I bought the Ænima CD—the one with the clear lenticular case that could wiggle the cybernetic album art designed by artist Cam de Leon—when I was 12 years old at a long-forgotten record store in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where I grew up. I was, at that time, on whatever level of consciousness is associated with being in middle school and sitting at the lunch table that hosted Magic: The Gathering games—“level one,” I guess. This was a few years before I stumbled upon a website called the Erowid Vault, a beautiful relic of the early internet where amateur and professional psychonauts could blog about their experiences on drugs. There I’d learn that if you ground up enough morning glory seeds from the gardening store, you could, in so many words, trip balls, and that if you drank enough Robitussin, you could join a small group of people who claimed they all saw the same exact interdimensional being from the same exact star system. For those in small towns with a dial-up modem and without access to eccentric new age gurus, poisonous flower seeds and Robotripping were alternate means of enlightenment. Total mentions in the Erowid Vault blog archives: Drunvalo Melchizedek (1); Magic: The Gathering (9); Tool (80+).
Of course, Drunvalo Melchizedek was only one of countless spiritual practitioners working in Los Angeles. By the 1990s, the city hosted a cottage industry of psychics, astrologists, oracles, new age publishing houses, numerologists, crystal dealers, and tarot throwers. (Keenan claims an Angeleno psychometry practitioner foresaw the arrival of Justin Chancellor, Tool’s new bassist for Ænima). The glut of woo in Los Angeles had established itself slowly over the years, under the influence of charismatic leaders and con artists alike, descended from the strains of 19th-century metaphysical groups such as the New Thought movement and the Theosophical Society.
When the film industry arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s, it had an alchemical reaction to the new age community. With the allure of fame, people from all over America followed the trail west to California to stake their claim—again. Los Angeles, after all, was modeled after Arcadia and marketed as a new Eden, a kind of coastal suburban utopia that was newly minting global superstars. It was a magical place, as inexplicable as an aura. As Spencer Orey observed in his dissertation, The Dream Refinery: Psychics, Spirituality and Hollywood in Los Angeles, Hollywood became a kind of global media nexus through which new age thinking flowed, buoyed by celebrities and their celebrity seers. What better way to expand the mind, manifest success, and explain away the constant rejection of the entertainment industry than to seek out divine intervention from a crystal ball, Enochian magic, or a 13th-dimensional being?
Keenan was wary about the move to Los Angeles, but in 1990, after a few false starts in Boston and Grand Rapids—most notably with the art-house new wave act C.A.D.—he packed up a U-Haul and drove across the country, where he settled into a tiny apartment just off the Sunset Strip with his pet zebra finch, Harpo. He fell in with a group of musicians that included Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and the absurdist rock troupe Green Jellö. A year later, he formed Tool with drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones, and bassist Paul D’Amour, got signed to Zoo Entertainment, and began working with the raw, unformed ideas that would form their debut EP, Opiate.
