Jack Black names the best show he has ever seen: “It was so good”
For someone who has made their living on the big screen, Jack Black has rock and roll running through his veins. While it’s hard to divorce him from the character he played in School of Rock, we don’t really need to since he’s been playing the damn part his entire life. That doesn’t mean he’s exclusively into dad rock, considering he nearly melted the moment he crossed paths with Thom Yorke for the first time.
Then again, Black is the last person you would think of being starstruck by someone like Yorke. Considering his pedigree for playing some of the most over-the-top characters of all time, Black looks like the guy who would listen to almost exclusively hard rock and metal music from the pre-alternative age.
After Nirvana blew everything up at the turn of the decade, Radiohead were already doing something different. It took them a while to run away from Kurt Cobain’s looming shadow, but looking through the band’s 1990s output, their growth on OK Computer turned them from a one-hit wonder to the kind of group who could drastically change the music industry if they stayed the course.
But Yorke wasn’t built to please the masses. He did whatever the hell he wanted, and even though it has no ties to the genre, Kid A is one of the most punk statements Radiohead ever made, as they threw away everything that made them a band and doused themselves in electronic music.
Still, that didn’t stop Black from loving the group and eventually becoming too much of a fanboy seeing Yorke, saying, “I worship Thom Yorke. We were on the bill of a Neil Young benefit concert in San Francisco, the Bridge School Benefit, and Thom Yorke was doing a solo performance, playing Radiohead songs on his acoustic guitar and on Neil Young’s piano, and, yeah, that was one of the best things I had ever seen. It was so good.”
It’s hard to imagine Black having any time for artists who don’t have at least four-foot-high stacks of pyro going off throughout in their setlist, but he’s also had a more subtle side to him. Remember, this is the same guy who loved Elliott Smith in the 1990s and would earn his keep as a musician who almost exclusively played acoustic guitar, so the similarities between that and more subtle singers weren’t that far away.
If anything, an acoustic performance is probably the ideal way for someone to experience Yorke as an artist. Sure, acclaimed acts can make the best with whatever kind of technology they have in front of them, but when they cut everything out, and it’s just them with a guitar or a piano, that’s when they show you who they really are.
And it’s not like Black didn’t learn that lesson later, considering Tenacious D’s cover of ‘Wicked Game’ by Chris Isaak exclusively on acoustics is miles better than logically should make any sense. It’s not the optimal way to listen to a song, but Yorke could be just as spellbinding singing ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ by himself as he could glitch out when playing ‘Idioteque’.
