The Tool / A Perfect Circle / Puscifer frontman hits back at those who think he's “being paid” to claim that he had coronavirus.
After recently revealing that he had contracted coronavirus earlier this year, Maynard James Keenan has gone into more detail about his experience – and given a very simple message to those who don't believe him: “Eat a dick.”
In an extensive new interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the Tool / A Perfect Circle / Puscifer frontman explains that he didn't initially realise that he might have COVID-19 while touring in Australia and New Zealand in late February.
“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,” he says. “We didn’t know that these are the things you’re looking for, like immediately… I had to get on an international flight the next morning, fly to New Zealand.
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“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.”
Maynard adds that the cough that first began in New Zealand is still affecting him to this day, explaining that he'll have 10 minute coughing fits every other day at the moment.
“I’m still feeling residual effects of [coronavirus],” he says. “I feel like there’s a bunch of people that… maybe I didn’t almost die, but I have friends who almost died. It was ugly. And then you have people going… apparently I’m being paid to say this. Eat a dick, dude.”
Puscifer will be releasing their fifth album Existential Reckoning on October 30. Watch the full Maynard interview below:
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