Watch Tool’s Justin Chancellor and Danny Carey play Ænema for a class of college students
Let’s hope there wasn’t a pop quiz afterwards
We don’t know what guest lecturers you may have had the pleasure of experiencing during your own college days, but smart money would bet it wasn’t anyone as cool as Tool bass guitar player Justin Chancellor and drummer Danny Carey.
Which puts you at least one step behind the lucky students at Berklee College of Music, who were treated to a private showcase gig from the Tool rhythm section, hosted by Steve Bailey from the school’s Bass Department, on November 14, 2019.
And since everything in Tool world tends to move slowly, footage from that lecture, which shows the duo playing 1996’s Ænema, the epic title track from Tool’s second full-length album, has just now surfaced online. And it’s rather spectacular – stripped of Adam Jones’ guitar and Maynard James Keenan’s vocals, the performance demonstrates the subtle complexity at the heart of the song’s structure.
You can check out the video, which was posted by YouTube user Unquarked, via the WAL Bass Collective Instagram page, above.
As for Adam Jones, the Tool guitarist recently unveiled his rather awesome collaboration with Gibson, the 1979 Les Paul Custom in Antique Silverburst. You can read all about it in his exclusive interview with Guitar World here.
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
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