Classic Roots Choice #23

That didn't take long, did it?

Elvis Costello was on Late Night on Friday. Here, The Roots have an entire life's work of songs to choose from, so what does one do? The walk-on music they chose for Elvis Costello was the theme song from the R. White's Lemonade commercials.

There might be thousands of people everywhere scratching their heads looking to my blog for the answer to the riddle (which I would know) except Elvis just couldn't leave it be and explained it himself in his interview (boooooo! I could have been the only one!).

Elvis' father was a jingle writer and wrote the R. White's Lemonade "Secret Lemonade Drinker" song. On top of it, Elvis' sang back up on the song when he was just a kid. In case you weren't living in Great Britain in the 70's (and I suspect that's the case) it looked like this:



It's always struck me as the height of weirdness. Is this a common problem? He's addicted to lemonade, isn't he? He's gotta do it secretly because he doesn't want his family to know he's got a serious lemonade problem and needs professional help? LOSE THE HABIT, MAN!

"Conan" Episodes To Be Available Online

Team Coco recently announced that full episodes of "Conan" will be available online (for free) the day after they air. It takes just one sentence to communicate that and yet its importance is monumental. This small nugget of information is the difference between me seeing every episode of his new show and seeing virtually none of it. I already watched every single episode of "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" so you know I'm good for it.

In other Conan News, in a magazine interview, Conan said he will not have Leno on as a guest (surprise?). But even more shocking is that there's going to be a rule that goes against decades of Talk Show Law in which no guest will be allowed to plug a project. I'm not so sure that's possible. Could it just be a joke? And even if it's real, it's going to become a giant elephant in the room in each episode. You'll have an actor never mention their show but wear a tshirt with the title and opening date on it or they'll take a sip from the guest mug and there'll be a movie poster on the bottom, etc. I guess we'll have to see what happens on the first show, airing this Monday.

Classic Roots Choice #22

Usually these posts are for obscure or clever choices of song for a particular guest's walk-on music. This one's a bit different. This is about kicking-to-commercial music.

The Roots covered "Everything in its Right Place" from Radiohead's epic "Kid A" album.

It looked and sounded like this:

"But wait a minute", you say incredulously, "It goes to commercial so you only get to see a few seconds of it". Your point being? Those two seconds were the most exciting two seconds of my terrible day.

Ed. Note: Relistening to the original now to verify the youtube link and, 10 years later, it still sends me back to the first time I heard it. That is a trip. The song is a trip in itself, but that's a trip on top of the original trip. That's what I call "Double Tripulature". There's also "Triple Tripulature" but people don't generally survive that. Don't forget to trip your waitress.

Conan : The Zeroeth Episode

Conan recently did a preview episode to showoff what his new show will be like. Much like "An Idiot Abroad", he's calling it the "Show Zero".

The new show is supposed to take "full advantage of the internet" (possibly not an actual quote) so hopefully that means putting the EPISODES on the internet. Please Please Please Please.

F--- YOUR REWARDS CLUB

I give you the money, you give me the product. END OF TRANSACTION.

Back to The Future - 25 Years Later

This year is the 25th anniversary of the release of "Back to the Future", a true classic.

Michael J. Fox was on Letterman recently and told the story of how he got the job:

The song "Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News is on the new Rock Band 3 which came out this week. Wow, that's gonna be fun to play.