Hours before showtime in Los Angeles, Adam Jones is making art. The Tool guitarist spends most of his days on the road like this, reaching into a box of coloured markers backstage and adding drawings and his signature to posters commemorating each night of the tour. Tonight also happens to be St. Valentine’s Day, and the first of two sold-out hometown concerts at LA’s Crypto.com Arena, but there is no entourage in sight as Adam happily draws away.
“I like doing it because I love drawing,” says Adam. He’s dressed in a black t-shirt commemorating the fictional shark fisherman Quint from Jaws. And on the wall behind him is a banner in the colours of the Mexican flag, with the image of two beefy masked wrestlers and the words ‘Lucha Bros’. Adam is sitting just steps away from the concrete hallway where, in 2019, he finally met his personal guitar hero, Eddie Van Halen, who attended a Tool show that night in one of his last public appearances. “If I had died right after that, I would’ve been happy,” Adam says. “That was incredible. Meeting your heroes is crazy.”
