Tool’s Adam Jones Once Played the Most Brutal Tour Prank Ever on The Melvins

Adam Jones by deep ghosh, King Buzzo by Andy Witchger. Via Wikipedia.
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Tour pranks are a time-honored tradition of bands on the road. Whether it’s the ol’ hand-in-warm-water or hiring an overweight male stripper for your pal on their birthday, the monotony of the tour life can lead to some elaborate jokes played on bandmates and tourmates. But few if any tour pranks will be as brutal as the one Tool guitarist Adam Jones pulled on the dudes in the Melvins.

In a recent interview with The Chuck Schute Podcast, Melvins drummer Dale Crover regaled listeners with the tale of how Adam turned one day of tour into a living hell.

“We got pulled over in Texas,” explains Crover, “right outside of Houston, and the cop finds some weed on the ground, right outside of our van. It wasn’t ours! Funny enough, because I knew it wasn’t any of ours. None of us would have been stupid enough to have any weed while driving through Texas…especially the guy who got blamed for that part, because he didn’t even smoke weed, which was our road manager at the time.

“Anyway, we get pulled over by this big, huge, Buford Pusser-style Southern cop, and he finds this weed, and he’s like, ‘Whose weed is this? Arright, errybody outta the car…’ He gets us all out of the car, and he’s like, ‘I’m’onna search all of yer bags,’ being a total dick cop or whatever. I’m kind of talking to him like, ‘Oh, that’s not ours,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you the spokesman for the group? You smoke weed?’ And then he goes to search our bags where I can’t see, behind our van, and then he comes up and says, ‘You. C’mere.’

“I go back, and I see my bag on the hood of his car, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is sticking out of my bag…’ He starts pulling stuff out of my bag, like, ‘Look at what we got here…’ Pulls out a 9mm…and then he pulls out the scales…I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And then he says, ‘Lord, what we got here,’ and pulls out the biggest bag of cocaine I’ve ever seen in my life…So I’m like, ‘Okay–lawyer.‘ So he puts my in the car…I’m thinking, ‘Okay, he’s planted all this stuff in my bag, what’s this scam here?’ So I was trying to figure out what the deal was — does he want money? Should I have bribed him?

“After a while, he lets me out of the car and says, ‘Look, I just want to tell you guys…Adam Jones from Tool says you’re pranked.’ He was friends with Adam!”

So just know, when your buddy shaves off your eyebrow while drunk, at least he didn’t plant guns and drugs on your while you were driving through Texas.

Watch the full interview below:

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Words by Chris Krovatin