“The best thing to hit rock and roll”: The profound moment Jack Black discovered Nirvana
It made sense for Jack Black to pursue a career on the silver screen in the 1990s.
Despite his dual approach to creativity, one that saw musicianship and acting combine, he made the more definitive decision to commit to the latter, but who could really blame him… It was a decade of booming advancement for Hollywood and one that propelled comedy films into the box office and broke out stars like Black.
His beloved rock, on the other hand, was in a different state. The dregs of ‘80s hair metal were slowly dying out, and fans wondered if the art of sticking it to the man was lost entirely, stamped out by society’s obsession with commercialism – an obsession that ultimately made cinema a more lucrative creative business.
But then Nirvana came along and revived the spirit of the underground. They did away with superficiality and smeared it into the ground with their new brand of authentic and energetic grunge. Fans who had spent the last decade disillusioned with the state of rock were all of a sudden revitalised by Nirvana’s appearance and began to believe in rock again.
One of those people was Jack Black, who, while crafting a rather successful cinema career, was also laying the foundations for his comedy rock band Tenacious D. But maybe the furious career Black embarked on with his Tenacious D co-member would have never have happened if it wasn’t for Nirvana and the spark of influence they provided.
While discussing the beginning of the band with Gass himself, Black said, “When we were first starting out, just like jamming before we were a band, before HBO or any of that stuff, when we were just hanging and rocking, I told you about Nirvana. But it was powerful and like the best thing to hit rock and roll in many years.”
Of course, there was the music itself, which turned rock at a right angle and made it more aggressive and anti-establishment than it had been in the previous decade. But it needed a performance style to boot, one that did away with pretence and truly gave into the transcendental nature of rock, one that Black himself has begun to master.
He noticed that about the band and Cobain in particular, recounting to Gass, “It came with a kind of, like, self-destructive energy that you see the way that he launched himself into the audience, he did not care… There’s like, I did not give two shits if he lived and died.”
It’s no surprise that since those days, Tenacious D have forged a friendship with Grohl – in many ways, Black and Grohl in particular were kindred spirits who occupied music and cinema with the same level of enthusiasm and authenticity, but ultimately, it was a shared attitude forged by decades of adoration for classic rock and the subsequent genres it created thereafter.
Both were disillusioned with the state of affairs in the ‘80s, and both helped forge a new era of rock and roll-laced art in the ‘90s.
