The two iconic bands Jack Black admitted to stealing from: “Not enough to sue us”
Every rockstar gets their ideas from somewhere. Art requires discipline and that discipline comes from sitting down with your instrument and listening to a lot of great records before anyone starts forming the basis of what sounds like a great tune. Jack Black didn’t even bother hiding his greatest inspirations, and when he hit the ground running with Tenacious D, he admitted that Metallica and Led Zeppelin were the basis behind ‘Tribute’.
Then again, if you’re talking yourself up as being one of the greatest bands in the world, it’s hard to miss when you choose both Metallica and Led Zeppelin as the basis. Next to someone like The Beatles, who transcended genre boundaries, Led Zeppelin may be the face of what hard rock was supposed to look like, down to the Les Paul guitar slung around Jimmy Page’s back half the time.
As far as Metallica is concerned, their turn as superstars with The Black Album put them in the conversation of the greatest of all time. They were already filling stadiums before they even had a proper video out on MTV, so even though millions were buying their albums now, it was more or less confirming what a lot of fans already knew about them.
So with those two bands as their guide, Black and Kyle Gass set about making ‘Tribute’, the perfect song ripped straight out of a B-movie Western. While the idea of someone going down a long and lonesome road and a demon showing up has been played out at this point, the whole reason why it works so well is that Black puts so much of his personality into it, including the incredible scat breakdown where they topple the demon with the power of rock.
Despite being the composers of the greatest song in the world that nobody has actually heard, Black did admit that ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Zeppelin and Metallica’s ‘One’ were his guides, telling ActuallyMe, “I mean, we had influence from Zeppelin because we used some of their chords, but not enough to sue us. And also there’s influence from Metallica’s ‘One’ because we were listening to that at the time of the original version.”
Listening back to it, it’s easy to tell that this is a clear homage to a song like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in the sense that the entire thing is supposed to be somewhat episodic. There’s no part of ‘Tribute’ that they really return to, so it’s almost like the comedic version of ‘Stairway’ mixed with the raw metallic edge of what James Hetfield put into ‘One’.
But let it be known that scribes such as Page and James Hetfield can only imagine getting to the same level that Black could reach when he beat Satan in the middle of a crossroads. Of course, we all don’t know what that would actually sound like because our ears aren’t blessed with such fortunes, so it seems we’ll have to settle with the pretty kickass tribute song to that fateful day.
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