Keenan’s Puscifer and A Perfect Circle will join Primus on Wednesday at Van Andel Arena. He opens up to Local Spins about the tour, his past and a development he plans for Scottville, where he grew up.
Three-Headed Monster (and Keenan’s Idea): Puscifer, Primus and A Perfect Circle on tour. (Courtesy Photos/Primus by Anthony Norkus)
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Yes, the Sessanta tour was conceived as a celebration of Maynard James Keenan’s birthday.
Yes, it features two of his bands, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, which makes him one of the key focal points. And yes, it was pretty much his idea in the first place.
But the singer and former Michigander says the event has been stripped of all semblances of rock-star ego. It gives equal time to its three headliners, rounded out by alt/jam-rock goofsters Primus – who rotate three-song sets throughout the evening. And typical for Keenan’s signature skewed, deadpan sense of humor, he makes that assertion in a rather colorful fashion.
“The nature of it is, most groups, when they get a little bit of success, there’s definitely some ego involved – you know, sniffing of your own farts,” Keenan said in a recent phone interview with Local Spins.
“If you’re not flexible and open to it, then you’re looking a little bit like a buffoon. If you’re gonna dig your stake in the ground like, ‘We’re gonna sound better than the other bands,’ well, then that’s just not gonna work here.
“It takes the right bands to (be on this tour).”
Sessanta stops at Van Andel Arena at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday (May 28). There’s no opening act. Find more details, and purchase tickets, here.
Documenting the Live Shows: “Cinquanta” and “Sessanta” EPs.
The concept was originally executed in 2014 for Cinquanta, which celebrated Keenan’s 50th birthday with a pair of Los Angeles concerts featuring Puscifer, A Perfect Circle and Failure; the shows were documented with a recently released live album (and notably features Keenan on the cover, wearing a diaper and wailing like a baby; consider yourself warned).
The idea was resurrected as Sessanta in 2024 for Keenan’s 60th, swapping Failure for Primus, and staged as a full-blown North American tour that has since spilled over into 2025.
Fans can expect a setup that’s less rigidly structured and more free-flowing than the live shows of Keenan’s most famous band, Tool. Sessanta allows the singer to exercise different muscles, and leaves space for collaborative and improvised moments as the bands segue from set to set.
“It’s a fun community vibe,” Keenan said. “It gets you out of your norm so you’re having to think on your feet. It keeps you fresh, and you get to hear some of your friends’ songs you haven’t heard in forever – and the audience gets to see a show they’ve never seen before.”
Of course, Sessanta’s Grand Rapids tour stop is a homecoming for Keenan, who was born in Akron, Ohio, but moved to Michigan at age 12, living in the tiny northern Lower Peninsula town of Scottville, where his father was a schoolteacher and wrestling coach.
After graduating high school and a stint in the Army, Keenan relocated to Grand Rapids in the 1980s, taking classes at Kendall College of Art and Design. He was a fixture in the local punk rock scene, playing with the bands C.A.D. (Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty) and Tex & The Anti-Nazi Squad before moving to Los Angeles.
The rest, as they say, is history: He joined Tool and became one of the most recognizable rock stars with West Michigan roots, as the band sold millions of albums, became rock-radio staples and headlined arenas, as well as festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella.
“Grand Rapids is a very interesting big little town, or it used to be a little big town – however you wanna put it,” he said.
Keenan’s first Grand Rapids show with Tool took place in 1992 at the now-defunct 200-capacity dive bar The Reptile House. The band has since graduated to playing to thousands at Van Andel Arena, most recently in 2022. All three of his bands have headlined West Michigan shows multiple times over the decades.
And while Keenan hasn’t lived here for a long time – he currently resides with his family in Jerome, Arizona – there’s still some Michigan in him. He says living in the Midwest instilled in him a strong work ethic that continues to this day.
“I kind of refer to us as snow shovelers, because literally that’s the obstacle between you and where you’re trying to get to, the snow,” he said. “So you have to remove the object to get what you want, and I feel like that instills in you a sense of being able to dig in and get the task done even though there’s things in the way.”
GETTING READY TO INVEST IN HIS OLD HOMETOWN OF SCOTTVILLE
Keenan’s status as a 21st-century renaissance man is proof of that ethic: He fronts three bands. He recently acquired a black belt in jiu jitsu. His love of fine food and drink manifested as a large winery operation in Arizona, Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards, which just celebrated its 21st vintage and boasts tasting rooms in Jerome and Cottonwood, as well as the Merkin Trattoria restaurant in Verde Valley.
He and his wife, Lei Li, own and operate the Queen B Vinyl Café in Cottonwood, selling coffee, lunch and breakfast, vinyl records and canned wines, with a small stage for live music and an attached barbershop. And he opened the Four 8 Fried Chicken restaurant, also in Cottonwood.
One of his next projects is going to involve investing in his old home.
“I’ve got a few irons in the fire up in Scottville still, so we’re working on a little café up there, and a couple other projects,” he said. “So that’s going forward at some point when I can find the bandwidth to just dig in for a little bit.”
In Grand Rapids with Puscifer in 2022: Maynard James Keenan (Photo/Chelsea Whitaker)
Keenan said the café will be modeled after Queen B, followed by “some kind of distillery, brewery or possibly a cider mill or winery” in his former hometown, which he hopes can be rejuvenated into a quaint tourist town along the lines of Manistee, Ludington or Pentwater.
“(Scottville is) one of those beautiful small towns that, when they put the bypass in, it just (bleeped) it up the ass,” he said. “You know, all these cute little businesses that basically died because they put the bypass in and shoved you over to Walmart and Home Depot.”
Keenan’s diverse and high-profile endeavors may seem far removed from tiny Scottville and small-but-big Grand Rapids, but his youthful years in West Michigan provided the pragmatic foundation that makes him the tireless and passionate artist he is today.
The unusual Sessanta tour is the latest bullet point in a musical career defined by the pushing of boundaries – consider the diversity of his three primary bands, which range from the deeply philosophical prog-metal of Tool to A Perfect Circle’s moody hard-rock iteration of Depeche Mode to Puscifer’s unusual melding of performance art with fringe industrial rock inspired by weirdo outsiders like the Residents and Captain Beefheart.
For each band, Keenan embodies bizarre stage personas that find him wearing outlandish costumes, wigs and makeup. He’s routinely challenged his audience, although the mystique surrounding him has softened over the years.
“Once you’ve established that (mystique), it only goes so far, right?” he said. “If you’re up there to do a thing you kinda have to do the thing. You’re an entertainer at the end of the day, so how I choose to entertain is gonna be based on the script, like, what is the script for the story?”
And he’s constantly writing new scripts.
With Tool: Keenan (Photo/Anthony Norkus)
“Thinking outside the boxis essential for humanity to move forward,” Keenan said. “I think that’s one of the things that’s kind of missed in education. When you’re in high school and you’re learning these things you think are irrelevant for the future, they’re not irrelevant because you’re learning how to learn and you’re learning how to absorb and retain information and apply it. That’s what you’re learning. You’re not learning trig, you’re learning how to learn trig. You understand now how to solve puzzles and to be discerning. And you know to look at things and decide for yourself, what’s true and what’s false.
“So that’s kind of that creative brain, and that’s how I was brought up with my father. It was always about solving the puzzle: Don’t take things for face value, question authority. Sometimes authority was right, but (it’s up to) you to actually look at it and decide what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. But if you don’t have any frame of reference, if you don’t have any kind of tools at your disposal to understand how to solve those puzzles, you’re at a disadvantage.”
Keenan’s next musical project will be a new Puscifer album, which should debut later in 2025 alongside a film of the band performing the entire record live.
A new Tool album isn’t coming quite so soon, though. His bandmates notoriously take their sweet time writing new material for him to sing over – 13 years passed between 2006’s “10,000 Days” and 2019’s “Fear Inoculum,” although legal issues with record companies contributed to the slow process – so he advises fans not to expect anything too soon.
“I can’t work on stuff in an empty folder,” Keenan quipped. “When the folder has stuff in it I can work on it. If there’s no stuff in the folder, I can’t work on it. So I’m waiting just like you are.”
VIDEO: Sessanta at Red Rocks (2024)
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