Is this the end of Jack Black’s spoof rock band Tenacious D? It could be, after his bandmate Kyle Gass’s comments on Sunday led his more famous partner to cancel their world tour and announce “all future creative plans are on hold”.
The band were midway through a show in Sydney when Black suggested his bandmate make a wish for his birthday. “Don’t miss Trump next time,” Gass responded, apparently referring to the attempted assassination of the former US president the day before. Both have long been critical of Trump, but Black seems to have quickly realised the joke had crossed a line. “I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form,” he later said in a statement, claiming to have been “blindsided” by the comment.
For his part, the equally mortified Gass wrote: “The line I improvised Sunday night in Sydney was highly inappropriate, dangerous and a terrible mistake. I don’t condone violence in any kind, in any form, against anyone. What happened [the shooting] was a tragedy, and I’m incredibly sorry for my severe lack of judgement.”
If this is indeed the end, it’s a sad and sorry demise for a partnership which always seemed to know exactly where to draw the line. Their shows may long have been littered with F-bombs, references to sexual deviancy, drug abuse, inflatable Satans and a parody of a power ballad titled Fuck Her Gently, but it’s always been in good fun and there’s never been anything actively, properly outrageous. Equally, as Gass’s comment about improvisation suggests, what makes this howler so out of character is that their stage routines are usually meticulously scripted with the same precision they bring to the visuals (giant robots, dragons and all) and the music.
Anyone who’s seen a Tenacious D show will know that they weren’t just a great spoof rock band, but a fantastic rock band in themselves. Partly, this was because, like This Is Spinal Tap, Black and Gass had a deep knowledge and indeed affection for the subject they were sending up.
Their gigantic rubber demon was based on 80s rocker Dio’s real-life 18ft dragon, Denzil. Their “sound crew solo” drily went “check, 1-2”. From Black’s operatic metal vocal to their exquisite guitar duelling, the musicianship has always been impeccable and while their songwriting wasn’t always as good, their best epic anthems could almost have been lost rock classics themselves (had they not been full of lyrics about beasts and farting). The masterful Tribute retold the meet-the-devil-at-the-crossroads myth so well they created the “greatest song in the world”, promptly forgetting how it went (hence the “tribute”). Such masterly, knowing tomfoolery enjoyed the respect of “real-life” peers from Beck to Pearl Jam. Dave Grohl was certainly in on the joke when the oft-called “nicest guy in rock” agreed to star as Satan in the video for Tribute, and then also the 2006 Tenacious D film The Pick of Destiny.
At the heart of their art was a deep, decades-long friendship between Black and Gass, which produced such wonderful chemistry onstage. Having met as struggling actors who formed the group in 1994 as a joke, before films such as High Fidelity or School of Rock turned Black into a superstar, their bond was strong enough to survive Black’s career upturn. The actor-singer once knowingly compared the duo to “Simon and Garfunkel and Black Sabbath mixed together” and indeed, just as Art Garfunkel’s voice needed Paul Simon’s songs and vice versa, Black’s comic timing benefited hugely from the classically trained Gass’s formidable abilities as a musician and comedic foil.
Their fortunes certainly waxed and waned – The Pick of Destiny flopped at the box office – but 2012 album Rize of the Fenix hit the US and UK Top 10 and this latest tour returned them to arenas around the world. On their recent British dates, audiences chanted “D!” and sang along with every word. One of the funniest bits was a sketch in which Gass dramatically “left the band”, leading Black to respond with a heartfelt ballad titled Dude (I Totally Miss You). Only time will tell whether the seemingly now genuinely estranged pair will get the band back together.
