Tenacious D Spinal-Taps a Comic Nerve

Superb. Stupendous. Sublime. The men of Tenacious D have it all--everything two jobless losers could possibly need to reach the top of the pops. Behold the new kings of rock. They reign. Or that’s what they think.

The two slobs standing on stage at the House of Blues on Monday, with their acoustic guitars and faded T-shirts, didn’t exactly inspire visions of rock-star nirvana. Which is part of the joke, since Tenacious D is a largely fictional entity, the focus of a surreal HBO comedy series of the same name, and a kind of Spinal Tap for the open-mike-night crowd.

As on the series, singer-songwriters Jack Black and Kyle Gass were masters of the painful classic-rock stereotype on Monday, with simplistic, overwrought musical interludes and silly sexual innuendo. Black was the high-strung frontman, singing an ode to Sasquatch and the refrain “Someone stole my rocket sauce!” over the delicate picking of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

But mostly, the men of Tenacious D sang about themselves, and the supreme hypnotic power of their music (“We’ve traveled through time and space, my friend, to rock this house!”). It’s stuff perhaps best enjoyed by those already familiar with the HBO show, but even the uninitiated could find something hilarious and alarming in the lyrics: “Everything sucked in high school, so I moved to the Middle East.”

Tenacious D may be a pair of losers who never made it and never will, but that fits their philosophy. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good,” declared Black. “It only matters if it rocks!”