Tenacious D plays at being the ultimate rock-blockers: shredding metal music mainline, making fun while giving a big hug to the largest, lamest excesses of fans and musicians.
In the origin story that scampers from Los Angeles to Sacramento to the gates of Hell in “Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny,” Jack Black (JB) and Kyle Gass (The Kage) dispense with subplots in a quest for the pick used by the greatest of guitarists, carved from a busted tooth of the devil. Talking to the slim, sly offstage creator of “The D,” I had to wonder what he thinks is the essence of the act. “How would I describe ‘The D?’ Oh, God,” 36-year-old musician-writer-director Liam Lynch (also behind “Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic” and “The Sifl & Ollie” MTV show) moans. Are they satirists? “They’re Satanists,” Lynch deadpans. After the shortest of beats, he continues: “They have a classic chemistry that you will see in every single duo, and that goes from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello to Ren and Stimpy, which is, the guy who moves a lot and the guy who doesn’t. It’s this funny, animated one, and the straight [guy], basically. It’s a winning combination; it doesn’t matter if their thing is rock or whatever, just in general. But they also have another level, which is they have the everyman sort of quality, because they aren’t good-looking like… Well, they’re both handsome guys, but they’re not the in-shape, typical, movie-star type of duo. I think that that makes them more relatable, and on top of that, and because of that, you root for them in their dreams. Everybody has something they’d like to be. Everybody’s got a song they’ve sung in front of a mirror to a brush. That sort of dream, it’s easy to get sucked into with these guys.”
The movie’s sung-through opening is a cannonball, with a young JB (Troy Gentile) singing in his bedroom, with Ronnie Dio chorusing in from a poster on the back of the door, and then Meat Loaf singing back at him as his disapproving dad. Why not a sung-through musical? “I think that seriously limits your chances of more people liking it. Because if you don’t like the music, you don’t like the movie. What’s nice is that we have all the humor and action around things that kind of is just the sugar around our rock pill. But of course I really want to do a rock opera, hardcore, like ‘The Wall.’ But y’know, ‘The D’ isn’t about just that. When you go to see ‘The D’ live, you go home with your ears ringing and your stomach hurting from laughing. And it has to be that mix, y’know, when you go to see the movie, you should feel like you went to a concert.”
The movie and “The D” are a shared enterprise. “It’s different from a regular movie anyway. In [other] movies, Jack hasn’t been able to do as many takes as he would like to. Directors that aren’t his best friend, who don’t know him as a person, they get something really funny on film and they’re satisfied. It’s like a radio dial where performance is like, you’ve gotta go and hear where the station is loudest and go past it, y’know, where you lose the station to realize where it was the strongest. You have to go until it sucks. Then you know where it was the funniest. [I stayed] aware of their energy and knowing when to hold Jack back and when to let him go and when to amp Kyle and when to bring him down. It’s not like I’m going to tell them, ‘Can you be more like JB? JB, can you be like JB?’ I mean, they are the guys that are in the movie! They’re not having to act!”
A staple from the act and the HBO series is a little ditty called the “Cock Push-up.” Not only does Kyle educate JB in that fine skill, it saves the day late in the picture. “Jack and I just thought of that one night. Just like, what could cock push-ups do but strengthen your cock? And then you’ve got to use it like a tool. That’s every man’s hidden thing, is, like, god, if I could just fuckin’ nail in this nail with my cock, I would be almighty. Using the cock as a tool is mighty powerful thing. The cock push-ups were so part of the lore of ‘The D,’ you’ve gotta give it up for that. Yeah. It was fun. It was borderline embarrassing to film, because you have all these monitors up with this giant cock. I’m looking at the monitor at this big dick going across screen, that fuckin’ thing is going to be twelve feet long! We had all these rigged, robotic cocks and things like that.” The “funnest” part, Lynch says, was when they scored the scene. “We were working with a choir, a twenty-one-[voice] choir singing, ‘COCK! COCK! COCK!’ and you’re looking at the music they’re singing, and it’s quarter notes with the ‘cock’ over it, like two full pages. It’s like, ‘Here’s your music’ and then the whole room just busted out laughing, ‘We’re about to sing “cock” over and over again!’ Meanwhile, that big screen is behind us [with those images]. That, for me, was classic, just getting all these people to have to sing ‘cock’ over and over again. Awesome.”
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
