In 1995, Joni Mitchell sat down for an interview with one of her biggest fans: Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer of Tool. Kennan asked her about guitar tunings, songwriting, Hejira’s “Black Crow,” the colors of chords. Joni, always the raconteur, offered long and thoughtful answers. The only artist Keenan mentioned more than Joni Mitchell in interviews around this time is the New York noise band Swans. Ænima, Tool’s third album, actually kind of sounds like a cross between Swans and Joni Mitchell.

“You can have pure major experiences,” Joni said, “but since we’ve been standing under the shadow of the bomb, it seems to me we’re all emotionally complex. That to me is why these modern chords are the chords of our spirits.”

That is the world of Joni.

“I think we’re evolving at a rate that we need to move on to the more complicated structures anyway,” Maynard replied. “Simplistic stuff is a good starting point, but you need to hear those things. You really do. They’re like software upgrades for the psyche.”

This is the world of Tool.

Tool is what the comedian Norm Macdonald would describe as a perfect joke, where the setup and the punchline are identical. Tool? Tool. In 1996, they were a band for the times, set against the backdrop of an ascendant Christian right, a new age boom, a cultural vacuum where grunge used to be, and a post-metal Los Angeles reckoning with a newly shorn Metallica who just came all over their new album cover. Enter the more prurient, more indulgent, 77-minute Ænima. Its title is a portmanteau between the Jungian term for the feminine part of the male psyche and an anal cleanse. Its lead single was the biggest radio hit about hole since Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” After living with this album for 30 years, turning it inside and out, memorizing its drum fills and marveling at its sacred geometry, I have one remaining question about Ænima. Are you serious?

A few months before he met with Joni, Keenan attended a week-long seminar, in California’s San Fernando Valley, rooted in the teachings of new age guru Drunvalo Melchizedek, who, in 1972, claimed his former self was inhabited by a higher-dimensional being who had been moving through the emptiness of space in the 13th-dimensional realm for 10 billion Earth years before he came upon the star Sirius in the Orion system and was transformed into an alien lifeform and granted a spaceship by the Sirians with which he journeyed to Earth with 350 crewmembers and then—skipping ahead a bit—spirit-walked into the body of a man who would now be known as Drunvalo Melchizedek. He, meaning the interdimensional being known as Drunvalo Melchizedek, said he was sent here to raise as many spirits as possible through to the next level of consciousness. (N.b. Drunvalo Melchizedek says there are 100,000 levels of consciousness preceding the All Is One realm, so.)

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.

A year after that, they put out a great debut LP called Undertow that eventually went gold and got heavy rotation on radio and MTV, thanks in large part to Jones’ unsettling stop-motion animation videos for the hit singles “Sober” and “Prison Sex.” (Butt-Head’s reaction to the “Sober” video remains to this day critically salient: “Cool.”) They got even bigger on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour when they were upgraded from the side stage to the mainstage—where Keenan would sometimes join grunge juggernauts Alice in Chains to sing backup on “Rooster.” Tool were hard to classify. They were slowly building a following among the riff-rock crowd who had one foot in Soundgarden’s melodic grunge-metal world and another near Helmet, with a third foot in astral projections.

When it came time for Keenan to start planning the follow-up record, he looked to his bookshelf. There were his familiar books by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, John Crowley’s heady sci-fi series The Solitudes (then known as Ægypt), and a small stack of private-press books someone had dropped off, written by Drunvalo Melchizedek. Drunvalo Melchizedek was a minor figure in the Los Angeles new age community, perhaps because some of his more outré ideas would make even the most dilated third eye begin to squint: a universal system of measurement inscribed on the Giza Pyramids and Stonehenge by extraterrestrials, a foretelling of a global shift in the tectonic plates that would swallow California whole, a new breed of humans possessed with not just the usual 46 chromosomes but an additional two more. All this was set to usher in a new age of cosmic consciousness. At the weeklong seminar in the Valley, Keenan took copious notes.

If you accept Ænima as a kind of new age California metal album, you can meet it at its own level. Call it pseudo-intellectual, or fake deep, or prog-rock, but those are half measures that don’t take into account the terroir out of which Tool grew. It is a record that emotionally and aggressively tries to gain access to a deeper consciousness through a cocktail of mysticism, mushrooms, mosh pits, and masturbation. The new age metal mindset, Ænima posits, is not just yours to inhabit, but yours to witness—like an impossible polyrhythm or an alien spaceship. To ascend, you must first be in awe, and then you will be subsumed, and only then will you understand that all this is one big joke, one big ride, and the alien is smoking a joint, and he takes a puff and says, “Take me to your dealer.” That’s the world of Tool.

As I sit here and tilt my Ænima CD case so that I can use the lenticular cover to animate a naked milk-colored person suckin’ their own dick, I wonder if rock music that tries to be smart is actually dumber than rock music that knows it’s dumb, and should not be critiqued as a failed attempt at entering into the realm of smart music. Is half-way smart all-the-way dumb? It’s just a theory.

But the one unassailable truth about Tool and Ænima, around which the laws of rock are governed: “Forty Six & 2” rules. Always has, always will. It is compositionally perfect, muscular and musical, thoughtful and instinctive, start to finish. Jones’ greyish chords snake in and out of Chancellor’s amazingly simple bassline. It is the first riff you learn to play when you first tune your guitar or bass down to drop-D. Carey’s drumming is busy, naturally, but he’s so effortlessly groovy. It remains, to me, the peak of Carey’s writing in Tool’s entire catalog. I have watched so many YouTube drum covers of this song that I’ve developed a sixth sense for whether the drummer will nail Carey’s solo based on how well they do the opening drum fill.

And so the song is about, what, 13th-dimensional aliens? Chromosome upgrades? Jungian shadow theory? Ego death? What Keenan brought home from the weeklong Drunvalo Melchizedek seminar was not a membership card to a galactic cult, but an idea toward transcendental songwriting. To Keenan, the era of grunge songwriting defined by self-chosen pain had run its course. A new era of heavy music was dawning, one of alienation, transgression, and childhood trauma. There’s something in complicating a harmonic voicing, troubling a time signature, a brief detour into esoteric metaphysics that could, as he told Joni, become “software upgrades for the psyche.” Maybe there’s a way to evolve your inner consciousness through engaging with your shadow self and purging it through verses and choruses. Unless you’ve taken a heroic dose of DXM, “Forty-Six & 2” may not cause you to join Sirians on the higher plane. But, in 1996, it certainly evolved mainstream rock music.

“The reason the world’s so fucked,” said Bill Hicks, the acerbic underground comic, in one of his final specials recorded in 1992, “is we’re undergoing evolution, and the reason our institutions, our traditional religions are all crumbling is because they’re no longer relevant…. So it’s time for us to create a new philosophy and perhaps even a new religion.” The often brilliant, sometimes homophobic, usually sophomoric Hicks spent his two-decade career working in relative obscurity in America, speaking truth to power through the realizations most people have at the peak of a psychedelic trip and bookending them with bitter sarcasm and paroxysms of anger. Henry Rollins, one of the first acts to bring Tool on tour in 1992, called Hicks “hilarious, brilliant, brave, and right about everything.”

Hicks’ bit about evolution continues: He wonders why America’s drug czar under President H. W. Bush isn’t someone who’s in recovery who can understand that addicts need compassion and not punishment. Sick people don’t get healed in prison. “And if we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might become more compassionate and something like heaven might dawn.” The audience applauds, and Hicks quickly cuts them off: “I want everyone here to take the five dried grams I taped under all your chairs right now. Let’s go, man. The fucking UFOs are waiting in the fifth dimension, let’s go!”

The way Hicks conveyed his evolutionary manifesto—angrily, innocently, sarcastically, drugily—is the perfect analog for Ænima. Keenan had absorbed bootleg cassette tapes of Hicks’ shows in the tour van. He named Hicks as an influence in the liner notes for Opiate and sent him a copy of the album. They eventually developed a friendship, and Hicks even introduced Tool at one of their Lollapalooza stops (he did a bit on stage about losing a contact lens in the mosh pit). They exchanged letters, then began talking on the phone. They were going to plan a tour together until Hicks died of pancreatic cancer, in 1993, when he was only 32.

Inside the Ænima booklet, there’s a painting of Hicks and Keenan together; Hicks is dressed like a doctor who appears to have just pried open Keenan’s skull, revealing his third eye. You can hear Hicks on the album—sampled in the final song—but you can feel his presence deeper, more prominently elsewhere. On the title track, Keenan imagines, like Steely Dan and Warren Zevon did before him, California tumbling into the sea. But the invocation of “Arizona Bay” is borrowed directly from a Hicks bit, and the broad, vituperative rant about the various Central Casting characters you’ll find in Los Angeles could have been pulled from a never-surfaced bootleg Hicks tape Keenan and Rollins laughed at on the tour bus. Again, the song’s composition is incredible—Carey switches between several different feels within one time signature to give the illusion that the song is slowing up and speeding down. When a Tool song is molded around a particularly brilliant Carey drum part, it simply cannot fail.

The same can also be said for “Jimmy,” the first song Keenan wrote about his mother, Judith. When Jim Keenan was 11, he watched his mother be carried out of their rural Ohio home on a stretcher. She suffered an aneurysm and was partially paralyzed until her death in 2003. Keenan’s reverie back to this childhood trauma is full of backmasked and digitally manipulated vocals with Carey delicately, musically grounding the song around its shifting sands of time. It’s the most personal the album ever gets, putting the spotlight directly on Keenan’s voice, which, on Ænima, still stands as one of the best melodic metal performances ever given. When he appeared on Deftones’ record four years later, he passed the torch to another shapeshifting California band and vocalist who would discover even more unsung melodies in metal and evolve the genre.

Amid the unremarkable main-menu pain lyrics, there’s this funny and prescient line from Keenan: “All you know about me is what I’ve sold you, dumb fuck,” he sings on “Hooker With a Penis,” a seething l’esprit de l’escalier rant about a kid who told him he thought Tool was selling out. Keenan, in a very Adbusters way, agrees with him: “I sold my soul to make a record, dipshit, and then you bought one.” It was a clever way to get ahead of the curve in a time when “selling out” could mark you as a pariah in alternative rock. “All you know about me is what I’ve sold you” is one of the more honest things Keenan or any singer has written.

When Tool are in their flow state, they are a marvel to listen to. Enough can’t be said about Carey, the spine and heartbeat of the band, as well as a true believer in Enochian magic, a language said to have been given by angels to John Dee, a 16th-century magus who left written accounts of experiments with extradimensional beings. Keenan’s emotional dynamism and vocal vulnerability helped enlistan entirely new demographic to heavy music. While former bassist Paul D’Amour helped write five songs, Chancellor brought a nimbleness to the band; just listen to his fretwork on the title track. Jones became almost an entirely different guitarist between Undertow and Ænima, finding more space in drones and psychedelic leads, giving songs a crucial lift and drift. His shining moment is on “Stinkfist” when he plays a two- or three-note solo that starts to tilt the whole song just slightly off its axis.

The band did concede to MTV’s standards when programmers asked that “Stinkfist” be titled “Track 1” when they played its video. Provocative? Transgressive? Juvenile? A nod to no wave pioneer Lydia Lunch? This is the world of Tool: The sacred and stupidly profane. Some of it hasn’t aged well, though you could say music listeners have, over three decades, evolved so as not to be shocked by invocations of sexual fetishes. But in 1996, to hear “Stinkfist” on the radio invoked the same kind of tittering and fascination with my cohorts at the Magic: The Gathering lunch table as the rumor that Marilyn Manson removed his own rib so he could better suck his own dick. Is all this within me, too? Do I possess this kind of prurience? Is this my shadow? I wondered. “Relax, turn around, and take my hand,” Keenan croons. A few years later, I traded all my Magic cards for a 4xCD Led Zeppelin best-of box set. I didn’t know at the time that Tool had recorded a pretty good cover of “No Quarter” during their Ænima sessions and released it on the Salival box set in 2000.

What doesn’t work, and what has never worked, is “Third Eye”—which is a shame because it is the grand finale, a mission statement, and it takes up 13 rather difficult minutes on a record that, even with a few dull moments, is an otherwise spectacular, unstoppable listen. “Third Eye” is what happens when Tool shoots from the hip, and the riffs tumble forward without shape and contour. The silly rhythmic muting of the vocals, the aimless noodling, the mindless pentatonic riffing, the stupid phaser effect—all cast into sharp relief their understanding of psychedelic music. On an album whose liner notes are nothing but an inscrutable rant about the subtler properties of ketamine, you wish the band had a better way to land the spaceship—and it took them until 2019, with Fear Innoculum’s closing opus “7empist,” to really figure out how properly do it.

I’m toying with the lenticular Ænima CD case again, looking at the third image in the booklet, a monster’s eye rolling around like you’re face-to-face with some kind of Xenomorph, or maybe a Sirian from the Orion system. For an album that is about the balance of high and low, go-dumb riffs and complex time signatures, the world within and the world without, childhood trauma and a recipe for cookies recited intimidatingly in German, is it any wonder that when I peer into this lenticular case, I see why I love this record and why I think it kind of sucks? After all these years, I don’t think Ænima is serious, but it is in perfect harmony with itself. It is the setup and the punchline. It is the perfect joke.