TOOL’s Maynard James Keenan Unintentionally Performed Two Shows With COVID
Earlier in the month TOOL’s Frontman, Maynard James Keenan, revealed that he had been infected with Covid-19 and still has lung damage. Maynard has now revealed that he unintentionally performed two shows while infected.
The two shows took place back on February 28th and 29th of this year at the 12,000 capacity Spark Arena in Auckland, New Zealand.
Talking on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Keenan revealed that the doctors had given him the all clear to perform, despite losing his sense of taste before the band flew from Australia to New Zealand.
“I’m in Australia, we went out to dinner… and immediately food didn’t taste right, but this is now, this is all hindsight, right – I didn’t know at the time, We didn’t know that these are the things you’re looking for, like immediately” he explained “I had to get on an international flight the next morning, fly to New Zealand.”
“So we got there, I was, like, four days in the hotel, ’cause we have four days off before the shows, So I was just drinking water, hot showers, taking care of myself, hot tea, just trying to get through it and it sucked. But you didn’t know yet…how bad this thing could have been. If I’d have known how bad it could have been, I would have been freaking out.”
“I isolated pretty well… I grabbed a mask before I ever got on the plane”
“I asked the doctor when I got to New Zealand ‘Do you think this is covid?’ he was like ‘did you have a fever?’ I’m like ‘I don’t remember if I had a fever’ ‘well then you… don’t have covid'”
The band went on to perform the two shows, adjusting the setlist to remove “the hard ones” so Keenan could still perform. Maynard then went onto explain to Rogan how it’s still affecting him “I still have the cough,” he explains “So whatever cough I had, whatever cough I got in New Zealand, like every other day, I’ll have a coughing fit for, you know, for 10 minutes, coughing up stuff, so I have lung damage from it still.”
The first confirmed case of Covid-19 in New Zealand was in the afternoon of the first show, when a resident returned from Iran with the illness. The fourth case in the country was a TOOL fan who attended the first show and later tested positive.
Maynard James Keenan other band Prucifer release ‘Existential Reckoning’ this Friday via Alchemy Recordings/Puscifer Entertainment/BMG.
You can watch the full podcast here: