After an ill-timed joke about the Trump assassination led to Tenacious D taking an indefinite pause, co-founder Kyle Gass has broken his silence, expressing remorse for his remarks, teasing a comeback (“it’s gonna be bigger than Oasis!”), and explaining what went down between Jack Black and himself.
On July 14th, 2024 — Gass’s birthday — a Tenacious D concert in Sydney, Australia featured a birthday cake. Gass’s birthday wish: “Don’t miss Trump next time.”
“I’m human, I made a mistake. I was going for a joke,” Gass said in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “But timing is everything. If there was ever a ‘too soon,’ it was this.”
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He added, “It was terrible. It was terrible judgment, obviously. I’ve felt terrible ever since, because it’s such a responsibility to not screw up like that.”
As he recalled, “We were discussing what we were going to do [with the band]. I think we were considering taking a show off and getting back out there. I thought I could apologize onstage, like, ‘Hey, I wasn’t thinking straight.’ But at that point there were safety concerns.” The band received threats. “And once you get into that, it just doesn’t matter.”
Gass posted a public apology the next day. He thought, “People are really disturbed and hurt by this, I have to apologize. It was hard to think straight, but I had some time to craft it. I did it myself. I ran it by the manager, and it seemed like I got what I wanted to say. And then that became a story.”
The “tsunami of shit” picked up speed. “The next day, my agent dropped me. And I was like, ‘Well, gee, it would have been nice to at least talk to you or something.’ But I think he wanted to get in the news cycle too… It did feel like an overreaction. But that speaks more to my relationship with my agent. I’ve been around a long time and I guess he was tired of me saying no to too many projects or something. He saw an opening.”
As Gass tells it, he accidentally poured gas on the fire by deleting his apology from Instagram. “I’m usually [just] recording Seventies covers on my Instagram,” he said. “And so [the apology] was out for four or five days, and I thought, ‘It looks like a dead fish just laying there.’ I really did apologize, but I took it down because it’s out there. I saw it printed everywhere. I think that was definitely a misunderstanding. If I would have recanted, I would’ve said, ‘I’m taking this down because now on further reflection…’ But no. It’s out there. And then, it’s like, should I put it back up? It just felt so wrong at that point. To have that be a separate news story was really disappointing.”
For a short time, Gass did not speak directly to his partner, Black. “No, we were in our own camps at that point. Jack has an agent, manager, and publicist, all that stuff, and they were doing their thing. And I was over here trying to figure out the best thing to do.”
He understood why Black released his own statement, and does not agree with critics who think it threw Gass under the bus. Black “was doing what he felt he had to do. We’re separate people, always, and we’re on different career paths. I totally understood what he needed to protect. I didn’t begrudge him any of that.”
“I might have deserved it,” he continued. “He had to protect himself from his loose cannon partner over here. I totally understood once safety concerns got in.”
Later on, however, “We hashed it out. And it was hard. It is like a marriage. You go through these ups and downs, and try to understand your partner.”
And Gass confirmed the return of Tenacious D: “We’re gonna come back — it’s gonna be bigger than Oasis!” he said. “We will be back. We will return.”
