Review: Tenacious D.
We don't get out much, it's true; and for fear of revealing our age we hesistate to mention which Britpop act was strutting about in its louche fashion last time we found ourselves standing among the masses in front of a big stage.
So when Mr. Edwards provided the means for an impromptu field trip to the land of craning-our-necks-above-taller-people-to-catch-a-50-yard-glimpse-of-a-guitarist, we felt it was about time. Our destination was the Tenacious D show at Roseland; for those few of you as culturally behind the curve as we apparently are, Tenacious D is actor-goofball Jack Black and more musically talented partner Kyle Gass making "real" what they did in a set of shorts originially produced for Comedy Central and HBO: they form a monstrously and hilariously self-aggrandizing "band" - whose musical armament consists almost entirely of their two acoustic guitars - and their goal is the elevation of the Dorm Room Guitarist to superstardom. They don't cover Zep or "Freebird," but the notion of doing so with great earnestness is implicit in their entire act.
(Yes, yes, Spinal Tap. Right. We know. But still. It's different enough. And they don't fake any accents or make up names for themselves).
Aided by a gigantic backdrop of a winged Satan (of course), smoke machines which billow at key dramatic intervals, and a couple of roadies to play off of (as well as a small cast of less compelling secondary characters), Black and K.G. create a convincing pastiche of heavy-duty Rawk of the sort every Gen-X'er grew up with.* Jack struts the stage, rhymes a lot of things with "Tenacious D" at a blistering pace which would do any would-be rap-metal frontman proud, and is clearly having a very good time. His cooler-headed cohort Kyle plays just well enough to make many of the pieces tuneful references to the galloping guitars of yore (again, think of that guy in college who would strum out "A Horse With No Name" with a lot of feeling and you get the general idea). And Black is always ready to launch into a loopy vocal "solo" consisting of nonsense syllables babbled out in rough imitation of a noodling heavy-metal guitar turn.
While a lot of the bits are undercooked one-offs, funny more in the conception than in the execution (there's a guffaw-worthy song about how it's time for Ronnie James Dio to "pass the torch", for example, that Black seems to have just stopped writing after it hit about 90 seconds), they do well in the stage banter in between, Black's blustery persona suddenly deflating: "Take a solo, dude. I'm tired out from 'Hornets Nest' " -- that being Tenacious D.'s appropriately braindead "commentary" on the political situation in the Middle East. When Black decides that he needs a chair to stand on (in deference to "all of the short people out there") it turns into a subtle one-upmanship contest that invokes, of all things, The Smothers Brothers.
There is of course the Rock-Star-As-Sex-God thing, which Black does so effortlessly one realizes that he probably really does have his pick of screaming fangirls from the audience. Along similar lines is their paean to "The Road" which is such a great beating of a dead horse it makes you wonder why the sport is so unpopular. And Black and Gass are pitch-perfect in a few longer songs which combine geeky melody/time signature changes with flaky mysticism and the construction of some kind of Bowie-esque story involving superheros and the band itself.
In moments like this, Tenacious D. do more than earnestly re-enact the kinds of pleasantly dumb music that Spinal Tap and Wayne's World spent their yuks on. They also skewer the easy surrealism of a lot of bands we'd like to think don't have anything to do with Dorm Room Rock. Fifteen minutes of Tenacious D. will probably change the way you listen to, say, Neutral Milk Hotel, which is as good a reason as any to approach with caution - we likes our hipster pretentiousness just fine, thanks, and it was a wee bit troubling to be reminded that in the dark it's hard to tell your Guided By Voices from your Yes.
None of this, we suspect, would have been all that much fun if we'd heard a single note before coming to the show (and would have been twice as much fun if we'd been in a club one-fifth the size). Which why the presence of a packed crowd who knew the songs was a bit hard to explain. Fully aware of the gag status of the band, they wanted simultaneously to treat Tenacious D. as real, and the amount of singing along was perplexing at first. Do people get pleasure out of seeing a comedy act for which they can already repeat every joke? The answer, we conclude, is yes. Jack Black is offering up comfort food to the fans, a familiar and reassuring experience where you can rock your cake and laugh at it, too. The songs are so familiar the newcomer almost thinks he's heard them before; and Black, for all his glower and strut, is a teddy bear waiting to be hugged on a cold January night. Know the lines, join the club, and feel cozy. It's not in the end for us -- but there are worse antitodes for the midwinter doldrums.
*For our readers outside of these borders - the occasional New Wave single aside, U.S. radio in the early/mid 80's was dominated by an invention called Classic Rock, which was sort of an endless mix tape of all of the ponderous, guitar-heavy AOR produced from 1970-1978, salted with a little inferior heavy metal, plus late hits by aging bands thrown in for good measure. Even those of us who naturally drawn to, say, the Soft Boys have "Dust in the Wind" and suchlike locked up note-for-note in memory's cage.
Posted by B T at January 23, 2002 10:11 AM