"Tenacious D" Tells All!

Actor Jack Black and "bandmate" Tenacious D's Kyle Gass look like a couple of fans from the pit at a classic rock concert. Jack sits across from us in black Black Sabbath tee and scruffy jeans. Kyle wears plain beige tee; casual attire for Beverly Hills but who cares? These guys are the real thing, just two fellows who dig playing music together and making folks laugh. They wanted to make a movie about how it all came about for them. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny is that film.

Jack's fame as a film actor might have helped the duo get their long-awaited, hilarious Tenacious D film together and that's okay with Jack. He's glad it's finally out there. Get ready for a fun interview full of silly , kinda raunchy humor and the facts about "The D's" tunes, upcoming projects and why they've been buds for years. Jack was really digging a photo given him by a journalist who dressed up as Jack's Nacho Libre character and won a Halloween costume contest.

Jack. Awww, nice. Dude, I'm honored. Should I sign it or just keep it? [He folds it up very carefully, like he hates to crease it].

TeenHollywood: So why is Tenacious D the greatest rock band in the world? You are often billed that way.

Jack: We have never said that we are the greatest rock band in the world. Other people have said it, and it's always flattering, but the reason we are great, or whatever you want to call us, I think is because of our chemistry. Sometimes you get lucky. Me and Kyle stumbled upon each other and immediately it was apparent that when we were friends walking down the street it was like peanut butter and chocolate, lightning and thunder. Together we're ten times the rock beast that we are alone. We're not just twice as powerful when we're together, but ten times as powerful, like a rock transformer! [He says this while wiggling his famous eyebrows and opening his eyes really wide!]

TeenHollywood: Were you guys always thinking about turning the D into a feature?

Kyle: I think it started happening pretty seriously after our HBO show. We were going to do a run at HBO. [If you missed the early days of Tenacious D, Jack and Kyle were on TV]. They offered us ten episodes and wanted to fire us from being executive producers. We said, 'F-you. We'll go make a movie'.

Jack: Yeah. They said, 'yeah, we want you to do a lot without you having any creative control. We want you to be more like 'The Monkees'. We're like 'what? Why would we do that when the first shows were so good with us f**kin' in charge'?

Kyle: They said 'do you want to make the show'?

Jack: We're beyond it. We're gonna go make our movie!

Kyle: You know why? Because success is the only revenge.

Jack: But then Cage [he calls Kyle Gass Cage for KG] was like 'dude, f**k the movie. The only thing that matters is the album', remember?

Kyle: Yeah.

Jack: So then we made the album.

Kyle: And I was right.

Jack: Then, you changed your tune.

TeenHollywood: Was it hard to get a studio interested in making the movie?

Jack: There was only one studio interested. We went all around the Horn and then New Line was the only one that said 'yeah. we'll put our money on that one'. Nobody else was interested. It was too expensive. None of them thought we could do it.

Kyle: We had to take no money. On the back end. If it does well, we're going to be on Barbados with...

Jack: Mai Tais.

TeenHollywood: Jack, since the show and the album you became a huge movie star. Has that changed Tenacious D at all?

Kyle: Yeah. I hate him.

Jack: I like to think that we would never have gotten the movie made if I hadn't built some sweet...

Kyle: What's good for the goose is good for the gander. As big as Jack was getting, it could only help get a name I think. That's all they really think about... bankability.

TeenHollywood: But has your film career changed things for "The D", Jack?

Jack: Oh, yeah.. we've gone on tour after School of Rock.

Kyle: We've played shows. We've had great tours. I think people seem to separate it pretty much.

Jack: It was a bummer after Shallow Hal when people were carrying around the Shallow Hal billboards at the concerts [he indicates people holding them up over their heads]. That's not really heavy metal to look out in the audience when you're tryin' to rock and there's a Shallow Hal cardboard cutout.

TeenHollywood: They'll have Nacho Libre posters next.

Jack: That I don't mind.

Kyle: It's just the way it is. You've got two jobs. People can separate it.

TeenHollywood: How do you describe your style of humor?

Kyle: Childish, sophomoric, scatological.

TeenHollywood: Satiric?

Jack: What are we satiring? Satirizing? D**n, what's the saturnization about in this?

Kyle: The saturnization really begins with.. I think we're poking fun at the pomposity of rock stuff.

Jack: A little bit, kind of.

Kyle: It's really just about us though. [People say] 'These guys rockin?' People respond to the weird confidence [we have] about the mission. We have this grand mission to rock and we just have acoustic guitars. It seems to connect that way.

TeenHollywood: Was there a scene in this that was hard to get through because you were cracking up?

Jack: I was laughing all the time. I haven't had this much fun on a movie ever.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about the physical aspects of the D performance?

Jack: You've got to be in the best shape possible.

Kyle: We're like Jackie Chan. We do all our own stunts.

TeenHollywood: Is what you do on stage choreographed?

Kyle: You pretty much have to choreograph for the movie.

Jack: You have to block basically.

Kyle: Cuz' lighting is so difficult.

Jack: But, on stage they did a lot of camera movement and let us do whatever we want. It was pretty loose up there.

TeenHollywood: Your music is really good. Does it have to be good before it's funny? What comes first?

Kyle: I think it's important for us that it's as good as we can do it just musically-wise.

Jack: Yeah.

Kyle: I think it's what makes us a little different from some guitar comics. We love music and just try to make really great songs.

TeenHollywood: Do you start with the tune before the words?

Kyle: We usually have an idea and we do a lot of improv and Jack will riff a lot of the lyrics.

Jack: Kyle is always a bubbling cauldron of tunes. He's always playing and working on little melodies and riffs and then I would need to have something that I think is funny, a concept that I want to riff on, or, I need a type of song that I want to make that we've never made before. Then we can just start jammin' and always recording.

TeenHollywood: Jack, you are so busy. How do you balance Tenacious D, movies, marriage and children or child?

Jack: I'm very, very busy. But the way I do it is I look ahead on the future calendar and I can see that, come February, I have nothing on the schedule and, no matter how hard it is, no matter how little sleep I'm getting, I know that there is sleep at the end of that rainbow.

TeenHollywood: How much of this "getting the band together" story is true?

Jack: Glad you asked. It's all true except....

Kyle: His father is one of the most supportive men..

Jack: My parents were always very supportive of my rocking.

Kyle: He was not a fundamentalist Christian.

Jack: No. I was actually raised a Jew. I went to Hebrew school and got bar mitzvahed. So that was a lie. But the rest.. true.

TeenHollywood: The car chase was hilarious. How was that accomplished?

Kyle: We had to go to special driving school. No, we had stuntmen to do all that.

TeenHollywood: The director said you got carsick, Kyle.

Kyle: Well, they have a special car that they make to do stunts that has these huge wheels and it kind of spins around and you're sort of driving it but they're driving you in the car. It's a barfy ride. I'm not gonna lie to you. It's a barf machine. It's fun though.

TeenHollywood: You guys do an awesome rock power slide.

Jack: I got a little rug burn, yeah.

Kyle: But it was a pretty old school special effect. We were just being pulled.

Jack: And Kyle didn't lean back far enough.

Kyle: We did it all day, okay?

Jack: He's like.. [indicates arms straight up over head.. not leaning back at all].

Kyle: I know. How come I'm not sliding?

Jack: People ask, is there anything you would go back and change? Just that one thing, the power slide.

TeenHollywood: You guys are doing a publicity tour, music tours. You're huge now.

Jack: We're big, bigtime, yeah. U2 is opening for us now.

Kyle: We're thinkin' we'll make them play acoustic.

Jack: Bono doesn't go all the way down on his knees.

Kyle: And we'll say 'Bono, lose the sunglasses'.

Jack: Oh man, hamstringed. We just took him off his game.

TeenHollywood: How did you two meet?

Kyle: We met in '89 through a friend [argument over what year it was].

Jack: I had been a fan since '86 or '87 because I had gone to see him perform.

Kyle: But Jack got in a production that we were doing in the Actor's Gang called The Big Show and I would do all the music usually for the Gang stuff and Jack came in there and started contributing and threatening my very existence.

Jack: That's right.

Kyle: But it was a case of 'if you can't beat 'um, join 'um'. I couldn't beat him.

TeenHollywood: We hear that there is going to be a lot on the DVD in deleted and extended scenes. Are there any you are hoping we'll get to see?

Jack: There's the song "The Government Totally Sucks." It's a shame we had to cut it but it's on the record and it'll be in the deleted scenes. There's a lot of little chunks but not whole scenes. There's a great scene in my fantasy sequence where Kyle is actually a monster and I go and punch on him with my feet.

TeenHollywood: There is a little kid who plays Jack as a child in the film and he's great (Troy Gentile). How did you respond to him? He's a carbon copy of Jack... only as a kid.

Kyle: We loved him. He was fun to watch.

Jack: He was tremendous in the audition and Liam [the director] videotaped me performing the entire song and then he studied the video and got my moves from the video. He's great. He also played the young Nacho. In this movie he's wearing a J.B. wig.

TeenHollywood: Did you give him any suggestions?

Jack: Not really. He had it down, all the moves. He was great.

TeenHollywood: Jack, are you more comfortable doing the acting or the music?

Jack: Acting or music. No, they're altogether. That's like saying, 'what do you like better, breathing in or breathing out?'

TeenHollywood: If you two had to rock off against each other to save your souls who would win?

Jack: Well, it depends, if Cage is going to come out and we're going to say, 'Choose your weapon, we'll only use singing,' I would probably slay him. But if he says, 'Step into the cage and let's go guitar battle,' Cage would definitely kick my a**.

TeenHollywood: Why do women find musicians so sexy?

Kyle: I don't know, thank God though. I need all the help I can get. I think that music is somehow simulating sex. It appears we have some sort of special touch.

Jack: I think it's because when you sing and play music, even if you're singing hard rocking, you're showing a sensitive side, and the women I think are a little attracted to that.

Kyle: It seems like we'd be good in the sack.

TeenHollywood: How hard was it to write this script knowing a lot of people who come and see the film might not know Tenacious D, as well as writing it for the fans?

Kyle: It's definitely a challenge to try to serve both camps.

Jack: That's why we did the origin. The movie is like the origin episode of a comic book where you start before there was a Tenacious D, because if we would have started in the middle of our existence then people would have had to do a lot of catching up.

Kyle: I think we tilted it more for fans I think but we're hoping people got it.

TeenHollywood: The opening of the film is like an opera. Who thought of that

Kyle: The opening scene is mind-blowing and I just sometimes get a little sad when it stops, that's when I come on.

Jack: That song is not easy to write – to write a full opera you've got to take your hats off to The Who, but on the other hand that movie kind of sucked, and it's probably because it was an opera from beginning to end, Kyle. You've got to stop and start talking at some point, you have to talk and communicate without singing. It's annoying.

TeenHollywood.com: How would you describe the D?

Kyle: I think it's balancing between some hard rockin' and having fun with the form, the lyrics.

Jack: I don't think there is any real satire in there, is there? Well, I guess we make fun of Satan, we make fun of the devil in rock a little bit.

Kyle: I think our commitment to the rock is funny to me, we definitely play on the Black Sabbath and the Satan thing, which when you look back seems really funny, but you don't think there's any irony in those guys, but now I think when we do it, hopefully it appears fun.

TeenHollywood: Kyle, you started your own group called Trainwreck. Was that to get away from Jack for a while?

Kyle: I started Trainwreck so that I could talk on stage, because Jack is a steamrolling motherf***er up there. Jack is really entertaining and the reason it rocks so hard is because Jack is awesome.

Jack: [grinning] Awww, dude.

Kyle: It's true, you've just got some great pipes and it's just really fun to watch – I still enjoy watching Jack perform after a gazillion years of watching him. I'm just going, 'Wow, that's really fun.' Trainwreck is satisfying. But I figured out mathematically that Tenacious D is actually a thousand times more popular.

Jack: We'll see after the movie comes out.

TeenHollywood: Will you be taking Tenacious D on the road again?

Jack: Yeah, we're doing one when the movie opens, we actually start before the movie opens, because now the movie opens on the 22nd, and our tour starts on the 17th and so those people from the 17th to the 22nd will not know what the hell we're singing about, because they will not have seen the movie, we'll just be singing these songs.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.