Puscifer released their debut studio album, “V” Is for Vagina, in the United States on October 30, 2007. Maynard James Keenan had made the record while touring with Tool, using the gaps in one band’s schedule to develop a project with different musical and theatrical possibilities.
Keenan and co-producer Mat Mitchell worked wherever the tour took them, including buses, hotel rooms and studios. In SPIN’s 2007 profile, Mitchell described starting points as rough as a hummed recording, an acoustic guitar idea or Keenan tapping a hotel wall. He estimated that 99 percent of the record had been built on Keenan’s Apple laptop. Guest musicians included Primus drummer Tim Alexander, but the album’s development revolved around Keenan and Mitchell working on the move.
The difficult part was deciding what this third musical outlet should become. Looking back in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, Keenan remembered the unsettled nature of working in different locations and the pressure to establish a separate identity. His central question was straightforward: “how do we make this third thing not sound like the others?” The distinction also involved how much room to give his humor. He described the early separation between the bawdy non-album single “Cuntry Boner” and material such as “Indigo Children,” before Puscifer became more comfortable combining those impulses on later records. The debut captures that process while its boundaries were still being worked out.
There was a history behind the jokes and characters. Puscifer had emerged in 1995 through Keenan’s involvement in Laura Milligan’s Hollywood variety show Tantrum, then appeared as a fictional hardcore band on Mr. Show that same year. The album gave a recording identity to an idea that had already existed in comedy and performance for more than a decade. That background helps explain why a Puscifer release could involve considerably more than the musicians heard on it.
The record opens with “Queen B,” whose accompanying video extended the project into animation. Meats Meier created the clip, released in 2007 and identified by Puscifer as its first video.
Keenan also wanted control over how the work reached listeners. He financed the project and self-released the album, telling SPIN that he hoped to establish a way to release smaller batches of music through iTunes and Puscifer’s website as they were finished.
That flexibility carried into Puscifer’s first live shows in Las Vegas in February 2009. Reviewing the opening performance of a three-night stand at the Pearl Theatre, SPIN described a production that combined musicians with comedy sketches and filmed segments. Keenan appeared as characters including Major Douche and evangelist Neil Suckit, with the latter joining a scene involving a nun and a priest before “Sour Grapes” moved the show into music. Other debut-album songs, including “Momma Sed,” “Trekka” and “Indigo Children,” followed during the set. The performance closed with “Queen B,” giving the album’s opening song a new place inside a show built around music, sketches and shifting characters.
