“I may have cried”: Jack Black on the one band that saved ‘School of Rock’
Jack Black was always going to be a faithful rock and roll servant. Even if he didn’t exactly pick the same medium as his rock gods, it was all fine as long as he had a better outlet to bring his love of music to millions of people around the world. And in terms of the few instances of perfect casting in a movie, School of Rock is one of the few roles that Black was born to play before he even had the script in front of him.
While the actor is known to be everyone’s best friend the minute that he walks into the room, having him be the main professor in teaching kids how to play rock and roll is almost too on the nose. There was no way he could have infused the same type of humour that Tenacious D put into their music, but hearing him freak out over playing ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin tugged on a few heartstrings of every wannabe rockstar who saw it in the theatre.
And for all of the comedic moments, the movie is actually pretty heartfelt when breaking everything down. Black wasn’t going for an Academy Award or anything, but watching someone develop their passion and being able to harness it made him look like a pretty great teacher of rock and roll whenever he came onscreen as well. Then again, that didn’t always equate to having the best ending, either.
Although the battle of the bands was always set to be the ending, the whole thing needed to be tied together with a song to fix everything. And while Black is a man of many talents, writing an earnest rock song wasn’t in his blood. He was forever a comedian, and the only way that he could think of getting the right rock and roll song was to go to the indie scene and scour the talent.
Of all the bands that he had known, The Mooney Suzuki became the first one on his list. From the minute that he saw them midway through production of the film, their brand of indie power-pop and ear for hooks was exactly the kind of track that he was looking for to take the movie from a fine finale to a knockout punch.
Even though Black didn’t have as much of a hand in writing it as he would have liked, he had to admit that the results turned out perfectly, saying, “I wrote a bunch of different drafts, and none of it was working. They were so funny and hard-working. I thought ‘I wish I could write a song like that. That’d be perfect.’ I went backstage at the end of the show and said, ‘I’m doing this movie called School of Rock. You think you could write a song?’ The next day, I got the demo, and said, ‘WE HAVE THE END OF OUR MOVIE’. I may have cried a little bit.”
Despite most of the songs in the movie being indebted to rock’s past, it’s only fitting that the ending song be an amalgamation of what rock’s future was looking like at the time. The Mooney Suzuki was opening for The Strokes when Black asked them about the opportunity and hearing them take a crack at the tune took everything onto the streets of New York circa 2001, where everything was about listening to bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
So, in a way, School of Rock may have been one of the most airtight histories of rock thanks to what Black did for the final song. Because by not going with a song from the past, the ending assured everyone that rock would keep going as long as there were true believers out there to spread the word.
