Jack Black on the band with endless creativity: “No one is that kind of lightning rod”
The art of music and humour have never exactly been that far apart. Both mediums require different training and years of experience, but the art of being able to improvise and come up with material that no one has heard before on the spur of the moment is half the reason why artists should be given credit as creative geniuses. Although Jack Black has transformed himself into the kind of actor with expert improvising chops, he knew that musically, everyone he listened to was following in the footsteps of The Beatles.
Despite claiming to be a member of the greatest band in the world, Black would have a lot of explaining to do when putting Tenacious D up against the Fab Four. Regardless of their musical ability, their knowledge of harmony and how to create the perfect two-minute pop song in their early days was unparalleled and still stands as some of the best music to come out of the 1960s.
Then again, no one listening to The Beatles now is exclusively listening to A Hard Day’s Night. It was all about what happened when they started opening themselves up, and by the time Rubber Soul arrived, there was something different in the air. While pot would have been the more accurate aroma in the air, the experimentation that went along with it brought out the best in everyone, leading them to test their audience even further on Revolver.
But even if they didn’t have a million effects going at once, each of their songs held up on their own. Whether or not ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had its iconic psychedelic construction, hearing John Lennon talk about his feelings of alienation as a youngster rings true for anyone who’s ever felt alone in the world and needed some form of escape.
For Black, though, it was about the creativity over the pure songcraft. Any of them could have decided to write a million knockoffs of ‘She Loves You’ for the rest of their lives, but by going outside the realms of possibilities, a song like ‘I Am The Walrus’ can somehow be accepted by the masses as long as it had a melody over the top.
Even though Black is more likely to extoll the virtues of acts like Led Zeppelin, he knew that no one had the kind of creative rocket sauce that the Fab Four possessed, saying, “When you think about rock at its origin, and you think of the Beatles and millions of kids screaming as loud as they can and running as fast as they can towards the Beatles, there’s no one who is that kind of lightning rod, who commands that kind of power and has that kind of creative magma.”
And it’s not like Black is wrong, either. There may have been more creative bands to come later in the decade, but in terms of breaking down boundaries for what was acceptable in rock and roll, The Beatles stood alone as one of the single most groundbreaking entity to ever grace the pop charts both then and now.
It’s a shame to see a group as pure of heart and spirit as ‘The D’ dethroned at the top of rock and roll Valhalla, but Black is more than happy to relinquish that crown to the Fab Four. Because, really, a tune like ‘Tribute’ can only work if John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote their own masterpieces first.
