T
he 14-hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles is already brutal. Crossing the Pacific while the focal point of an international media shitstorm — as Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass did in July 2024 after an ill-timed joke about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump — will only make it worse.
“It’s an arduous flight, and then having to sit in your thoughts of, ‘What have I done?’” Gass tells Rolling Stone from his home in Los Angeles. “It was a very low moment for me.”
On July 14, 2024, Tenacious D, the comedy rock group Gass co-founded with his friend Jack Black, performed at the ICC Sydney Theatre. It had already been, Gass recalls, a…