Growing up in Northern Arizona I heard all the rumors.
“Maynard James Keenan!” they’d say. “Singer of Tool, you know?” Of course I knew. “He bought a house in Jerome and does all kinds of crazy shit up there!”
What I didn’t know at the time was that, no, my friends weren’t completely bullshitting me. The tall and mysterious frontman of Tool, A Perfect Circle and, more recently, Puscifer, did in fact buy property in the impossibly small mountainside former ghost town of Jerome 60 miles southwest of my of birthplace, Flagstaff. But he wasn’t dropping acid, painting himself blue and “stinkfisting” lucky fans like we’d assumed. He was, of all things, digging in the dirt, planting grape vines and building a winery.
I realize some may find it hard to believe that arguably the finest hard rock singer in a generation—a man who writes platinum hit songs about fevered drug dreams and desires for the apocalypse—would be into doing more with an alcoholic beverage than slamming it before noon or pouring it on a groupie. But Keenan, while always weird, was never the party animal type, and winemaking fits right along with his musical M.O. of secrecy and solitude. Today you can find the end product, Caduceus wine, on the web, at a few selective stores and at his hillside tasting room in Jerome. As for the full tale of rock-god-battles-high-desert, you can get that by watching Blood Into Wine, the new documentary film by director Ryan Page, which screens at the Rio Theatre on Thursday, April 1.
“When I moved to Jerome in 1995 I was trying to match an idea with the landscapes in my head,” says Keenan, who called into Santa Cruz Weekly to talk personally about his tilling of the earth. “I think I just wanted to be a grape farmer at that point.”
The film has an exciting mix of fast-paced narration and head-scratching comedy, courtesy of Adult Swim’s late night weirdoes Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. It also goes to great pains to show Keenan’s entrance into oenology as a serious passion and not just a rock star’s trendy whim.
As spontaneous and unexpected as his second calling is, Keenan isn’t doing it alone. He’s joined by mentor and partner Eric Glomski, a veteran in the business who used to make wine—as luck would have it—for the David Bruce Winery. Between the two, they’ve got both the ambition and the know-how to make it in the ancient industry. Getting there, however, is a long and dirty road.
“I think there’s a misconception that winemaking is a lofty process that requires a lot of pontificating, when in reality it involves a lot of hard work,” Keenan told me last week. “Now it’s spring and we’re starting to prepare the vines for pushing their buds. In the winery we’re racking the barrels and cleaning out the sediments that are at the bottom of the barrels and bottling some of the younger wines. It’s a busy time.”
Not A Dry Heat
Arizonans like myself are used to the stereotypes: “one big desert,” “concrete and cactus,” “a bazillion degrees in the summer.” But what most people don’t realize, and what Keenan himself says he didn’t know until he ventured far north of Phoenix, is that the Grand Canyon State boasts nearly every ecosystem you can find in the other western states, from rolling hills and lush forests to snowcapped peaks and raging rivers. In the Verde Valley, where Keenan set up his vineyard (and where my mother resides to this day), the soil is volcanic, the vegetation hardy and the rainfall low—perfect for grapes. It also dips below freezing regularly in the winter, however, and while most might think that the chief threat to growing grapes in Arizona would be heat, as Keenan says in the film, he sees more damage from the cold than anything else.
“It’s an unforgiving landscape, and you look at the animals that live there and you see,” says Keenan, who also retells a story in the film of his vines being eaten by javelinas, a type of wild boar. “All the terrain from Tijuana north to Vancouver you can find represented in Arizona.”
Judith
One of the Caduceus wines is called Judith, after Keenan’s late mother. Though he didn’t want to tell the painful story over the phone, those familiar with his music know that his mother suffered several brain aneurisms at age 30 and lived out the last decades of her life paralyzed. Her devotion to religion in the face of her disability is a topic found in many of Keenan’s lyrics, most notably in A Perfect Circle’s 2000 track “Judith” and in Tool’s 2006 album 10,000 Days, the latter being a reference to the amount of time between his mother’s stroke and her death. After she was cremated, Keenan spread her ashes over the field that now grows the grapes used in this full-bodied wine.
“Boundless and open/A light in your eyes/Then immobilized,” reads a verse in “Wings for Marie Part 1” off 10,000 Days.
This bleeding-over of familiar themes and creativity from Keenan’s musical projects into his winemaking is undoubtedly a reason some folks have reached for a glass of Caduceus. Keenan, however, tries to downplay his rock star status and let the wine stand on its own. He also says that while he doesn’t plan to quit any of his bands (thank God), music is already becoming a break from winemaking instead of the other way around. In the meantime, he offered what might pass as advice for folks thinking of giving one of his vinos a day in court.
“If you don’t understand painters, the best thing to do is go to a museum and look at paintings,” he says. “I can try and describe Frank Zappa’s music to you, but until you hear it, you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. So I can describe my wine until the cows come home but the best thing you can do is just try one.”
BLOOD INTO WINE screens Thursday, April 1 at 8pm at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave, 831.423.8209. Tickets are $8 at the door. For more info see www.bloodintowine.com and www.caduceus.org.
