Friday, Sep 5, 2008
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.
Apr 27, 2000 | 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.
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