places, even around the world, just to check ‘em out?
MJK: No, pretty much… If you know how to play Rush tunes then Led Zeppelin doesn’t have to happen. All we need to do is know is what we are capable of here. Of course, you want to have a broad sweep of things as far as understanding grapes in general and understanding winemaking in general. But as far as how it applies to your area, you don’t really need to know how it applies to somebody else’s area in detail. You just need to know what the basics are here. So, you really start learning the details of where you are. It’s about reconnecting to where you are.
JPG: But what I meant wasn’t so much to gain knowledge from these other places but just to check out wines as far as flavors…
MJK: Oh yeah. I think there’s lots of people doing great things, as long as they’re taking the artist’s path. If they’re taking the businessman’s path, their wines probably suck. There’s probably no better example as far as quality over quantity than grapevines. You’re cropping your fruit back and keeping it concentrated and have low yields that you balance with your canopy management, then you’re going to have some fantastic wines for your site or they’re going to be as good as they’re going to get. If you set too much fruit, it’s going to be not very concentrated. The flavors aren’t going to be complex ‘cause you’re going for volume. That’s your box wines.
JPG: Do you still have a half acre of land that was mentioned in the documentary?
MJK: I have many sites but that particular one that we were speaking of is still happening today, the half acre.
JPG: As far as the idea of doing a documentary, which followed the Judith bottling…
MJK: Well, the documentary itself is just chronicling of what we’re going through in Northern Arizona. Not to scare people away, it’s not a PBS special on winemaking. It’s definitely a story, and it chronicles all kinds of things going on up here — politics, weather, different struggles, successes, misconceptions…We did it basically this last year. So, it chronicles 2009.
JPG: I read something about it was going to be online in 2009. So, I thought the filming was an earlier time period.
MJK: Started filming in early 2009, late 2008. When you see the bottle of Judith wine going in the bottle in 2007 that’s how long it took to get that wine in a bottle. It was harvested in 2007. It’s a commitment to time.
If you’re going to plant a grape, it’s going to take you four years before you see any fruit off of it and, of course, it’s going to take you another year-and-a-half depending on the quality of the fruit before it sees a bottle. It takes you another six months to get it out in the public. So, start to finish, you’re talking about six or seven years. It’s different if you already have the land and the holes prepared. So, add on two years for escrow, preparation and all that before you see dime one out of your investment, you spend eight to nine years.
JPG: For someone who is a musician, you can come up with a chord, record a demo or go into a studio or play in front of an audience and get an immediate reaction to your stuff. With wine that takes years, so did you have to re-wire yourself and develop the patience towards getting results or did you always have that in you?
MJK: Considering that most of my musical projects take about four years to get out there, I think I’m pretty much right there. That’s how I do it. Good things take time.
JPG: You had lessons in wine tasting for fans during your tour with Puscifer, is that band more artistically freeing for you because it allows you through music and performance to pursue a wider approach, even allowing you to use your acting background?
MJK: It’s an open palette. We pretty much are pursuing whatever we can pursue. Any idea that we have, however dumb it might be, we get the chance to see it through and then go, ‘Oh, that one didn’t work,’ and it didn’t cost us a million dollars to see that it didn’t work. And the ones that did work we continue building upon. It’s definitely a project that’s evolving as it goes. It’s a work in progress every step. It’s pretty fun.
Pucifer was always the umbrella, band name. Umlaut was one of them. The Burger Barns was one of them. We had all these ridiculous kind of metal…Wicked Scepter. Those kind of names. A lot of the performances were in small clubs. Same clubs that all the Mr. Show sketches were worked on before there was Mr. Show (the HBO television series).
Puscifer, whatever name it is, would close one show and Tenacious D would close the next week. It was that kind of crowd of people working on their new stuff. If you can remember when you heard of Tenacious D add 8 years and that’s when we were doing stuff with them in the clubs back in LA.
JPG: At the same time, when we’re talking about the freeing element to it all. Although you feel free to try anything, do you feel any difficulty because people are going to look at this a little more due to your involvement rather than it can grow quietly like it did originally? Does it matter at this point?
MJK: At this point I think any juice you can bring to the table to make the thing work is good. Use every aspect at your disposal to ensure the success of your project not because you want to make a lot of money but because it takes money to put the things together and make it work. This show is an expensive show to put on and it wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have this other bank account to help, not a lot, but the importance of it is that we get it to a point where it’s not relying on anything else, that it can truly express itself independently.
JPG: In that regard I read about the live shows versus the studio efforts, things such as relentless percussion, fiery and explosive. Will the live show influence the next Puscifer studio effort or could it be completely different?
MJK: Hard to say. And when we say ‘studio’ you have to remember the first thing that comes to mind is ‘band.’ I would like to twist that word ‘studio’ to make sure that it’s more of a, ‘When we go back into the movie studio, the filming studio, the soundstage,’ if you will, because the next effort might have very little to do with music. It might evolve into what’s a Pucifer Season One? with 10 episodes or 12 episodes. Every show is different.
JPG: Obviously, you’re talking about visually rather than just changing a couple of songs in the setlist.
MJK: The theme of the show will change. The way we play the song will change. I’m trying to sell that idea to people that it’s not…if you just come with an open mind. You’re better off pretending you’re going to go see an early show of the Mr. Show project and then you’ll end up enjoying yourself more than if you’re thinking you’re going to go mosh.
JPG: I was going to say, the reviews made it seem that the crowds were confused because they were expecting a straight ahead rock show.
MJK: I said from the beginning not to expect it. Talk ‘til you’re blue in the face… Kind of on your own, really. I always have been.
JPG: At the same time do you think it’s necessary for an artist to challenge an audience?
MJK: I think it’s more necessary for an artist to challenge himself. I just think that the only way that you learn is through mistakes. The only way you really learn is through trial and error. I think it’s important to see how far you can push yourself in whatever direction you’re going.
