Tenacious D - The Complete Masterworks 2 DVD Review

Posted by Joshua George on 11.13.2008

Just when you thought that you were going to have to wait another 80 years before Tenacious D came out with anything else, here we go with a new DVD. "Tenacious D: The Complete Masterworks 2" riles you up for another round with The D simultaneously rocking your socks off while showing you the truth of being on the road.



The Running Length
3 hours even.

The Rating
No Rating: Though contained on the disc is Strong Language and Sexual + Violent Content.

The Release Date
Tuesday November 4, 2008.

Disc One - The Concert

1. "Kielbasa"
2. "History"
3. "Wonderboy"
4. "Dio"
5. "Lee"
6. "Saxaboom"
7. "The Road"
8. "Hell Movie Skit"
9. "Kickapoo"
10. "Karate"
11. "Dude (I Totally Miss You)"
12. "Kyle Quit The Band"
13. "Friendship"
14. "The Metal"
15. "Papagenu (He's My Sassafrass)"
16. "Master Exploder"
17. "Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)"
18. "Double Team"
19. "Fuck Her Gently"
20. "Tribute"
21. "Who Medley"


Every Tenacious D fan can tell you that they've been likely chomping at the bit to see this DVD ever since word started circulating about its release. Even more, I was really excited to get a chance to watch a new concert; something that would be refreshing and awesome. The first thing you notice at the start of the concert is the large amount of fans that look like they've never seen a real woman in real life singing songs by "The D" horribly horribly out of tune. A keen eye, will also be able to catch that about seventy percent of the fans on film are completely stoned out of their minds, which shouldn't surprise you.

At the open of the concert we get some normal Tenacious D antics with "Kage" (Kyle Gass), and "Jaybles" (Jack Black) sleeping on opposite ends of a couch center stage. What a great way to play off their normal "get out of bed and rock" concept than to have it done this way. One fun thing to see (and we see this a lot) is that Kyle is wearing his usual Trainwreck tee-shirt. In case you didn't know, Trainwreck is another band (this one containing six members) that features Kyle Gass. They're actually pretty decent and come with recommendation from Jack Black (of course). We're not here to talk about Trainwreck, though you can find more on them at their official website.

There's basically a whole lot of the same stuff on this performance. I have to say that overall, I was rather disappointed in the concert. You'll notice a lot of the same stuff in this show as was in the show on Volume One and with a much slower overall tempo and pace. I loved the set ("Kage's House") for the concert as it was one of the main refreshing parts of it. The set included a poster of Dio on the wall referring to just about everything, a Live Nudes sign above the "house" referencing the older HBO series shows, as well as a sofa, refrigerator, and a working television that appeared to be playing a documentary on bears.

What I really didn't understand and what really drew my interest away from the performance was the lack of energy on all parts. Jack Black just didn't have his usual crazy energy flow until MUCH later in the show and Kyle was what Kyle is. He's great on the guitar and funny, but has never been a center for energy. The crowd even seemed a bit distracted during the show as at one point they showed the crowd and there were a lot of people texting during the songs. I guess it might just be me, but I have a certain expectation from Tenacious D when I listen to them based on the first Masterworks, and the shows, and the movie of course. Jack Black seemed to take about 5 or 6 songs to really warm his voice up because most of the times that he would normally sing high or in his chest voice, he took the chance to go an octave down, or sing in his falsetto. This left me wondering if perhaps Jack wasn't feeling top shape that day.

They definitely gave JR Reed, or "Lee", quite a bigger role on this set. He played the parts of Lee, Satan, A Dancing Mushroom (during the trippy song "Papagenu"), and the giant heavy metal robot. He was much farther in the forefront of parts of this concert and was given a chance to wow us with his vocal stylings. Unfortunately JR did just the opposite of wowing me. His voice was callous and seemingly rather untrained and primarily only served to bring down the actual harmonies of Jack and Kyle. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that Lee might've been better seen and not heard as he just sounded kind of like the drunk uncle trying to sing with the wedding singer.

I have to say that I love the saxaboom skit/song and everything involved with it. You can tell that Jack knows something about woodwind instruments (going to Juilliard will do that for you) because he holds his mouth just like they usually do just before he starts playing. Eventually Jack gives up on the mocking gestures and just holds the saxaboom to the mic for all to hear whilst everyone dances like nobody's watching.

Jack gives an interesting intro to The Road that I haven't heard before. I'm not sure if it was on another something, but I have the Masterworks 1 and I don't remember that intro at all. Feel free to tear me up (as I know the commenters are oh so willing to do) if I'm wrong, but I really appreciated this fresh beginning and I think it allowed Jack to tune in and start really performing.

At this point The D gets "electrocuted" and heads to hell where they meet up with The Antichrist (John Konesky who also plays for Trainwreck), Charlie Chaplin(John Spiker, who looks remarkably like the kid that plays McLovin on Superbad, but he played for Filter and Trainwreck), and Colonel Sanders (Brooks Wackerman who is the current drummer for Bad Religion) who will all become the members of the band for the rest of our concert. I thought this wasn't such a bad idea, as I always love Tenacious D with band members (specifically drums), but I have to say I thought it was interesting to see them get a drummer that wasn't Dave Grohl. I'm not sure how much I liked Brooks but he did ok.

We got a really nice switch of pace after Kyle claimed to quit, instead of jumping straight into "Kyle Quit the Band", we got "Dude I Totally Miss You", which actually threw me for a loop. Again Jack Black just didn't give this song everything he normally gives it, though from this point we start seeing some crazy shit as "Lee" comes out in the suit for the Heavy Metal Robot and the camera shakes with each step, the Jaybles eats some "shrooms" (which you could tell they were rice cakes if you looked close enough) and we get "Papagenu" which really sucks when done live on stage. They didn't have anyone come out in a sasquatch costume, which I think was complete bullshit considering they had sasquatch in the HBO shows AND in the movie. Honestly, how much more would it have taken to have "Lee" dressed as sasquatch and let some stage lackey dress as the mushroom. Totally dumb, and definitely took away from the song more so than Dio and Meatloaf not appearing. Speaking of complete and total bullshit, how about the fact that when they did "Master Exploder", they just lip-synced the entire song, while doing crazy stage work?!?! I understand that the song is ridiculous, and I understand that they wanted to make the crowd laugh, but I was truly interested in seeing the band really perform this song. As a musician myself, I wanted to see Jack Black in all his glory hit those notes and sing the hell out of that song (no pun intended...), but instead I got completely screwed by having to see them fake it. That alone brought this concert down a whole point in my personal ratings. It also doesn't help that "Lee" later comes back out in the Satan outfit and sings horribly and they play the song MUCH slower than any other recording, and "Lee" doesn't ACTUALLY play anything. So the whole idea to challenging Satan to a rock-off when he's not even doing the rocking, is pretty much stupid. Once I saw the lightening effects I was really impressed and then Satan's horn "fell off" which consisted of "Lee" holding the rubber horn on his costume back and just holding it there and don't get me started on the "I'm mellllttiiinngg" part.

At this point we can pretty much call it a day but we get a nice solo section during "Double Team", introduction of the band, and some than-yous. "Fuck Her Gently" comes rolling out and we seem to close off the show with "Tribute" but then they make another stupid decision and that's to do "Who Medley". I'm not sure if there's any significance to them doing this particular medley, but the harmonies and vocal quality left quite a bit to be desired as Jack Black couldn't sing most of the song in his chest voice. Why try to close out a show with a song that you can't sing as hard and full as possible? If I had been there, I would've been pissed that they ended the show with this.

My Ratings for this Disc

The Audio and Video: 10 out of 10
Sound and video quality are all very good. Video is a good mix between professional and "documentary style" camera angles and the nice thing here is that the crowd is definitely singing with them, but luckily we had a person producing the sound that knew enough to make The D louder than the crowd

The Band: 9.5 out of 10
This band was great. The energy was awesome and the actual "band" behind The D was a perfect background band until their respective solo sections and then they really blew the shit out of the water. They were excited and pretty cool, but I felt like I had to take away 0.5 because Brooks Wackerman wasn't Dave Grohl and I think Dave cliques with Kyle and Jack perfectly.

The Concert: 6 out of 10
This concert as I said was just a lot of the same things we saw in the previous DVD release, and then they added in songs from the movie and didn't do them as well as they were done in the movie. Let's be honest, no live song will ever sound as GREAT as the studio version, but I honestly felt like they could've offered us a bit more energy and a bit more speed on the songs. It's almost like they were slowing all the songs down so they didn't have to strain themselves and so they could actually make it last an hour and a half. Had they played all the songs at the normal pace, we likely would've cut out at least 15 minutes from the show; I for one would rather have a shorter but better show, than a longer pretty good show.



Disc Two - D Tour: A Tenacious Documentary and Bonus Features

D Tour: A Tenacious Documentary

This disc brought us something completely different than what we're used to seeing from the band. We went from the completely confident, cocky, fun-loving D to seeing a lesser, more worried and stressed version of the same band. I think it's interesting that Jack Black doesn't know very much about the guitar. He has Kyle teaching him during a couple of rehearsals and it's kind of cool to see that they work together like that, but I'm surprised that they still have to rehearse so much considering they've been playing a lot of these songs for about 14 years now. You'd think they could play them in their sleep.

The cross interview of Kyle Gass and Jack Black with Dave Grohl was featured on MySpace and I'm glad it was a part of this documentary.

One of the things that I found truly interesting was the amount of realism in this documentary. We got to see KG talk about how he's not "feeling the band", the families are in the wings and we see quite a bit of the wife with a baby toil, Kage has to stretch out his tee-shirts (which I can understand being a fellow fat man), and we seem them warming up before the shows. It's crazy that they decided to read the reviews for the movie out loud on the documentary and then talk about how horrible the movie bombed. You would think that even though everyone knows about it, they'd still not want to play it up so much. The fact that they read all of the reviews was cool too, though I almost hope that they don't read mine. I might have to go complete fan-boy all over them if I knew they were reading my first review ever posted on a real website, and I have to say that I'm honored to be reviewing THEM for my first assignment... no matter how harsh I may be.

Okay, let me music geek out on everyone, but he says that the CD is 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it's actually The Blue Danube Waltz. This pisses me off quite a lot, because I feel like there's no consideration that fans may actually know something about classical music, and unfortunately if someone DOESN'T have any classical knowledge, now the one thing they think they know is completely wrong.

There's a tiny bit of tension where Jack is the much bigger star and people just want to do single shots and interviews with Jack. It definitely gets to Kyle, but he tries very hard not to let it. The great part is when they go to Letterman and Jack finds out that he's supposed to be the only person there. He refuses to go on the show and threatens to walk if they don't let Kyle on the show. As a result of KG feeling like he plays second fiddle too much, we then get to see a Trainwreck gig, which includes JR "Lee" Reed as one of the frontmen. It's pretty interesting but the sound quality is absolutely horrid.

Jeremy Piven, Ben Stiller, Andy Dick, John Stewart, Christine Taylor, John C Reilly are some of the celebrities that appear in this.

The Bonus Features

Time Fixers - An episode much like those on HBO. It features The D going back in time and making sure that Abraham Lincoln goes back in to the Theater to get shot. They mention having a Totally Excellent Adventure, and getting Back to the Future. It was a pretty good little skit and definitely made me laugh out loud quite a few times. This is the kind of comedy that I was hoping for when I bought this DVD.

John K Classico Piece - This was the most fucked up thing I've ever seen. It's an animated video of "Classico" and it features a whole lot of animated sex in various holes as well as a lot of fondling and crazy things by cows, and ducks, and devils and other things. Honestly I can say that even if I was high that might've been too completely crazy for me to handle.

TV Appearances

- Late Night with Conan O'Brien. They did Master Exploder again and faked the whole song once again. The only funny part is when JB makes Conan's head explode. Can they actually perform this song? I'm beginning to wonder if this song was actually played by other people.

- MTV Video Music Awards. They sang a song called "Friendship" that I've never heard in my life. It was pretty cool, but nothing special.

-SNL. Normal Performance of The Metal

My Ratings for this Disc

The Audio and Video: 6 out of 10
The primary problem here is there was so much overlapping audio from one segment to the other that it was really difficult at times to pay attention to the things actually going on. The sound quality during the Trainwreck gig was completely horrid too. I realize that most of the audio is through hand-held camcorders, but the fact is that it was just gross at times. I give it a 6 out of 10 because that's just average and that's about what I figure this was for a documentary.

The Documentary: 7 out of 10
The documentary left a bit to be desired for me so I was going to give it a 6. Then, I decided that because they really let it all hang out and let us see the truth on tour, I had to give it another point. The documentary itself wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but because of the truthfulness, I had to give it a 7.

The Bonus Features: 8.5 out of 10
The bonus features on this disc were fantastic. The Late Night appearance is what dragged the ratings down on this because them faking a song is not what I bought this DVD for. The rest of the features were great and it was nice to hear a new song by The D at the MTV Music Video Awards.

The 411: This DVD is pretty much a good watch. It's got the normal Tenacious D stuff and a little more than what you would expect. While some of the things aren't as good as I had hoped they would be, I certainly feel that it's worth the money you spent if not a bit more due to the Bonus Features and a few parts of the rest of the discs. The band and the quality of sound and video definitely helped this DVD out in the rating, and if it hadn't been for the concert being a little slow, it might've been higher.

Final Score:  8.0   [ Very Good ]