The Who were so powerful that Jack Black believes it will “never be seen again”
For someone who has taken to the screen more than the stage, Jack Black has never stopped being a student of music.
His voice is one of the central parts of so many classic films, but he was clearly a hard rock singer in a past life, and some of his favourite bands are a good look into the kind of music he was always meant to play.
But going back through his filmography, it was somewhat hard to pin down the kind of music that Black listened to compared to what he talked about in interviews. Anyone who jams out to bands like Led Zeppelin in School of Rock seems like the guy who would listen to nonstop hard rock every time they get in the car, but when listening to Tenacious D, no one gets to make those close vocal harmonies without being compared to someone like Simon and Garfunkel, either.
And for Black, there were never any rules for where music could go. Yes, he could sing the praises of rock and roll giants like Ozzy Osbourne, but who says he couldn’t try his hand at singing beautiful ballads like ‘Wicked Game’ if he wanted to or turn Britney Spears’s ‘Baby One More Time’ into one of the most impassioned vocals that he ever spat out. But that kind of imagination only comes from listening to artists who weren’t afraid to push the envelope when they started as well.
You have to remember that there were no rules for where rock and roll could go. No one told Queen that they were allowed to make something as daring as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but the fact that they managed to get away with it is half the reason why rock endures. It isn’t afraid to break down the barriers around them, and when listening to The Who, you can tell that Pete Townshend was never going to be satisfied making typical pop-rock singles.
They were masters of that format for a while, but there was always room for him to grow, and projects like Tommy and Quadrophenia were opportunities to build on what he had done before. And while Black was still a fan of music thinking that most rock stars were gods among men, he knew that what The Who were doing with their rock operas was a one-off in rock and roll that no one could match.
Even if he loved albums like Tommy, Black was never expecting anyone else to touch that kind of territory again, saying, “No other band had the courage or sensitivity to write those kinds of emotionally raw songs. Achingly beautiful melodies touched by the hand of god. Or the devil. Or both. Or neither. I must say neither. Just a collection of ass-kicking songs, the likes of which will never be seen again! On the battlefield of rock, they went toe to toe with the likes of Hendrix and emerged unscathed.”
That didn’t mean that Black didn’t try to get somewhere close to them when he made music, though. The Pick of Destiny is already one of the greatest stoner rock comedies ever made, but if you listen to the album itself, it’s easy to hear him taking a few cues from the episodic parts of Tommy, especially when connecting each of the songs together and making them flow like a coherent story.
Plenty of other rock stars have come forward with their own approaches to the rock opera, but for every American Idiot that sets the world on fire again, Black knew that The Who were the true godfathers of that flavour of hard rock. Most people can try to emulate them, but no one’s going to be able to eclipse what Townshend did.
