To make a truly memorable comedy song with both longevity and mass appeal is a hard task. But to create one that achieves all that while also going out of its way to compete with Metallica and Led Zeppelin while positioning itself as the greatest song ever made? Oh, and all while being only the second song you have ever written together? Surely impossible!
You’d think so, but with the help of everyone from Dave Grohl and Maynard James Keenan to the bloke from Better Call Saul, that’s exactly what Tenacious D did when they crafted their own “Mona Lisa”, Tribute.
Jack Black and Kyle Gass were both members of the experimental LA theatre collective The Actor’s Gang in the mid-80s. On a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, where the pair were performing in the play Carnage, they began to bond over music and, as the 90s, arrived they had decided to start collaborating on songs together.
Their first effort was a serious composition about a break-up that Black had recently gone through; they were too embarrassed to play it to anyone, so it went in the bin. Their second effort, inspired by listening to Metallica’s One, would prove more fruitful.
“We had the idea late at night listening to Metallica in Jack’s car,” Gass told Guitarings in 2011 of the genesis of what would become Tenacious D’s breakthrough hit. “He said ‘Dude, check this song out, it’s the greatest song in the world.’ Which is every Metallica song, because they’re such an epic band. I said, ‘I think we should write the best song in the world,’ and Jack said ‘You can’t do that, you can’t just write the greatest song in the world!’”
But the conversation had stirred an idea in Black’s head.
“Jack put his twist on it,” Gass continued. “He said ‘We could write a tribute to the greatest song in the world?’ and that was it.”
"There’s just something very funny about that to me,” Black laughed to Kerrang! Magazine in 2021. “The idea of ‘the greatest song’ was so absurd that it’s sort of in line with my obsession with the limits of universal laws. These absolutes and how absurd they all are." Gass recalled the duo staying up for “literally for the next three days crafting the song.”
With an intention so ambitious, Black and Gass had to attempt to ape some of the very biggest names in rock.
“At the time there were parts of Stairway to Heaven in it,” Gass revealed to Guitarings. “It was this long, crazy epic jam. Once we finished with it, we knew we had something special.”
Once we finished with it, we knew we had something special.
Kyle Gass
Soon, the band were invited by comedian David Cross to play their first gig at a comedy night in LA. They christened themselves The Axe Lords Featuring Gorgazon’s Mischief, there were only 12 people in attendance and Tribute was the only song they had available to play, but Gass claims the song went over “gangbusters”.
Having settled on the name Tenacious D, the partnership soon began to find an audience in LA with both comedians and musicians. At one point, they were even invited to open for both Tool, thanks to frontman Maynard James Keenan taking a liking to them, and for the live tour of the HBO comedy series Mr. Show, starring Cross and the future Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk.
"Our whole career has been a series of fiery hoops,” Black told Kerrang! In 2021, looking back over their career. “Just events that are fucking terrifying. You get these opportunities where Eddie Vedder will call and say, ‘Hey, we like your band and we want you guys to open for Pearl Jam’ and your first reaction is terror...but then you look in the mirror and say, ‘Wait. This is an opportunity. This is a fiery hoop and you have to dive through and face your demons."
Still, despite plenty of opportunities to tour and even a short-lived HBO TV series between 1997 and 1999, there was no sign of a Tenacious D album on the horizon.
“A big part of the story is how long it took to become an album,” Gass explained to Kerrang!. “We had a really good batch of songs by the time we did the HBO series, but we didn’t start recording until 2000.”
“In a way,” continued Black. “Tribute was our Mona Lisa. We had to work on it all throughout the 90s.”
That all changed when the band formed a friendship with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, who was another high-profile fan. Tenacious D were encouraged by the production team of The Dust Brothers to get Grohl involved as their drummer to help them capture the songs in the studio. Grohl came and brought an impressive cast of alt-rock musicians with him; the likes of The Vandals guitarist Warren Fitzgerald, Phish keyboardist Page McConnell and Beastie Boys percussionist Alfredo Ortiz can all be heard on the finished track.
“It was kind of mind-blowing just to have Dave playing on our songs,” Gass remarked to Kerrang! “It was like your hero walking through the door. There goes my hero – and he’s playing drums on your track! It was pretty crazy."
The song was picked as a single from Tenacious D’s self-titled debut album. Even prior to its release on February 11 2002, Tribute had found a life on music television channels thanks to its brilliantly chaotic video. In it, Black and Gass go to record the song in a karaoke booth, whilst the story of the pair encountering a demon (played by Grohl) and playing him “the greatest song in the world” is shown in flashback. There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Ben Stiller.
We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve never actually had to pay any real dues.
Jack Black
In a world filled with videos from identikit nu metal and pop punk acts and deliberately ordinary and ramshackle-looking garage rock bands, Tribute was a breath of fresh air, capturing people’s imagination. The song propelled the album into the UK Top 40 album chart, sold 600,000 copies when it was released as a single and turned an odd pair of comedy songwriters into the rock superstars they had told everyone that they were going to be.
"We’ve been very fortunate,” said Black. “We’ve never actually had to pay any real dues. You’re supposed to spend your early years driving around in a van that you drive yourself from gig to gig, staying on people’s couches and making a little extra money by selling weed on the side. We didn’t have to do any of that. We got lucky.”
Au contraire, my hard rocking amigo: this was no lucky break. Twenty-three years later, Tribute is still a classic, floor-filling rock anthem and one of the most recognisable tunes from that era. Which is a fitting tribute to Tribute itself; it may not be the greatest song in the world, but it's a classic all the same.
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