Why Jack Black hated opening for Tool: “We were a lot softer”
Jack Black always had a sixth sense about how to get an audience pumped.
Whether he was teaching millions of kids how to rock or being an absolute goofball when working with Tenacious D, Black had that sense of comedic timing and charisma that only comes once every generation. But even if he had his fair share of highlights onstage, he admitted to being on bills where he wasn’t the best fit.
Then again, it’s not like Black is doing anything deliberately annoying whenever he goes onstage. He’s seemingly at 200% energy even on his off days, and when looking at his track record for performing with legends, he can manage to stand next to people like James Hetfield of Metallica and feel like he belongs, even if he clearly doesn’t have the same kind of guitar chops as those he’s sharing the stage with.
But the real superpower that he’s always had is his voice. ‘Kickapoo’ was already supposed to be a massive pisstake on the overture-style songs heard in rock and roll operas, but the fact that Black could hold his own as a singer next to Meat Loaf and Ronnie James Dio says a lot more about his talent than most people realise. He never once claimed to be the best singer out of the three, but any other vocalist would have been laughed out of the room had they tried to come close to them.
At the same time, humour is incredibly subjective, and when someone’s going to a concert expecting music, getting a band that comes up there strictly to make you laugh is going to be a bit of a gamble. While many comedic artists are able to balance everything whenever they’re working, opening up for a band like Tool was always going to be a hard tightrope for anyone to walk, let alone a comedy band.
While Tool has a lot of great material and deserves to be counted among the greatest metal acts of their time, their take on comedy only exists in short bursts. Maynard James Keenan can be a goofball when he wants to, but since his sense of humour caters to insanely dry wit, having someone who was all energy all the time opening for them led to a crowd that felt like they were being played for fools half the time.
Black would never say no to opening for a legend, but he felt that his time opening for Tool wasn’t what he had in mind, saying, “I didn’t feel like we weren’t ready for prime time. I just felt like, ‘Oh, this is what happens when we don’t go to the right audience. We know Tool. Tool’s great, but that crowd – they came for Tool, or you better be a lot like Tool. We were a lot softer than Tool. We came out playing ‘Jesus Ranch’, and they were like, ‘What?!’”
Keenan may have misjudged the moment when working with Tenacious D, but it’s not like Tool were nearly as serious as their fans took them for, either. The frontman had worked in Green Jelly, had spent one of their darkest songs singing a cookie recipe in German, and even had ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA playing as the outro music on their latest tours, so it’s not like he was afraid to get a little bit whacky every now and then.
But it’s always about knowing one’s audience, and even if some of the biggest names in the world have time to tour together, there’s no telling whether they’re going to be like oil and water once they try to reach the same people. Regardless of who he’s playing with, though, Black was always going to put on the kind of show that made the audience not know what hit them.
