Bonnaroo Festival 2022: Tool takes a packed field on a pummeling, unsettling journey

Getting older is a trip. Here’s one of the million reasons why: over the decades, you’ll see the dangerous rock bands of yesteryear — the ones parental advisory labels were invented for — steadily lose their edge, even turn downright wholesome, as society catches up.

And then there’s Tool.

I saw this band for the first time in 1997 at Lollapalooza — the same year my parents brought me along to see the one-time bad boys of rock and roll, The Rolling Stones.

I just saw Tool for the second time, when they headlined Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night. And I can tell you this four-headed beast remains gloriously unsettling and inscrutable, 30-plus years into their run.

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However, frontman Maynard James Keenan — still keeping to the back of the stage, often shrouded in darkness — found his own way to “radiate positivity,” as the ‘Roo mantra goes.

“There’s a lot of (expletive) going on in the world right now. It’s a (expletive) mess, if you ask me. But guess what? We’ve been through a lot. We’ll get through a lot. But today, you deserve a break. So today, there’s only here. There’s only now. There’s only us.”

And as has long been the case, a surprisingly wide swath of humanity was willing to go on this menacing ride: marked with primal, motion-sick metal grooves and inter-dimensional songcraft.

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The band tackled both ends of their three-decade catalog immediately: starting with "Fear Inoculum," the title track of their latest album, released in 2019. They followed it up with one of their signatures, "Opiate," from their debut 1992 EP of the same name. The band actually just released a new version of the song — adding 3-plus minutes of runtime — earlier this year.

Your only hope of seeing the band at all was to elbow your way close to the front, as the stage's massive video screens never cut to live shots of the musicians. Instead, it was time-tested, terrifying and trippy images: computer animations of shriveled heads with third eyes, and 2-foot-long tongues passing from one grinning skull to another.

This crowd was fully onboard: you could hear them singing along in the silent spaces of 2006's "The Pot," in a rare moment when the band lowered their tone.

The field in front of the “What Stage” wasn’t as densely packed as years past — see the talk of ‘Roo’s attendance being down this year.— but the audience stretched clear to the back of the field. That included a small group of uniformed police officers who hopped into a golf cart as soon as the show was over.

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Bonnaroo 2022: Tool's Maynard James Keenan takes crowd on journey