73% of the Way to Being the World's Greatest Rock Band

BLACK: I think he really had a love for commercials. He would have made more money staying on Seinfeld. He turned down a billion, probably.

GASS: Yeah, that's true.

BLACK: But I saw him the other day, at this Robert Smigel benefit for autism, and he cut me down a little bit in the hallway. "Hey, Jack Black, nice to meet you. I really liked you in the Titani- I mean, the King Kong." And I could not for the life of me come back with a snappy snapback at him.

GASS: Nobody probably could. He's probably king of the snapback.

BLACK: I was just befuddled.

GASS: They get you on that.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh, yes. The duo met in the Actor's Gang, where Gass taught Black guitar. Gass is fairly certain the first song he taught Black was by Tom Petty. ("'The rain was unstoppable,'" Gass sings. "That one.") Black, in turn, hipped Gass, who describes himself as "more of a folky, Crosby, Stills and Nash kind of guy," to bands like Metallica.

"I have to think that lit a spark," Black says. "Because we were listening to 'One,' but we just had two acoustic guitars."

"I'll tell you the exact story," says Gass. "Jack said, 'Check out this song. I think it's the greatest song ever. But then again, every song Metallica does is the greatest song ever, because they're just so over the top and huge.' And I was like, 'Yeah, that's true.' As fledgling songwriters, it doesn't cost anything to try to write the greatest song ever. So we kicked that around for a couple of days. Then Jack finally said, 'We can write a tribute to the greatest song ever.' And I was like, 'What?' I didn't know what he was talking about, quite frankly. But then I caught on. And that was the first song we wrote."

The song was "Tribute," in which Tenacious D, in the grand tradition of the Charlie Daniels Band, find themselves challenged to a battle of the bands with the devil and end up vanquishing him by playing the Greatest Song in the World. (The punch line of "Tribute" being that the song they are now playing is not actually the Greatest Song in the World, which they cannot remember: "The song we sang on that fateful night, it didn't actually sound anything like this song. . . ./This is just a tribute!/You gotta believe it!")

"We had offers to do a movie probably a year after we started," recalls Gass. "When you've got something hot in L.A., the first thing people think of is, 'We can turn this into a movie!'"

After numerous fits and starts, the pair eventually settled on fellow L.A. comic Liam Lynch to direct The Pick of Destiny. A musician himself, Lynch had scored a minor joke-rock hit of his own in 2003 with "United States of Whatever"; he also created the MTV cult series The Sifl and Olly Show and directed Sarah Silverman's concert movie, Jesus Is Magic.

"Liam did a couple of short films for us, and a documentary of us on the road," says Black. "Kyle would say, 'He's batting a thousand!' And I would say, 'Dude, don't say a thousand, because in baseball, if a guy is batting .400, he's the best player of all time. Just say he's batting .800.' But he insisted that Liam was batting a thousand. After that, there was no way he wasn't gonna end up directing the movie."

Black had initially hired outside screenwriters, but he grew frustrated as their treatments turned his characters into Bill and Ted-type metalheads. "I told Jack, 'I don't know why you're expecting someone else to tell you what the D is, when you guys are the D,'" Lynch says. "He was like, 'Dude, you gotta help us.'" Black and Lynch worked on the script together "every night for fifty straight nights," says Lynch. "He'd come over at around 8 p.m. and we'd work until five or six in the morning." Every couple of days Gass would come over and approve or veto various ideas. "He was our sounding board and unbiased opinion," says Lynch.

Along the way, the film encountered problems.A November 2005 test screening bombed, prompting the studio to shoot a new ending. "We shot it two years ago, and then did a re-shoot a year ago, and then a re-re-shoot about six months ago," admits Gass. "It took forever. Oh, my God, dude."

The script finally coalesced when Black and Gass settled on making a mock biopic -- the story of how a young would-be rocker (Black) flees his oppressive family and moves to L.A., where he meets an older would-be rocker (Gass) busking on Venice Beach. In the film, the D start off playing open-mike nights and eventually learn of the fabled "pick of destiny" (chipped from a devil's tooth), used by guitarists from Robert Johnson to Angus Young. They embark upon a quest to find it, culminating in a Mission: Impossible-style break-in at a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-style museum, along with another rock-off with Satan.

With their film hitting theaters, the D decided it would be the perfect time to launch their biggest tour ever, one that will take them to Madison Square Garden. Black, describing the stage show, says, "It starts in Kyle's apartment. We both wake up on the power couch. And we realize there's a theater full of people in Kyle's apartment, and we have to rock. So we get up and do it. But somewhere in the middle of it, we die. And the stage is transformed into hell. And it's fuckin' big. It's 3-D, it looks like hell goes on for miles. I feel like, after this tour, we can just go straight into a Broadway run."

All of this complicates the gag, of course. For the first time ever, the D will be touring with a full band. But are joke-metal songs still funny when, rather than being played by two dudes on acoustic guitars, they actually rock? And how much do Black and Gass actually, sort of sincerely, want to be rock stars? When I ask them how much of Tenacious D is two actors playing characters and how much is simply an exaggeration of their true personalities, Black says, "Seventy-three percent real."

Gass has been talking on his cell phone and didn't hear my question, or Black's answer. When I repeat it, he says, "Probably around seventy-five to seventy-six percent."

"That's always been our shtick," Black says, "is that it's not really a shtick."

"Part of the experiment," Gass tells me later, "has always been, what if we think we're the most awesome thing ever? There's a certain percentage of people who will buy into that, no matter what, just because we're saying, 'Listen to me: We're the greatest fucking thing you're gonna see.' You create your own reality. Even if it's not real."

[From Issue 1015 — December 14, 2006]