The 1970 song Jack Black will never get tired of hearing: “Most power”
There aren’t many rock and roll fans who are as pure as Jack Black has been.
The entire point of him being a rock fan wouldn’t have been taken seriously if he only did School of Rock, but across every single generation, he wanted to prove to everyone that he could walk the walk, whether he was playing his own music or trying his hand at singing in a handful of his movies He definitely had the voice to become one of the biggest names in music, but he felt much more at home singing about the fantastical aspects of the world.
Let’s face it: the guy wasn’t going to be taken seriously the same way that Robert Plant or Mick Jagger was, and since he was already a comedic actor, it made more sense for him to lean into that side. Tenacious D’s lyrics are a lot more sophomoric than most people might be used to, but that’s half the reason why they work. The appeal is knowing that these are some of the most ridiculous lyrics ever put to tape, and yet they manage to sound like they are one of the best-produced bands ever.
And that’s all down to the people that they have in their corner. Most parody bands don’t have the good fortune of having people like The Dust Brothers or Ken Andrews of Failure willing to work with them all the time, but Black was forever grateful to at least be in close proximity to them. But even if they had the best in alternative music, Black had his eye on something bigger when he worked on The Pick of Destiny.
He wanted the chance to make the perfect concept album for their parody band, and getting someone like Ronnie James Dio to sing with him is still one of the coolest things that he had ever done. Dio was a god among men, and despite his short stature, he towered over everybody in the room when he opened his mouth to sing. But let’s not forget the person that Dio replaced in Black Sabbath, either.
Black was the one championing Ozzy Osbourne from the minute that he heard Blizzard of Ozz for the first time, and his homework going back to the early Sabbath records was like unearthing lost gems. Every single one of Osbourne’s records with them had some good stuff on it, but for a band that was all about rock and roll more than anything, Black felt that nothing compared to listening to a song like ‘War Pigs’.
It’s not very often that a hard rock band got political in those days, but Black fell in love with the messaging behind the song as well as the riffs, saying, “I went deeper into the catalogue and found some powerful gems. My favourite of all time is probably ‘War Pigs’. It’s just Black Sabbath at their most raw power and there’s also this sort of anti-war message that you don’t really think of when you think of Sabbath. There’s this peaceful centre. That’s the dichotomy of the Sabbath.”
And to anyone that still thinks that Sabbath were nothing but a bunch of stoner kids trying to champion off of Satanism, listen to this song. If anything, the song is one of the greatest moral lessons that anyone has against warmongers, with individual verses sounding like they could have been written by Bob Dylan at his most cynical.
The chances of Black getting political would have probably ruined the fun of a love of Tenacious D’s material, but he wasn’t going to say no to hearing Sabbath go in a heavier lyrical direction, either. Every riff they played sounded heavier than steel every single time they performed, so wouldn’t it make sense that the music followed suit and dealt with some difficult subjects every now and again?
