The one singer Dave Grohl and Jack Black agreed was the best in metal
The rock and roll that Dave Grohl and Jack Black love is the kind of thing that hits you in the gut before reaching your heart.
There are plenty of acts like The Beatles that have become a part of rock and roll legend at this point, but when listening to any Foo Fighters song or the odd Tenacious D banger, there are pieces of their sound that are a lot more indebted to the hard rock that The Who and Led Zeppelin pioneered years after the Fab Four made their debut. The riffs may be one part of what made their songs so special, but having that one magical frontman wasn’t lost on either of them.
Granted, it’s not like Grohl was going to be looking like a rock n’ roll god every time he got onstage. He learned a long time ago that it was much better to be himself onstage, and the thought of him trying to channel his inner David Lee Roth or Robert Plant was never going to work all that well. And whenever Black took the stage, he seemed to be the antithesis of what a traditional rock frontman should be.
For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to rock hard with only an acoustic guitar in your hand, but Black found a way on the strength of pure charm. A song like ‘Tribute’ might benefit from having a full band behind it, but even if it were only Black and Kyle Gass playing the song, you can tell that Black means every single thing he’s singing. He was a student of rock and roll like everyone else, but he and Grohl always found time for rock and roll’s darker cousin: heavy metal.
Then again, there’s still some debate over when metal truly started. There’s a case to be made for The Kinks starting the heavy metal guitar riff with ‘You Really Got Me’, and The Who and The Beatles had their fair share of heavy tunes in their arsenal, but whereas they were flirting with something heavy, Black Sabbath made it into a style of music. And while Tony Iommi singlehandedly invented the heavy metal guitar riff, no one could ever deny what Ozzy Osbourne was doing on vocals.
He was the embodiment of what heavy metal is supposed to be, and when inducting ‘The Prince of Darkness’ into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Black had no problem calling him one of the greatest frontman rock and roll had ever seen, saying, “[He was a] plumber, car horn tuner, slaughterhouse worker, the greatest frontman in the history of rock and roll. This motherfucker invented heavy metal, along with Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and the immortal Tony Iommi, the darkest, heaviest shit the world had ever heard. And through all that power, Ozzy’s voice carving through the Sonic Blast Furnace like an air raid siren.”
But while Black is never short on words when talking about the greatest icons of rock, Grohl was more interested in Osbourne’s vocal delivery when he first heard him, saying, “His singing voice is very distinctive. His signature sound is a doubled vocal. He sings the line once and then sings it again and that creates the effect, almost like a phase or a flange. When he sings the line the second time they match up perfectly – not something everyone can do. He has this laser, crystal tone that can cut through the incredibly heavy music behind him.”
Getting those vocal lines to line up like that might seem impossible, but that came from Osbourne doing his rock and roll homework when listening to The Beatles. The double-tracked vocal was something John Lennon used all the time, and while Osbourne did have a few songs in his arsenal that were Beatlesque, you weren’t going to mistake him for anyone else when he started singing ‘Crazy Train’.
He may have had his fair share of controversial moments throughout his career, but if you look past all of the crazy antics, the reason why we’re still talking about him today is because of the great musician he always was. Osbourne didn’t really like the idea of him being the godfather of heavy metal, but there’s no doubt that everyone who’s ever picked up a guitar and made a metallic riff is working off the playbook that Osbourne helped write.
