We forget that Modern Rock is an art form only because it makes so few demands. A Perfect Circle's most recent offering is an authentic workout. You can try to figure out where Thirteenth Step is going, only to be diverted by the pervading sense of edging toward the unknowable. This is music that forces you to become a passenger on an excursion through radiant landscapes strewn with the wreckage of contemporary existence.

It is more than a little ironic that the band looks suspiciously like the front row at the MTV Awards. Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan is covering the vocals, and the lineup includes veterans of Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson. The fountain of inspiration in this band, however, flows from someone you might have found backstage wrapping up a cord for one of these luminaries: Billy Howerdell. Prior to his emergence into the limelight Billy was a guitar technician Nine Inch Nails, Tool, and Smashing Pumpkins.

There is an astonishingly imaginative range of expression coming from his guitar. He has the astonishing gift of being crunchy in a way that can only be described as evocative. This is a sound that lends itself to interpretation.

Timothy Parker: A Perfect Circle started with its own mythology. You’re in a back room in Tool's Studio laying some tracks and Maynard comes up to you and asks if he can sing on them. You say "Na" but he gradually wins you over and the next thing you know you’re an international rock star. Is that how it actually happened?

Billy Howerdell: Not exactly. Maynard and I had met years earlier. We wound up bumping into each other again in Los Angeles and ended up roommates.

I kind of went and did a temporary guitar tech gig for Tool. They were all friends of mine. I wasn’t really interested in teck-ing anymore, I just did it to help them out. Part of the deal was that I got to set up my studio in the back room and I was just working up some tracks. He actually heard them a little later and said that he wanted to sing on them. I didn’t put much weight to his words because he was just about to launch a Tool album and tour. I just kept doing my own thing, I didn’t really think much of it. I took it more seriously when he started putting vocal ideas down on songs, and two years later it started to come into reality.

TVP: Its very interesting that his voice found your work- they come together so naturally. Was a lot of the work on the first album put together prior to his emergence into the project?

B.H.: Around 70% of the blueprints were done before he came onboard.

TVP: Do you Find yourself writing a little differently now that you have an idea of the makeup of the project?

BH: I don’t write differently, I just decide what to show these guys. I filter what I present to them, or just know that some things will work for this band, and not others. There are some other tracks that I know aren’t appropriate for this band that I’m going to do something else with.

TVP Is there a sense now when you’re writing, that you’re writing for a full stadium, as supposed to writing for yourself?

BH: No. In a way the music writes itself. You can’t really think about it that much.

TVP: Art Rock is usually a term for a band with fifteen fans. Your work is probably the first popular music since the seventies that has earned that title. What goes into the success of music that has more content, more depth than people are usually willing to accept in Rock and Roll?

BH: I don’t know, I’m not good at the Biz part- what sells and what doesn’t. Things surprise me all the time. I hear a demo and I think "This is going to be the biggest thing in the world," or "This is never going to work" and its never right. For me personally, I’m putting my honest heart into it and I know everyone else in the band is as well and people are picking up on it. Hopefully that’s what people are drawn to.

There are a lot of other factors that got us off the ground. Maynard had a built-in audience with Tool, for example. Getting on the Nine Inch Nails arena tour right out of the box was good. David Finch producing our video. Nancy Berry at Virgin Records taking us under her wing, certainly was one of the biggest things. Doing music we’re really proud of helped us put it all together. The timing was right.

TVP: There seems to be a sincere effort to make your music sound accessible, even though the work itself is relatively arcane.

BH: It isn’t intended just to be accessible. The music that I’ve been inspired by is a factor. I think that musicians are the product of what they’ve been inspired by. It you took all the bands I’ve ever liked and put them in a room, that’s what comes out of me. And I guess that those bands are just accessible.

TVP: What do you consider your influences?

BH: The Cure, early on, when I was a kid, it was Blue Oyster Cult, Elvis Costello. During the first record it Was Fiona Apple, OK Computer by Radiohead was big. This time out I think Interpol had a lot of influence on me and White Stripes ‘White Blood Cells" , Cat Power. Mazzy Star as far as overall atmosphere.

TVP: The only thing I can think of that is remotely comparable in smoothness to A Perfect Circle is something like Gish- very early Smashing Pumpkins. They shared the trance-like quality, but minus the crunch.

BH: I can’t tell you where it comes from, it just comes out.

TVP: Anything you write strike you as coming completely from nowhere?

BH: Yeah, and I get scared. I’m like "Am I accidentally ripping off some song unconsciously?"

TVP: With so many aspects of your life having changed, does your inspiration change?

BH: No. But with so little time, it is hard to find time for the pure enjoyment of music. I don’t give myself a lot of time to simply listen to music. If I get spare time its usually to watch a movie or listen to a book on tape.

TVP: Did you ever suspect that the music you make would find such a huge mainstream audience.

BH: I’d hoped, but I never thought that it would get to this level. I’m a realist when it comes to the music industry just because I grew up working behind the scenes. I know how hard it is. Its even harder now than it was in the early nineties when I started.

I feel blessed and lucky to have the success that we’ve found.

Its great and I think it’s a really difficult time to be successful if you judge it by records sold or attendance at concerts.

TVP: I think a lot of people have been getting signed for the wrong reasons. There are so few bands available for a young person to become passionate about that it leads to lukewarm sales and so on.

BH: I agree. I’d be very surprised if many of the bands around to day will be around for more than five years.

TVP: Is it challenging to work with an avatar like Maynard?

BH: Its what I know. From working with a lot of talented and successful performers, more specifically, front men when I was a tech. I would always get hired for dealing with the "star". They’ve all got something special and they’ve all got a lot of baggage. You can look at it two ways. You can be with someone who is easier to get along with and with less talent, or someone who is slightly schizophrenic and has something interesting to say. Not to say that these people are totally insane, but people ask me if they’re like regular guys and I have to say no. You can’t be. These people are where they are because of what they were before, there was something that drove them to be out there in front. I’m not going to sugar-coat it or condemn it. But it has to be noted that these people are different.

TVP: There’s a mindset where it is more important to create, express, than anything else.

BH: Yes.

TVP: A Perfect Circle’s music sounds very much like it was built around ideas, themes. It doesn’t feel like you got together to bang out songs and then tacked the ideas on.

BH: I a lot of ways this music feels ghostwritten to me. I guess its how people explain going into hypnosis. You’re not unconscious, you’re just not totally there. I feel that way when I’m writing music. I only know that from getting interrupted in the studio. I’ll be sitting in front of the screen and playing, and my girlfriend would walk into the room and stand there staring at me. She would swear that I would see her and I don’t. As soon as you snap out of it takes a while to get back into it. Its like sex from the female perspective, you have to be in the mood for it to get the right result. That’s the way I see getting in the mood to write music.

TVP: Your music specifically has a trance inducing quality.

BH: I’m not sure about that.

TVP: I don’t mean that people are running off to join the Moonies, but you go to a Godsmack concert and everyone is trying to jump out of their skin. But this is something you only see at an APC concert: people are receptive. They’re seeing their favorite band, and rather than throwing their bras up onstage, they’re engaging the music on a different level, more trance-like.

BH: That’s been a big issue for the band on this tour, seated venues versus non-seated shows. Last night was a seated venue. And it was the best seated show we had on the tour so far. Every other seated show the crowd has been quiet. Our best shows are open floor. The kids are not moshing but certainly having a good time, you feel the energy, and you see people smiling. Other times we look out at the audience and we wonder, ‘Are people looking at their watches waiting to get out of here?’ A friend who was out there will say, no, people are just taking it in.

You believe that like you believe your mom when she says she likes your music. The show is as good as the crowd. When we don’t feel that we don’t give as much. It’s a chemistry thing. We feel silly getting physically into in of the crowd doesn’t

TVP: I’m not going to say that your music is more a cerebral experience- because its so heavy, but there is a strong cerebral component that makes people want to let it in rather than jump around. People are processing it.

BH: I have some friends who feel compelled to compare Tool’s music with APC, and say things like they need a paring knife to listen to Tool. It is really a more musician- oriented music. I love it and I would have to list it as one of my influences.

TVP: The only similarity aside from the vocals is the complexity.

BH: Have Beck sing with APC and tell me if it sounds like Tool.

TVP: Exactly.

BH: I’ve got a call on a wrap for this.

TVP: What are your plans in the near future.

BH: We’re finishing this tour and then we’re hitting Europe, Australia, and Japan. Then in March our big US tour, ten weeks.

TVP: Any advice for someone just trying to break into the business?

BH: I don’t know if I would even try. It’s an interesting time and I really don’t know what direction I would go. With or without a record company? As the digital age becomes more of a reality in the music world, the live experience is the last pure form of expression and the last authentic way to break out. Bands will value the live experience more.

TVP: The only thing you can’t dump onto a disk-

BH: is being there.