R.I.P. Gary Shandling

Not entirely rock n roll but I do recall the Butthole Surfers getting a run on the Larry Sanders Show.

I always liked Shandling quite a bit, but reading and watching tributes from his colleagues has made it clear that he was an exceptionally kind and gracious person, which makes his early exit from the planet even sadder. The guy spent his entire vacation in Hawaii making sure that Conan O'Brien was okay following the whole Tonight Show debacle, and they weren't even that great of buddies.

A lot of the characters Shandling played were pretty douchey, but apparently that was pretty far removed from him in real life.

It's often interesting, how far removed an actor can be from the character(s) that he/she usually plays. I've read that Larry Linville was the nicest, most well-liked member of the cast of M*A*S*H -- as far removed from Frank Burns as you could get. On the other hand, Gary Burghoff was extremely thin-skinned and short-tempered, and became even more so in his last two years of playing Radar. Maybe something to do with being "stuck" playing a boy just out of his teens, even as you're getting near thirty.

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Not entirely rock n roll but I do recall the Butthole Surfers getting a run on the Larry Sanders Show.

Must have been to pay back the Surfers for their great "Revolution" track, where they chant Shandling's name for, like, 5 minutes.

Which I thought was a fIREHOSE original for many years.

Getting The Butthole Surfers and fIREHOSE mixed up seems pretty unlikely, tho I did see them on the same bill once. Actually, getting the Surfers mixed up with anyone, or anything, else is unlikely. I did use to mentally file them in with Southwestern acid-punks like The Meat Puppets and Flaming Lips, but still, they were pretty much in their own private Idaho (or Austin, as it were).

It was from hearing them cover it on that Columbia years anthology.