The band Jack Black said he could never play like
Anyone who’s been in the general vicinity of Jack Black knows how little time he has for being serious.
As much as he puts his all into every single project he works on, his role as the lovable goofball half the time is what makes him so endearing to kids who watched School of Rock or adults listening to him talk about being in the greatest rock and roll in the world with Tenacious D. But even if Black contains multitudes, no one was going to see that in his playing by any stretch.
Which is kind of a shame given the amount of great music he’s been able to perform over the years. As much as people like the idea of Tenacious D forever being a hokey band that wrote crude sex jokes, it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes. They had people like Dave Grohl and the Dust Brothers working with them on their classics, so why the hell did they come together for tunes that were never going to find a place on the charts?
Honestly, it’s always been for the love of the sport in many respects. Grohl has always said that he is in absolute stitches when he works with ‘The D’, and even when working with legends like Meat Loaf and Ronnie James Dio, the fact that each of them sound like they’re having a lot of fun is half the reason why Black is such a great presence in the studio.
But the fact that he has a great voice also helps a lot more. Any other joke band would have been winging it for most of their career with a singer that wasn’t taught any kind of vocal technique, but the natural charisma and pure muscle that Black has in his delivery is the kind of talent most metal musicians wish they could have. Not everyone can hold their own next to Dio, but the fact that Black could sing alongside the metal god on a tune like ‘Kickapoo’ and not look like a fool is pretty respectable.
Then again, there were always going to be limits on where Black could go as well. He had his fair share of sentimental moments onscreen, but since he’s probably going to go down in history as the rock and roll elementary school teacher or the cheerful panda that learned kung fu, it’s safe to say that the same applies to music whenever he tries to make tunes with Kyle Gass.
Many of their best tunes have a lot of great musical peaks, but Black that reached the level of bands like Pearl Jam were out of their grasp, saying, “I believe to my core that that’s not what we were meant to do. We played the wrap party of Dead Man Walking, and Sean Penn said, ‘Why aren’t you a real band?’. I said, ‘What do you mean, like Pearl Jam? Because we’re not. We make fun of those serious bands.’ There’s enough serious bands. There’s not enough Tenacious Ds.”
That hasn’t stopped the big names from playing with the group every now and again. Black has been able to share the stage with everyone from Grohl to James Hetfield of Metallica, but anyone who’s got good ears will listen to a song like ‘The Metal’ and know that Black understands what makes a good tune the minute that he goes into those extremely tight harmonies.
Others might see it as a missed opportunity for Black not to make any serious tunes, but there’s no way that he was ever going to sit down with an acoustic guitar to write a breakup song or anything. His music feeds off of having a lot of humour behind it, and no matter how much rocket sauce he puts on a tune, Black wasn’t going to let a song slide if he thought it wasn’t funny enough.
