Jack Black picks out the greatest Black Sabbath song: “My favourite of all time”
Whether portraying the movie score composer in The Holiday or the hedonistic, peroxide-doused actor in Tropic Thunder, Jack Black always finds a way to bring out his inner rockstar on screen. Perhaps his most significant role of all was that of Dewey Finn in Richard Linklater’s School of Rock. The perfect man for the job, Black brought his genuine obsession with rock music to the fore to give his students an experience they would never forget.
Although his most notable talents lie in comedy and acting, Black has an equal passion for rock and roll and reserves much of his creative time for music. His weapon of choice is the guitar, as seen in School of Rock, and he has a particularly soft spot for hard rock by bands from the 1970s and ‘80s.
As Black’s character posed illegally as a support teacher at a posh prep school in School of Rock, he began to educate the children that music is much more than scales and instrumental virtuosity. After earning his class’s trust, Finn hands out some of his favourite albums to his students, including classics by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
In one prominent moment, Finn teaches the student guitarist Zack Mooneyham Tony Iommi’s iconic riff from ‘Iron Man’. The song appeared on Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, in 1970. At this point, it is plain to see that Black is playing an exaggerated version of himself, just as he does when performing with his comedy rock partner Kyle Gass in Tenacious D.
Like most music fanatics, Black would find it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to pick out an all-time favourite band, but the British groups Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin would certainly be in the upper ranks. In a 2017 interview with Planet Rock, the actor remembered discovering Ozzy Osbourne’s solo material before Black Sabbath. “I went backwards, because I started with Ozzy and I went deeper into the catalogue of the Black Sabbath,” he said. “Found some powerful gems.”
Continuing, Black picked out ‘War Pigs’, another Paranoid cut, as his overall favourite by the Birmingham metal innovators. “It’s just Black Sabbath at their most raw power,” he noted. “There is also this sort of heavy anti-war message that you don’t really think of when you think of Sabbath. You think of them as the dark underworld of rock, but really, there’s this peaceful centre. That’s the dichotomy of the Sabbath.”
Unlike many Sabbath fans, Black became a bigger fan of the band’s latter chapter with frontman Ronnie James Dio. “If you go into the Sabbath archives and you see what happened when Ozzy left them [in 1979], they replaced Ozzy with who turned out to be my favourite heavy metal singer of all time: Ronnie James Dio.”
Ostensibly, Black holds Dio and Osbourne in similar regard for their vocal talents, but his allegiances tilt towards national pride. “He held a special place because he was from the USA, so he was one of ours,” Black added. “And the fact that he joined forces with the greatest heavy metal band of all time was a great source of national pride for me personally.”
Watch the ‘Iron Man’ scene from School of Rock below.