First time I watched this, I had no idea what it was … It was late at night and Conan introduced them as “The Greatest Band In The World”; it wasn’t sarcasm and it was too quick to see if it was jest because then my attention went to the two guys dressed like superheroes—even cooler because Jack Black almost looked like a Mexican wrestler.
They had acoustic guitars, sounded great and started telling this crazy story. Nothing looked like this at the time: almost everything on the air was either pop (Ricky Martin, Britney Spears, etc.) or bands with no sound and only affectations (remember Limp Bizkit standing on a giant toilet?). Somehow, these two guys with theatrical lyrics and dressed like superheroes—with Jimmy Vivino looking like Ra’s al Ghul for good measure—was a lot less fake than everything I was being bombarded with …
The performance was amazing, band tight as it could be, and after it was over it was gone.
I lived in Latin America at the time, which had a different MTV (even worse than the US one, if that’s possible) that would not show anything remotely like this; so finding this there wasn’t an option. I still had dial-up internet which amounted to almost having no internet so it wasn’t really a thought to look them up (and bands didn’t use social media or websites as much as these days, anyway). And there was no post-performance interview. So I was just left with an excited feeling of “What the hell did I just watch?” “How can this be a band, just two guys?” (I knew that Conan’s band was just helping for the night). That feeling lasted for months until I kinda just forgot about them.
Later on, I learned that Jack Black was a comedian and, years later, I realized that it was a magical-and-mysterious band not quite. What happened that night was more like Jack Black was acting the way he acts everywhere …
This almost made it on Too Good Monday.
• Tenacious D – Wonderboy (Live on Late Night with Conan O’Brian)
Massive Tunes 