The one singer Jack Black was too powerful to record: “Just too big a voice”
The fandom that Jack Black has for all things rock and roll has always been about more than simple gimmick.
While School of Rock was ages ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the kind of rock and roll teacher that he plays in the movie isn’t that far off from who he is in real life. He has always been happy to prop up any of his favourite bands, but there are often those few singers that are almost too good to be true.
Then again, it’s not that hard to see Black wearing his influences on his sleeve whenever he played with Tenacious D. Comedy bands had certainly existed before, but when listening to a track like ‘Tribute’, Black wasn’t looking to make a typical parody of a rock and roll tune. He wanted to make the comedy rock equivalent of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and that didn’t come without doing his homework.
He was always the first to claim that Led Zeppelin was one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, but what Zeppelin did stretched far beyond rock. Although the band never claimed to be anything more than a bunch of musicians playing hard rock, the heaviness of their music managed to have a massive impact on everything that metal would become in the years since their formation.
It’s not hard to see their influence on a band like Black Sabbath, for instance, but what Ozzy Osbourne did was far more inventive than Robert Plant’s bellowing pipes. ‘The Prince of Darkness’ wanted to make music that would scare the living daylights out of any parent who heard their children listening to his record, but when he left the fold, Black found his new favourite metal vocalist when Ronnie James Dio took over.
For someone that was so small, Dio managed to pack every single ounce of emotion that he could into whatever he was singing. Whether that was his solo work on Holy Diver or delivering one of the most dramatic vocals of all time on ‘Heaven and Hell’, he was never one to half-ass anything he sang, so Black knew that he would be perfect for when Tenacious D needed a few rockstar cameos for The Pick of Destiny.
It’s one thing to have Dio in the room, but when they began laying down tracks for the album, Black remembered that his idol was almost too good to be properly recorded, saying, “He brought a microphone still attached to the stand. We’re like ‘Awesome, but we got the best mics in the world here.’ It sounds like I’m making this up, but dude laid down such a heavy vocal that it was distorting. We went through three or four state-of-the-art microphones, and he was just too big a voice for these microphones.”
While that would have been any other producer’s nightmare, getting to witness that kind of singing in the flesh would have been otherworldly. Dio was clearly a craftsman whenever he sang, but even after putting his voice through so much wear and tear with Sabbath, Dio, and even Rainbow before everything, the ferocity that he had in his voice seemed to be coming from deep within him every time he sang.
Which probably explains why Black ended up taking so much care of his own voice whenever he started singing with ‘The D’. The entire band was clearly a joke whenever they stepped out onstage, but that didn’t mean that the music itself needed to suffer if the rest of the lyrics were all about making sex jokes.
