The worst concert of Jack Black’s life: “That was a disaster”
Jack Black may have had twice as hard to earn his music stripes when he decided to actually embark on a career in the industry in the 1990s.
Because, despite Black’s clear rock and roll fandom and an otherwise obvious destiny on stage, he chose to double down on acting. And rightly so, for there was clearly a unique comedic talent within him that needed to be explored both on stage and on screen, and so in the ‘90s, an exciting silver screen career began.
The rapid success of that proved threatening to the nagging desire to return to music. Cross-platform careers can often feel gimmicky, and in the case of Black, someone who had carved a definitive niche for himself within the comedic circuit, a sudden twist to rock and roll drama threatened to undercut both endeavours. But he cannily combined the two, forming Tenacious D with Kyle Gass and tapping into the bizarre zeitgeist of rock comedy.
Fast forward to the present day, and this overlapping career makes perfect sense. Films, albums and live shows all intersect with one another underneath the Jack Black and Tenacious D umbrella. The entertainment product is as original as it is fun and compelling, but maybe that’s because he has mastered his craft and learned how to turn Tenacious D into a righteous rock outfit after so many years of struggling.
“That was a disaster,” Black once said of one of their early shows, proving that, yes, Tenacious D was once deemed a rock and roll laughing stock. It all came when he played a show in Las Vegas, organised by a radio show who flew lucky rock and roll fans out to ‘Sin City’, so long as they won a quiz on their show.
The prize this time around was a chance to see one of rock’s finest outfits, unbeknownst to the participants that it was an early formation of Tenacious D.
Black continued, “So everyone’s just like, ‘Oh man, I bet it’s like gonna be U2, it’s probably gonna be Led Zeppelin, it’s probably gonna be…’ and then the curtain opens, and it’s all these drunk people from all over the country who’ve been flown to Vegas, and then they see it’s Tenacious D.”
They were promptly met with booing and pelting them with spit and ice cubes, and Black remembered, “I’m looking around and thinking, ‘Is there anyone that’s enjoying this?’, but I felt like after that, I felt like we got stronger. We were stronger because of it, because there was something really funny about being booed that hard, too. In a weird way, it might have been our best show.”
This is ultimately where Black’s onscreen career would have come in handy. He would have been harshly exposed to the coldness of rejection and would have therefore known that the only way to win is to keep going. Tenacious D did that and pushed through the boos, only to earn their stripes at the other end and be considered a proper, rock and roll outfit.
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