The prog-rock band Jack Black called endlessly awesome: “A deep reservoir”
It didn’t take a lot for a great rock and roll band to get the Jack Black seal of approval.
Every single one of his favourite bands felt like a who’s who of the greatest musicians to ever pick up an instrument, and getting him to wax poetic about some of the best metal bands of all time wasn’t usually all that hard. He was willing to do everything that he could to prop up the greatest rock stars of all time, but the key to lasting long in the industry is being able to keep things going for generations at a time.
And that’s not exactly easy for any artist to do. Most people can have enough of their favourite band for one summer when they are a teenager, but all it takes is a few bad records for people to swear off their favourites for changing too much or not capturing their attention in the same way. But that’s always the band’s fault, either.
The Beatles and Led Zeppelin have remained evergreen to a certain extent because they both broke up before they had a chance to disappoint anyone, which is probably why Black still regards Zeppelin as one of the ultimate bands of all time. In his personal record collection, though, Black was still looking for bands that had great songs well before anything else, and that only came from bands that came around once in a lifetime.
He could always fall back on records by Nirvana or even get introspective with Elliott Smith every now and again, but not many bands were able to cover as many bases as Rush did when Black heard them for the first time. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the power trio were a Zeppelin-esque band when listening to their first record, but as soon as Neil Peart joined, there was no limit on where they could go.
They are technically a prog rock band if you had to break it down, but every single one of their greatest songs takes things in far more interesting directions than just the standard prog epic. They had that period of their career in the 1970s, but even then, a lot of the riffs Alex Lifeson was coming up with made the band sound closer to heavy metal a lot of the time, almost as if Black Sabbath had a baby with the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis that happened to scream as loud as Robert Plant.
And given the band’s track record for great material, Black was stunned at how a band could have kept up their hot streak for as long as they did, saying, “Rush is just one of those bands that has a deep reservoir of rocket sauce. A lot of bands, they only have so much in the bottle. They use it sometimes in just one song. These guys…their bottle was so big and so filled to the brim [that] they were shaking it literally for decades and still there was sauce coming out.”
But the key to Rush making as many great tunes as they have comes from switching things up all the time. Not as many people were in love with the idea of them embracing keyboards in the 1980s, but the fact that they had different periods in their musical development made things more interesting every time you checked up on them, whether that was the 1980s sheen of Hold Your Fire, the grizzled classic rock on Test for Echo or closing things out with the conceptual piece Clockwork Angels.
Whether or not Black achieves the same kind of staying power with Tenacious D remains to be seen, but the fact that he had Rush down as an influence was proof enough that he was heading in the right direction. Because even if the Canadian icons didn’t always have the reputation of being the coolest band in the world, staying true to themselves was one of the greatest advantages that they ever had over their competition.
