Tool's Maynard James Keenan got COVID in February of 2020, a particularly bad case of it too, saying "I survived it, but it wasn't pretty." He's now revealed in an interview with STROMBO on Apple Music Hits that he contracted the virus again in late fall.
"I got it like mid-November and ended up in the ER on December 1st. Ugly, ugly. Couldn't breathe," Maynard said. "I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit that, you know? It ended up kind of also progressing into pneumonia. So, if I stayed in the hospital, they said, ‘Okay, we can keep you here, but you're fighting 12 other people for a bed and a ventilator we don't have, so what do you want to do?’ I'm like, ‘Well, I need to breathe and I need to sleep.’ So, you're just treating symptoms at that point. There's nothing you can do other than treat the symptom, so for a real cough medicine, not the crap over-the-counter and then like an inhaler, and some antibiotics to fight the pneumonia and strap the f*** in."
Maynard was on Apple Music Hits ostensibly to talk about Puscifer's extraterrestrial-themed Existential Reckoning, which came out just in time for Halloween. "I grew up in Ohio, eventually moved to Michigan, but in a very fundamentalist conservative in a box community," Keenan told STROMBO. "And when you're an outsider, in a way, you don't necessarily align with those things. In some ways, you have to blend in and play along, but that idea of what moves people, scary wizards that are half zombie somehow or in charge of your life, and you have to be cool to them, and to get into the bar that is heaven. It was just a strange concept for me and I bought into it and I didn't buy into it and I bought into it and didn't buy into it. And I think in a way that unknown of extraterrestrial intervention or the coming of the aliens, that's kind of the new religion, because it's still kind of mysterious and scary and inspiring and lovely and awful and all those things. And I think because that's an unknown, it's like a combination of the new religion meets Bigfoot.”
