Conan's Free As A Bird Now...

You wanna get an idea of how much stupidity exists on the internet?

In the wake of Conan O'Brien's final Tonight Show, and this performance in particular, I was surfing the web last night and came across any number of ignorant comments at several different blogs (which shall remain nameless)...

One person wrote - "Holy shit, I didn't know Ben Harper played keyboards!" when clearly the man is playing a pedal steel guitar. Nobody else at that particular blog corrected the mistake, and I wasn't about to create an account just to get all pedantic on his ass...

At several blogs, a whole bunch of people mistook Jimmy Vivino for Elvis Costello, which is sad beyond belief since Jimmy Vivino has been the guitarist in Conan's band (The Max Weinberg 7) since his Late Show's inception way back in the early 1990's...Hell, even the notes for this YouTube video states that "No, that isn't Elvis Costello"...Who the fuck would ever think that's Elvis Costello? Embarrassing, and disrespectful to Mr. McManus and Mr. Vivino, and certainly makes me wonder how many of these people who have joined TEAM COCO in the past couple weeks actually ever watched his show over the past 15+ years.

Another commentator elsewhere on the internet misidentified ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons as his bassist bandmate Dusty Hill, and again, nobody bothered to correct that moron...

More esoteric but still maddening to me - Another blog commentator successfully sussed the fact that Will Ferrell was impersonating the late Lynyrd Skynyrd vocalist Ronnie Van Zant (not difficult since they were playing fucking "Freebird"), but wondered why the hell he'd wear a Neil Young shirt because of, you know, that whole "Southern Man"/"Sweet Home Alabama" dustup from the 1970's...Fair enough, but this commentator certainly didn't realize that the dustup was mostly tongue-in-cheek, that Neil Young and Ronnie Van Zant were actually mutual admirers, and became actual friends, before Ronnie's untimely demise in that infamous plane crash that took half the band. Hell, Neil Young even wrote the song "Powderfinger" for Skynyrd, which they unfortunately never got the chance to record. More to the point, however, is the fact that Ronnie Van Zant wore the exact same t-shirt on the cover of Skynyrd's final album, Street Survivors, in honor of Neil Young, and to imply that there really were no hard feelings between the two men.

Now, I'm certainly no genius, but I think I can say that when I'm unsure of what I'm talking about, I just keep my fucking mouth shut. Unfortunately, that's not the case with far too many people one encounters on the internet...Something to think about next time you read that, I dunno, A Clockwork Orange was Hitchcock's best film.

Note: I was impressed when Farrell shouted "How 'bout you?", which Van Zant asks the crowd himself on the One More From The Road album...All that was missing was him saying "Play it pretty for Burbank, Conan!"

Hotcha! Hank