“Heavy metal Pavarotti”: Jack Black and the metal singer in a league of their own
As suggested by his appearances in School of Rock and the Tenacious D franchise, Jack Black is much more than a Hollywood star. In many of his roles, including those in High Fidelity and The Holiday, he embraces his passion for music, which is quite possibly stronger than that for film. Either way, he is truly in his element when allowed to combine the two.
During Black’s early rise to prominence in films and television, he expressed his comical and musical sides as one-half of the comedy rock duo Tenacious D. He formed the band with Kyle Gass, a fellow member of the Actors’ Gang theatre company, in 1994. They bonded over shared passions for rocking hard and laughing even harder. The band has been backed on and off by John Konesky, John Spiker and Scott Seiver, with Dave Grohl making several studio appearances along the way.
In the 1990s, the band set out with an HBO television show before releasing their eponymous debut album in 2001. This was followed by the popular 2006 movie Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Along the way the band has embarked on several tours, providing support to the likes of Pearl Jam, Weezer, Tool, and Beck during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Despite their strong ties to the grunge scene, courtesy of Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, Tenacious D exercise various styles, from acoustic Americana to Latin rock in ‘Señorita’. However, the band’s catalogue is predominantly heavy metal orientated. Like his School of Rock character, Dewey Finn, Black is a huge fan of hard rock and metal bands like AC/DC and Black Sabbath.
Speaking to Planet Rock in 2017, the actor highlighted Black Sabbath as the best heavy metal band of all and one of his long-lived favourites. Black was just six months old when Sabbath released their debut album, and by the time he started listening to metal in his early teens, frontman Ozzy Osbourne was working as a solo artist. “I went backwards, because I started with Ozzy and I went deeper into the catalogue of the Black Sabbath,” he revealed. “Found some powerful gems.”
Black then picked out ‘War Pigs’ from 1970’s Paranoid as his overall favourite by the Birmingham metal pioneers. “It’s just Black Sabbath at their most raw power. There is also this sort of heavy anti-war message that you don’t really think of when you think of Sabbath,” he noted. “You think of them as the dark underworld of rock, but really, there’s this peaceful centre. That’s the dichotomy of the Sabbath.”
While Osbourne’s solo work guided Black to the wonders of Black Sabbath, his listening habits soon turned up another metal singer he reveres even more so. After listening to the classic early Sabbath albums with Osbourne on vocals, Black became a bigger fan of the band’s chapter with frontman Ronnie James Dio. “If you go into the Sabbath archives and you see what happened when Ozzy left them [in 1979], they replaced Ozzy with who turned out to be my favourite heavy metal singer of all time: Ronnie James Dio.”
Supposedly, Black admires Dio and Osbourne greatly for their services to heavy rock music, but due to national pride, Dio just about takes the gold medal. “He held a special place because he was from the USA, so he was one of ours,” Black concluded. “And the fact that he joined forces with the greatest heavy metal band of all time was a great source of national pride for me personally.”
Speakign with Rolling Stone Black shared when celebrating his life, “Ronnie’s singing voice had an almost operatic quality never before heard in the genre. While he claimed to have no formal classical music training, his total command of his vocal instrument was undeniable. Between the flawless vibrato and athletic melodic lines, the level of difficulty was off the charts. This is undoubtedly why there hasn’t been another vocalist like him in metal before or since. The heavy metal Pavarotti… and an American! That was a great source of national pride since the U.K. had bragging rights to so many metal vocalists before him. He was our guy… and he kicked major ass.”
During the filming of a music video, Black got to complete a lifelong ambition and meet the great man, “I first met Ronnie on the set of a music video he was doing for a song called ‘Push’ [in 2002]. He knew we were fans and asked us to make a little cameo. Of course, we were nervous to meet him, but he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. He was super warm and jovial, humble and relaxed – a real class act with a tremendous sense of humour.”
Below, listen to ‘Heaven and Hell’, one of Black Sabbath’s greatest tracks from the Ronnie James Dio years.
