Tenacious D Play With Metallica, Huh?

Let’s try a little experiment. Go to your cupboard and get out your bottle of vegetable oil. Now fill up a pot with water. Now combine the two into an even mixture. Not working, huh? Now put on a short-sleeved white button-up shirt, bow tie and plaid sweater vest, and attach suspenders to your pleated Dockers. Make sure the suspenders are outside of your sweater vest. Now go to a Casualties concert. Didn’t quite fit in, huh?

Now take Metallica, with James Hetfield’s Oklahoma-ish snarl and Lars Ulrich’s steroid kit-thrashing, and put them on a stage with Jack Black, Kyle Gass, acoustic guitars, and a lot of cynicism. Let’s see, one is a pair of drama majors acting like rock stars, the other is a group of rock stars acting like drama majors. One takes itself too seriously, the other likes to embarrass itself publicly. In the chem-lab of band booking, this experiment gets a big, red, circled “F.”

But according to NME Thursday, the two groups will pair up in Dublin August 20. The show will be a warm-up for their joint appearance a few days later at the 2008 Reading and Leeds Festivals. It is anyone’s call whether the great metal beast will embarrass the D in front of an enormous mob of spectators, or if the D’s satirical mock-rock will make the trucker-esque metal band look like buffoons in front of an enormous mob of spectators. Either way, had the pairing come about by coincidence, someone would probably be fired.

I have a hunch if this is not a joke put together by Jack Black, it will be filmed by his people to be included in some future DVD documentary, where it will then be a joke.