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>> EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Listen to outtakes from this interview: Jack Black and Kyle Gass on meeting Jerry Seinfeld, their early years learning how to play guitar, and on Tenacious D's new over-the-top live show.
A few years back, rock parodists Tenacious D recorded "Dio," a tribute (of sorts) to former Black Sabbath frontman Ronnie James Dio. In the song, Jack Black -- the actor, who formed Tenacious D in the mid-Nineties with his friend Kyle Gass -- praises Dio's "songs of wildebeests and angels" before commanding the diminutive metal god to "pass the torch."
"You're too old to rock/No more rockin' for you/We're taking you to a home/But we will sing a song about you/And we will make sure that you're very well taken care of/You'll tell us the secrets that you've learned. . . ./Dio! Time to go!/You must give your cape and scepter to me!/And a smaller one for KG."
On a recent November evening, Black, 37, and Gass, 46, strolled up the center aisle of the majestic Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles for the premiere of the long-awaited Tenacious D feature film, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. Both men wore capes and held scepters. They also had crowns on their heads, befitting their status as "the Greatest Band on Earth." (Not to give too much away, but in the film the D earn this title by seeking out a magical guitar pick that appears on the cover of this magazine.) By the time of the premiere, the Pick of Destiny soundtrack had already hit Number One on the iTunes album chart, and the video for the first single, "POD" -- which basically retells the plot of the movie with rock guitars -- was in heavy rotation on MTV. The film, meanwhile, seems poised to be the fall stoner comedy to beat. (Barring extremely surprising plot departures in that new version of Charlotte's Web.) According to the opening credits, The Pick of Destiny was filmed in "THC," and even Variety, in an advance review, warned that "theaters would be wise to disarm smoke detectors" for screenings.
Dio himself, symbolic bestower of cape and scepter, makes a cameo in the film bursting from a poster on young Black's door, singing, "To learn the ancient method, secret doors you must unlock. . . ./You will face your inner demons, now go, my son, and rock!" -- and was also in the audience at the premiere. At the afterparty, in the historic Roosevelt Hotel just across Hollywood Boulevard, Ben Stiller, who appears in the film as a Guitar Center clerk, greeted Andy Dick with a hug, while Dave Grohl, who also appears in the film (as an extravagantly horned demon), mingled with fans.
Dio stood in a corner with his wife and a towering man who got him drinks and appeared to be a personal assistant or bodyguard. "Jack called and said, 'We want you to play the part of Ronnie James Dio, and if you don't do it, we won't make the movie,'" Dio recalled. "Then he said, 'Well, we will make the movie. But it'll be shitty.'" Dio chuckled and continued, "Someone told me about the 'Dio' song when it came out. They said, 'It's a real slag-off, you shouldn't listen to it, you'll be angry.' But I did listen to it, and I thought, 'Oh, this is cool! They're being nice.'"
And therein lies the genius of the D. By playing raunchy, over-the-top, hilariously self-mythologizing heavy-metal songs on acoustic guitars, Black and Gass are clearly mocking the occasional -- OK, frequent -- pomposity and ridiculousdess of the genre. But Black and Gass also clearly, genuinely adore metal's pomposity and ridiculousdess. Like Spinal Tap before them, the D have recognized that the only way to effectively parody a genre so given to self-parody is by way of the Method actor's full embrace. In other words, in order to properly ridicule Yngwie Malmsteen, one must first become Yngwie Malmsteen.
Fans of the D's brilliant, short-lived HBO series -- now available on the DVD Tenacious D: The Complete Master Works -- will find more of the same in the funny (if less consistent) The Pick of Destiny, which traces the original story of the duo. There is a psychedelic mushroom sequence involving Black and the Sasquatch. There is a cameo by Meat Loaf, playing Black's fundamentalist Christian father. There are cock push-ups.
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In many ways, Tenacious D operate like a classic comedy team -- right down to the sight gag of their own appearance, only instead of a fat guy and a skinny guy, it's a fat guy and a slightly fatter guy. The first time I met the D, at the Dust Brothers' recording studio a few years ago, Black was eating a salad. After he finished, he lifted the plate to his face and began lapping up the creamy dressing with his tongue. Pausing to look at me, the plate still parallel to his face, he asked, "Is this disgusting to you? If it is, I will stop."
"You're fine," I said.
"Let me know if you change your mind," Black continued, his tongue still caressing the plate. "I. Will. Stop."
The day after the premiere of The Pick of Destiny, on a sunny patio in Beverly Hills, Black -- in jeans, a Beastie Boys T-shirt and an upscale haircut -- is looking more like the movie star he has become since the D's lean years of playing to alt-comedy groupies at tiny Los Angeles clubs like Largo. Slight variations on his obnoxious Tenacious D persona in films like High Fidelity and School of Rock made Black, with his ever-dancing eyebrows and semi-crazed glare, a much-sought-after comedic presence in Hollywood. His drawing power was enough to make even last summer's largely unfunny Nacho Libre a hit, and he's also graduated to roles in films as mainstream as King Kong and the upcoming romantic comedy The Holiday. Black also recently became a father. His wife, Tanya Haden, is a cellist and the daughter of jazz bassist Charlie Haden. They'd known each other since high school, but the teenage metalhead-stoner version of Black had been too shy to make a move. Then, in 2005, after Black had broken up with his longtime girlfriend, the comedian Laura Kightlinger, he ran into Haden at Frank Black's fortieth birthday party, where the D were the house band. They eloped after dating less than a year.
Gass, meanwhile, seems little changed. He is the fatter one. This afternoon he is wearing a MANDALAY BAY LAS VEGAS T-shirt over baggy blue shorts, along with white tube socks and thong sandals. Much of his hair is gone, and aside from a sandy-brown crop-circle of goatee, his cheeks are covered with gray stubble. Outside of the D, Gass has played smaller character roles in films like Elf, and, of late, he's been on the road with his side project, Trainwreck, a mock Southern-rock band.
Black and Gass both grew up in California -- Gass in Walnut Creek, a town north of San Francisco, and Black in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb Hermosa Beach. Gass' father was a fireman and his mother was a dental hygienist. "They get offended by some of the jokes," Gass says. "But the success trumps everything. Not just success, but making money. They were at the premiere last night. It almost didn't matter what I did. I could have been a Maytag repairman, as long as I was bringing home the bacon."
Black's parents were rocket scientists; his mother worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. "I got the 'rock' science," Black says, "but I didn't get the 'et.'" Black's parents split up when he was ten, but not before attempting to save their marriage by joining Family Synergy, a very Seventies, very Southern California polyamorous group. In an interview with GQ, Black described attending nudist camps with his folks, as well as the period in which a woman moved in with the Black family for an ill-fated ménage.
Black started acting as a teenager, appearing in television commercials. He met Gass while studying acting at UCLA, when he joined the Actor's Gang, a political experimental theater group co-founded by Tim Robbins, which Gass belonged to. The D played their first gig in 1994.
"We sort of sniffed each other out as musical cohorts," Gass recalls. "The show we did together was called The Big Show, which was a comic look at the Nicaraguan situation, and we both contributed music to that. Jack was doing some great multi-harmony stuff."
"They were jingles for a Nicaraguan game show," Black says. "If I didn't make it in acting or rocking, I could have been a good jingle maker for commercials."
GASS: It's a good fallback plan.
BLACK: Isn't that what Seinfeld did? After he bailed on his TV show, he just started making commercials.
GASS: He went into advertising. Because, well, he figured, he didn't have a billion dollars yet, so he wanted to push it over. He didn't have enough Porsches, so I think he had to get in there and make some more money.
BLACK: I saw him the other day.
GASS: [In Seinfeld's voice] "Why, if I have a hundred Porsches, do I need fifty more? I don't know. Maybe my penis is too small?"
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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]