Tenacious D have delved into the inspiration behind their career-defining debut single, ‘Tribute’.
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Jack Black and Kyle Gass discussed the band’s that inspired the track, giving a nod to seminal rockers, The Beatles, Guns N’ Roses, Paul Simon Metallica and Led Zeppelin, citing them as musicians who penned ‘the greatest song in the world’.
During the interview, Black mused that Metallica were one of the bands they “talked about a lot early on” when they first started helming Tenacious D tracks, to which Kyle added, “It actually was the inspiration for Tribute.”
“What?” responds Jack. “You’re saying that Metallica was the inspiration for Tribute?”
Kyle continued, “I’m saying a large portion, yeah.”
Jack went on to argue that, “When we were talking about what’s the greatest song in the world, at the time it was Metallica – ‘One’, some would say. But really, you can’t say that that was a greater inspiration than ‘Stairway To Heaven.’”
Gass went on to muse that it was Black who introduced him to Metallica initially, musing “They were going places that people didn’t normally go, but also with really staccato riffs. They were very exciting. It just seemed very important.”
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“It was a trailblazing song,” agreed Black. “You can tell that it’s their best song, because whenever you see them live, they always save that for the end. They know that people are waiting for One. They got a lot of great jams, Enter Sandman, this and that, all of the rest…”
Elsewhere in the interview, Black detailed that ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’ — a track that was helmed by the Charlie Daniels Band in 1979, and popularised by a Primus cover 20 years later— had a profound impact on Tenacious D.
“There’s a great tradition of doing battle with Satan in rock’n’roll music and before rock’n’roll,” he shared. “And of them all, I think The Devil Went Down To Georgia is probably the most powerful, iconic version of that story. Well yeah, we did it, but they did it first. And they were definitely a big influence on Tenacious D. Would we have done Tribute if we had never heard The Devil Went Down To Georgia? It’s doubtful. We definitely needed that jam to show us the way.”
Check out ‘Tribute’ by Tenacious D:
