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Tenacious D: The D Also Rises

Did you go way over the top? Is that why the break had to happen?

Black I don’t know. I never felt like we were taking a break. I felt like that’s our natural incubation period: six years. Before we had our first album, we were just jamming and playing for about six years.

Gass: Yeah. That’s true.

Black Then, after that album, it took us five or six years before we put out our movie-album, and then it was another five or six years before this one. We go away and we come back.

Gass: We clean out the pipes and come back.

Black We’ve been talking about and working on Rize of the Fenix ever since The Pick of Destiny. We’d do little tours here and there. And whenever anyone asked, “When’s the next album?” we would jokingly say, “Summer of 2012” because it was so far away. But then, it slowly came to be.

Gass: We did it!

Is it going to take that long for the album?

Black I could definitely see having an album sooner than five years from now. 2017 seems too far away. We’ve got to speed it up. It’s like that thing—the phenomenon of the quickening. As the Earth gets closer to disintegration, things start moving faster.

I haven’t heard of that concept!

Black The quickening? I heard some late night AM talk radio guy talking about it. It’s a conspiracy theory.

Kyle, had you been working on D stuff in the interim?

Gass: Well, Jack has this amazing film career, and I get a bit part here and there. I’ve always thought, it’d be great to get another band going—so, I spend a lot of time on my side projects and touring and playing music [with Trainwreck and the Kyle Gass band]. But the D crushes anything that I could come up with, and if Jack’s not involved…

Black Me too, dude! The D crushes all of my things, too. We always come back to the D, because there’s a magical combination there. Like, if you were the chef that invented apple pie, you can keep on making other things, but you are always going to want to go back to that pie. That’s what people want. We are more than the sum of our parts, Cage. Because when you put the flavors of the Cage and JB together—separately, they taste good, but when you put them together…it’s like PB and J. Peanut butter is good. And jelly is good. But when you put them together it is an explosion.

Gass: [Says matter of factly] It is the most powerful taste combination imaginable.

When you guys started, it seemed like the nature of the D—the joke, if you will—was that two guys with acoustic guitars were the greatest rock band in the world, even though it was just the two of you. But then, you actually became huge and did big tours and festivals.

Black Yeah. And it ruined the concept.

So how does that fit into the current concept of the D?

Gass: How does that fit in? Because the fantasy became the reality?

Yeah.

Gass: [Again, he says very matter-of-factly] It is pretty awesome.

Black Yes, but he is right. Part of the joke is dead. Part of the joke is gone.

Gass: But I think we can always rest assured that we don’t really look like rock stars. Nowadays, we are getting a little long in the tooth.

Black It gets funnier—what are those old farts doing up there thinking they are rock stars?

Gass: I think the concept is safe.