To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People April 27, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/cintra/2000/04/27/jackblack I have seen the future: It's Tenacious D If watching these two short, fat, weird guys perform doesn't make you happier than you've been in years, you're withered and dead within. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Cintra Wilson I had a dream the other night in which I was the passenger in a big, new, powder-yellow, heyday-of-Detroit mobile. All the chrome was there, the beige leather interior was intact and I was being driven through a suburban town on a hot late-1950s day in the Deep South. The driver was a young, handsome Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was clear by the friendly, ticklish vibrations in the front seat that I was his latest blond daytime dalliance (I, in the decade-less logic of dreams, was not from the 1950s, but was staring out the window tripping on the vintage sidewalk scene in my 19-year-old post-punk persona -- platinum blond, tight black jeans, pointy black boots, CRASS T-shirt.) Dr. King and I pulled into a lot behind a one-story motel in a glade of drooping green trees. "Is this gonna be all right?" I asked. (Translation: Is it safe for you to check in here with a white chick?) "Oh yeah, baby, we're all right. We're on the wrong side of the tracks, now," he said jovially, meaning: I can do whatever I want here; we're in the black neighborhood. Then the scene switched and the good doctor was wearing a loud pair of Hawaiian-print Bermuda shorts and a terry-cloth beach shirt and a nice straw fedora. He was watering the lawn outside of the motel and I was hanging around girlishly -- we had a very friendly, flirty rapport. He was young and fit and sexy -- I touched him on the stomach and he had washboard abs. The best thing about the dream was the elated flush of hanging around in the joyous, inspiring aura of a truly Great Man. Which is how everyone in the audience felt at the Bowery Ballroom April 18 and 19, when rock-comedy tyrants Tenacious D took the stage and rocked the fucking house two times with the pungent Rocket Sauce of Unadulterated Genius. "Rocket Sauce!" the overweight frat boys in the audience screamed all through the opening act, a painfully mediocre sketch, a comedy abortion and perhaps the unluckiest opening act in history. The people knew "The D" were in the building; they could smell The Sauce, and they wanted the D and nothing else. This is unsurprising. Tenacious D -- the round boys from L.A., Jack Black and Kyle Gass -- have recently carved their names on the forehead of Goddess Fame with solid-gold steak knives. Jack Black is literally the most unobstructed fire hose of white-hot mega-talent I have ever known or seen. He's just thrashed that huge Donkey Kong of a star-turn in "High Fidelity" as Barry, the vituperative record-store snob, and now the star everyone always knew would rise is blowing up at frightening speeds. The dressing room at the Bowery was full of the Cool Young Men of stage and screen -- John Cusack, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, David Cross -- all with their tongues way up Jack's legendary crack. Those who have known him since childhood all feel the same way about the little fucker -- head-shaking awe. Black is an unlikely, ferocious combination of Brando-like gravitational conviction combined with Belushian dire hilarity and a kind of tender Seals & Crofts musical ear for the lovely harmonics, bound up in an airtight flair for the absurd, a beautiful yodeling voice and a certain degree of (much satirized) raw cock power. Most people have a pipeline to the Gods of Inspirado that is somewhat occluded by the performer's neurotic inability to get out of his own way -- not so Jack Black, who is unimpeded by vanity of any kind, who seemingly has no psychic obstacles that prevent his continual blasting forth of four-alarm Celestial Heat Magick. Kyle Gass, aka K.G., aka Cage, aka Rage, aka Rage Cage, is the backbone sound of the D, the golden 12-strings of guitar craft that pulls it together musically. He is the acoustic metal sound. Shades of Neil Young. Shades of Zeppelin. Hefty wad of prog. Angels and wildebeests. The Harmonizer. It's a tough job being the guy who accompanies the walloping tsunami of adoration that follows Black around, and K.G. seems a little bitter and acrimonious in his between-song banter, but I suppose that's only human. In Black's bright and collateral light must he be comforted, and not in his privileged shoes -- it's a fucked-up world. It is the Faustian contract. But Rage does some beautiful finger work, and gets to stand on the stage, like all the guys whose names you can't remember in the Sex Pistols. The D are out and nobody can pull them back into the tasty semi-obscurity in which they once languished in dark comedy clubs and dim corners of HBO programming. Black is a great friend of mine who I've known for years. Now the world knows him: He's been on "Conan." Black is a good new star: gracious, diplomatic, filled with eight seconds of high-volume friendliness for all, in a way that makes everyone feel like they've got their warm gust of special attention. Movie star, rock star, great guy. It's interesting to be around an almost perfectly realized human being -- the last one I sat at a table with was Best-Surfer-In-Creation Kelly Slater. By comparison, everyone else starts to look like a 500-piece puzzle with only 32 or so of the border pieces locked in, whereas with the Shining Few like Black and Slater you can see the whole picture of the cocker spaniel pups in the basket with maybe just a yarn ball remaining to be assembled. "Shee-it," you say in admiration. What else can you say? They've figured out a safe way to be superhuman, a way to utilize that unexplored gray matter, some way to stop being subject to the roller-coaster win/lose, win/lose whims of basic humanity and rule nonstop. How? Who knows. The only thing in the entire Tenacious D set that gives me minor cause for alarm is the fact that the D have always been predicated on the patent absurdity that two weird, short, fat guys could be generators of stadium-filling cock-rock power. Now that they are routinely selling out venues to throngs of salivating fans, it's not so absurd anymore. At a certain point in the show, the D exhort the audience to quit their day jobs and "Free the Artist! In here!" Black thumps his chest for emphasis. "After a couple of years, Kyle and I will come and inspect your progress, and we will encourage you to continue. Or, we will say stop. And if we say stop, stop!" This is the beginning of a song called "The Cosmic Joke," which discusses the sad fact that many people have no talent. "I know what you're thinking," Black says to the crowd. "You're thinking, Hey, I'll learn some power chords, gain 40 pounds and my friends think I'm funny! But no. Not everyone is born with it, like me and K.G. Believe me, if we could hand out bags of talent at the door, you'd all be rocking." It was all so true that it was hard to tell if this was a piece of actual science being dropped like a bomb on the sub-talented audience, or if the comedic faux-egomania of the D has now been mixed so liberally with their actual worldly success that it's a joke that's no longer a joke. In any case, it made everyone mindful of how fucked it is that everyone can't be Jack Black. Don't get me wrong. Joy, my friends, is the cornerstone of the D. If a Tenacious D show doesn't make you happy like you haven't been in years, you're withered and dead within. See the D. Make pilgrimages to the D. You won't be able to buy a D record because they hate the music industry too much to record one. (Another reason to love them.) You can see Jack in many roles on-screen, but the D are the home of the Black Sauce of Victory. It is exciting to live in this time, a time of Michael Jordan and Kelly Slater and Tenacious D. I dig heroes you can throw your panties at. salon.com | April 27, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Cintra Wilson lives in New York. Her book, "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations," is being released by Viking in July. For more columns by Wilson, visit her column archive.