November 14th, 2006 • 12:40 PM
A movie soundtrack worth owning, and
a hip-hop album with depth. Are we dreaming?
The
world of music takes itself too seriously,
most of the time—about as seriously as an
episode of Studio 60 On
The Sunset Strip…in other words, to the
point of us wanting to poke brain-holes
through our eyes.
Some
artists are exceptions. Others are
stand-bys. Jack Black and Kyle Gass, in
their first album since their 2001
Tenacious D,
return with the Dust Brothers producing, The
Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on drums, and a
cameo by Meat Loaf on their opening track, “Kickapoo.”
True to the title, acoustic guitar’s the
order of the day here, along with the same
ridiculous music you either hate or love by
now. Buy it, you fool. And while you’re
waiting for your music to download,
check out our review of the movie.
Tenacious D's The Pick of Destiny Released Today
Tuesday, November 14,
2006
Featured Album:
Tenacious D, The Pick of
Destiny
A couple years back I saw
Tenacious D live at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison with
Weezer and I've been a huge fan ever since. Besides, I share the
same initials as KG, Kyle Gass, and I have a buddy Phil who
looks a lot like JB. Now all I need is Phil to turn into a sweet
guitar playing partner with the initials JB and we can start out
own rock supergroup.
Tenacious D's The Pick of Destiny hits shelves today in support
of their film of the same name, which I can't wait to see. Jack
Black might be one of the funniest people on the planet if you
look past his hosting of the MTV Awards, but I blame the writers
for that one.
Here's what Rolling Stone
had to say about today's release:
Any album that begins with the line "A long-ass fucking time ago
in a town called Kickapoo" can't be all that bad, but somehow
the soundtrack to Tenacious D's long promised movie The Pick of
Destiny never quite takes off. The fifteen tunes here tell the
fictitious story of how Jack Black met Kyle Gass, formed
Tenacious D and later fought some sort of demon to obtain the
mythical pick of destiny. Many of the songs, such as "Break In
City (Storm the Gate)" and "Car Chase City," exist solely to
advance the plot and will be funny only to tweeners who have
watched the movie eight times (not that there's anything wrong
with that). The music is Tenacious D's trademark overwrought
Seventies folk metal, featuring cameos by Meat Loaf, Dave Grohl
and, of course, metal god Ronnie James Dio. This soundtrack
would be a great bonus disc for the movie's eventual DVD
release, but as a stand-alone it falls way short of their vastly
superior debut album.
Tenacious D - "Kickapoo"
Tenacious D - "The Divide"
Tenacious D - "The Metal"
A couple more tracks available at the recently-engaged
Neiles Life.
Meat Loaf Dishes On Playing Jack Black's Dad, Hating 'Idol'
Performance
Rocker says he's influenced everyone from
Killers, My Chemical Romance to Kurt Cobain, Axl Rose.
by Shawn Adler
Marvin Aday — Meat Loaf to you
and me — is the man who "would do anything for love"
(but not that!). He's gone from "The Rocky Horror
Picture Show" to Bat Out of Hell in a career
spanning the stage, screen and radio.
In a recent phone interview with MTV News,
Meat Loaf discussed his role in "Tenacious D in: The Pick of
Destiny," why he's never hated anything more than performing on
"American Idol" and how his work continues to influence a whole
new generation of artists.
MTV: Tenacious D claim everywhere that they're the
greatest rock band of all time. Where does that leave Meat Loaf?
Meat Loaf: I guess at number 2.
MTV: Is that a happy number 2?
Meat Loaf: [He laughs.] That's fine. I like ["Pick
of Destiny" star] Jack [Black].
MTV: Your role in "The Pick of Destiny" is entirely sung.
Could you sing the answer to a simple question, say, who you
play?
Meat Loaf: I play Jack's father, and he's a religious
zealot — absolutely a complete control freak. He's got his wife
trained and his other kid trained, and everything is in its
place — the dinner table is set perfect, the kitchen is perfect,
everything is perfect except for little Jack, and little Jack is
far from perfect. He's going to teach him a lesson.
MTV: How did you become involved
in this film?
Meat Loaf: For five years, Jack Black has been saying
he wanted me to play his father. In every interview he did
he always [said], "I'm gonna make the movie 'Tenacious D,'
and I want to make Meat Loaf play my father." Every
interview. And my daughters, Pearl and Amanda, they kept
reading it and [would] call and say, "Jack said it again,
Jack said it again." I said, "When he calls me, I'll tell
him I'll do it." He did call. He called me himself.
MTV: So he started talking about you in this film
well before there was even a film?
Meat Loaf: Oh yeah. Well, he and [co-writer/co-star]
Kyle [Gass] had it in their heads. I think they had been
wanting to make this film for a very long time — I mean, for
five years. So it would be, what, six and a half years ago
now that he started talking about it.
MTV: Were you a fan of Tenacious D before this movie?
Meat Loaf: I'm a fan of Jack Black. Jack was
originally going to play me in the VH1 movie ["Meat Loaf: To
Hell and Back"].
MTV: At that point, though, you had met Jack?
Meat Loaf: No. I had never met him. I just saw him in
movies that he had done, and I had heard some stuff from
Tenacious D. I said, "This is the guy to play me. He's got
the energy, and he understands it." He was going to [play
me], then his career took off and [this] movie got
postponed. He tried, and I said, "Well, the guy's an idiot
if he does it." I said, "Let me see — a studio picture over
the Meat Loaf story? Let me think about that for a minute.
Gee, I don't know, that's a hard decision."
MTV: Interesting you talk about this continuum from
you to Jack Black in terms of high-energy performance. He's
a theatrical performer. There's a lot of bands like that
these days.
Meat Loaf: Well, that's what I'm hearing. That's what
somebody wrote the other day. They gave a review of the new
album, and they said that Meat Loaf is gonna have two albums
on the chart: My Chemical Romance and Meat Loaf.
MTV: When you look back now do you think about how
your career has influenced a whole generation of artists?
Meat Loaf: A few years ago in Spin magazine —
I don't know, about 12 years ago — they listed the 25 or 50
most important things in rock history, and they listed
Bat Out of Hell at #7. It had an influence on Guns N'
Roses, because Axl Rose made a statement about it, [and]
Kurt Cobain in several interviews mentioned [it]. And a
couple of other grunge bands in the '90s were talking about
it also. So I think it's had an influence. I'm so used to
being by myself, being alone in the parade, that it's hard
for me to deal with people saying Chemical Romance and
Panic! at the Disco and Killers [are similar].
MTV: When you say it's hard for you to deal with, you
mean just because you're more of a loner in your work?
Meat Loaf: I've always been a loner and all of a
sudden they're coming out, and that's OK. Because after
this, I'm going away, so it's time for somebody else to take
the realm.
MTV: You're still doing film work?
Meat Loaf: I'm doing film, yeah.
MTV: Just no more music?
Meat Loaf: Well, I'm not going to beat the horse to
the finish line like I did with [the recently released
Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose].
MTV: How did performing with Katharine McPhee on
"American Idol" come about?
Meat Loaf: Oh, they just asked me, and it was a
moment of sheer terror. I've never hated anything so much in
my whole life.
MTV: Why, because of the way it was performed?
Meat Loaf: One, for the way it was performed. Two,
just the whole — I don't know, it was just very strange. I
could never get the monitors right the whole time in
rehearsal or anything, and I was just trying to get the song
performed, and it was just a big mess. I have performance
anxiety. I'm getting a little better now because I've done
so many in the last month that I'm getting better at it.
MTV: Have you always had performance anxiety?
Meat Loaf: Always, always. There's others now I'm
finding out as well. Rod Stewart has it. I was reading an
interview with Rod, and he was going on about how for years
he just wanted to curl up in a ball. And I did ["The Tonight
Show"] in, what, '96? They told me I had two minutes to go
on, and I ran and hid under a desk. They had to go, "Come
on, get out, you're on." If you ever see a replay, I'm kind
of being shoved out there as they're introducing me.
MTV: Is it one of those things where once you get
onstage it washes over you?
Meat Loaf: No. Well, it did. See the problem with
"American Idol" is that I didn't have any music for the
first 12 or 14 bars. I was trying to sing from the house
speakers, so I could barely hear. I kept trying to get
quieter and I kept getting more nervous and quieter and more
nervous, and then I was out of time. And when you get out of
time on ["It's All Coming Back to Me Now"], the way the
chord structure is, the notes don't work.
I had to be live in New York the other night, and I came in
early, but it didn't make any difference. I came in four
bars early, I sang, and all of a sudden I realized what I
was doing. I just repeated two lines. But with that song
[from "Idol"], man, if you screwed up, you screwed up. It
was a mess. It was a very strange vibe, I think because it
was a competition. Usually when you do TV shows, it's like a
talk show, not a competition. But this was a competition, so
it was a very strange vibe backstage. Now I know why Prince
didn't show up until 10 minutes before he went on. They were
freaking out.
MTV: Really?
Meat Loaf: Yeah. He didn't show up until about seven
or eight minutes until he was going on. They had an idea to
do something with Burt Bacharach where we all went out and
sang again, but then they canceled that. Prince showed up,
so we were OK.
MTV: Do you think at this point people know you more
for your singing or acting?
Meat Loaf: I don't know. I think maybe some of the
younger generation are hip to "Fight Club" and that kind of
thing, and then you go back to silly movies like "Spice
World," which was an absolute — I can't even deal with that.
I've been in 43 films now. You haven't seen them, you've
only seen about seven. Most of them you don't know. If you
just watch HBO, you've seen seven.
MTV: What do you think is your favorite or your best
work of all the 43?
Meat Loaf: A movie called "Focus." It was written by
Arthur Miller, with [William H.] Macy and Laura Dern. "Fight
Club" is pretty good. I want to try and erase this "BloodRayne"
from the list. "The 51st State," what we shot was really
good and what they edited was a little cliché for me, but we
shot some great stuff. The last scene with Sam [Jackson]
when I die is really fun to watch, I like that one.
Actually, this little movie called "Rustin," I like that
character a lot.
You might have seen seven of these. Then you can go down and
find "To Catch a Yeti" in '95, which was a Disney thing that
they spent less than a million dollars on, with a motorized
puppet that you can hear in the movie. Every time it moves,
it goes, "Vrrmmmmm." They broke the bank. In the first scene
when I'm with the puppet, I said, "I can hear him. Wait, I
can hear him." And they said, "Don't worry about it. We'll
fix it in post [-production]." I went, "Oh, OK." It played
on the Disney Channel about 400 times, and every time if you
just watched it, you could hear the little monster going, "Vrrmmmmm."
It was pretty funny.
MTV: So what kind of movies do you do now?
Meat Loaf: It was very odd — an Academy Award winner
two years ago made this statement: "From the minute I read
the script, I knew exactly who this guy was and exactly how
to play him." Well, if that would have been me, I wouldn't
have won the Oscar because I would have turned the movie
down, because any time I finish reading the script and I
say, "Oh, I know exactly how to play this guy, I know
exactly who he is," I'll turn it down every time.
MTV: Tell us about your upcoming flick "Urban Decay."
Meat Loaf: That's a big giant mess. The producer ran
off with the money, and they haven't paid the Teamsters, and
[the Screen Actors Guild] has confiscated the film. So there
you go. That was a cool little thing, though. It was the
hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I did 22 pages in
one day. It was all monologue.
MTV: Will it ever see the light of day?
Meat Loaf: No, not unless I get someone to put it on
my reel. They've got, like, $3 million in it. It's one of
those horror movie things. I play a radio DJ that hates the
world. After I did "BloodRayne," I got nothing but
horror-movie offers. But I got "Urban Decay," and I liked
the character; I thought he was interesting. It was about a
homeless cannibal in Los Angeles, and we were helping to
track him down through the radio. I was safe in my little
booth.
MTV: Is there a role in your career that you could
have done and you didn't and you regret it?
Meat Loaf: Nope. I've turned down a couple of studio
pictures that were very big, but when I saw the role that I
turned down, I was really happy that I did, because I would
have been miserable. I've done studio pictures with smaller
roles, and I'm really miserable. I'd rather do an
independent where I go in and shoot 22 pages in a day and
work, and have it be the most difficult thing ever, than to
sit around for four months in a Holiday Inn Express — three
days a week doing nothing in the middle of Oxford,
Mississippi. I'm just not that kind.
I don't want to be a prop, and some of the studio movies,
when they offer you smaller roles, you wind up being a prop,
and that's what you feel like. I think that I'm better than
a prop — maybe they don't, but I do. "Let's get Meat Loaf,
he's a good prop." Well, Meat Loaf doesn't think he's a
prop.
This report is from MTV News.
