The comedy-rock duo Tenacious D was famously formed by a pre-fame Jack Black and his buddy Kyle Gass, who released their self-titled debut album in 2001 once Black’s film career began to take off. That CD was still a recent enough release when I served my mission in the mid-2000s that quite a few missionaries walking down a country road in their area could recite, “Long time ago me and my brother Kyle here/We was hitchhiking down a long and lonesome road…” and trust that their companion would get the joke.
The line comes from “Tribute,” the CD’s second single and most popular track; it made little commercial impact state-side (though became a Top 40 hit in Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, of all places), but has since gone on to be considered the band’s signature song. The tune is a deadpan parody of Charlie Daniel Band’s “Devil Went Down to Georgia” (which was already a parody of Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1925 poem “The Mountain Whippoorwill”), wherein a “shiny demon” appears before the duo and demands they “play the best song in the world/or I’ll eat your souls!”
And similar to Charlie Daniel Band, Black and Gass respond in the most American way possible, by beating the devil at his own game: they begin “playing the first song that came to our heads/it just so happened to be/the best song in the world!/It was the best song in the world!”
But that’s not punchline; the punchline is that “the peculiar thing is this my friends/The song we sang on that fateful night/It didn’t actually sound anything like this song!” This entire track, it turns out, is accurately entitled: it is only a tribute to the song that saved them from the evil demon, which came to them only in a rare moment of inspiration, and which to their regret they have since completely forgotten: “This is just a tribute/You gotta believe me/And I wish you were there!”
Again, this is all just a joke song, a good-humored parody of many an overly-self-serious Classic Rock tune (e.g. “Stairway to Heaven,” “Hotel California,” etc.), a genre that Tenacious D obviously harbors a lot of genuine affection for. They kid because they love.
But then again: are not jokes some of the most serious statements we make? And is it not a fact that sometimes our most moving spiritual experiences can neither be replicated nor captured in words?
Truman G. Madsen, in his 2000 lecture series on the Presidents of the Church, once recounted a time that Heber J. Grant delivered a sermon so powerful that all present agreed to adjourn the meeting immediately after, since it would be inappropriate to continue speaking after such an immense outpouring of the Spirit. Madsen got a hold of the manuscript for that talk, and found that, in form and content, it did not appear to be especially different from any other run-of-the-mill sermon; but then, it wasn’t the words themselves, but something else entirely—something irreplicable, un-reproducible, beyond discourse—that elevated the sermon above Grant’s mortal abilities, and that only those physically present could experience, and nowhere else.
I suspect that every missionary has had this experience: that certain memorable moments which would have only seemed rife with teenage awkwardness and linguistic fumbling to anyone who may have been observing from the outside were in fact profoundly sacred, life-transformative manifestations of the divine to those in the thick of it. And when you tried to recount it later (perhaps during your homecoming), it only came out as a series of forgettable cliches, utterly inadequate to your memory.
Those missionary moments, if you had them, were very real encounters with the “song of redeeming love,” but your recounting didn’t sound anything like this song. You could never do it justice, nor reproduce it for anyone that wasn’t there. It was just a tribute, and you gotta believe me, and I wish you were there.
Maybe that’s why us missionaries way back when enjoyed that song so much; maybe we were more right than we realized to sing it as we walked down a long and lonesome road together…