TOOL Has Lost “The Pot”: TOOL is Being Sued After Beach Festival Disaster
The band is, yet again, feuding with its fans.
By Charley Burns
I don’t think the metal band TOOL has ever really had a positive reputation with their followers, and that’s coming from a huge fan of the band. The frontman of TOOL, Maynard James Keenan, is not known for being the friendliest guy. He beefed with Justin Bieber on Twitter (for saying he was a fan of TOOL) in 2019, has racked up a couple of sexual assault allegations, and went on record calling all TOOL fans “insufferable r-slurs” in 2015. I don’t really think Keenan has said a positive thing about the TOOL fandom in the last 15-20 years, but still, TOOL fans have stayed loyal since the band’s formation in 1990.
Until now. From March 7th to 9th of 2025, TOOL announced that they were throwing an event called “TOOL: Live in the Sand.” It was marketed as a multi-day metal festival at the Hard Rock Resort in Punta Cana, with TOOL along with other big bands like Primus, Mastodon, and Cambria all playing sets around the hotel and its surrounding beaches. I’m gonna be honest, when I saw the announcement about this event, I was a little surprised that the band even decided to do this in the first place. As a band that notably hates their fans, why spend three days on vacation with them? But nevertheless, they persisted, and the event weekend came with no cancellations..
Now, here is where the real legal troubles begin. It was advertised in all of the marketing that TOOL would play two of the three nights of the event, with two completely different sets. And if you bought a ticket to this festival, you had to go every night, as tickets were sold as three-day all-inclusive resort passes. So if you wanted to see TOOL churn out “Schism” on the beach, you had to be ready to pay a minimum of $5,175 for three nights at the hotel, all-inclusive food and drink, plus fees for all of the shows happening throughout the weekend. That price is even more ridiculous considering that TOOL went on a national tour just the year before, so it’s not like this event was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the band. The demographic for people buying tickets to this event was die-hard TOOL fans who needed to see them again.
Those die-hard fans were infuriated when, after the first night’s ten-song set, TOOL played nine songs for the second night, with four being repeats from the first set. Feeling that this betrayed TOOL’s promise of two “completely different” sets, enraged attendees immediately took to social media to voice their outrage at the band. Fans clearly felt they had been tricked or scammed, with one fan even hanging a “Fuck MJK” (see below) sign out their hotel room window on the last day of the festival.
The band still hasn’t commented on the whole fiasco, but over 100 attendees have signed onto a class action lawsuit organized by a lawyer who was in attendance. As of the posting of this article, they are planning on moving forward with the suit, with the intent of getting as much compensation as possible for the audience members who felt lied to. It’s impossible to know the outcome of the lawsuit right now, but one thing is for certain: TOOL really just has something against their fans.