…Okay. Well, that pretty much wraps up our visit with Devendra.  We’ll check in again in a year or so.

Why didn’t anyone else see this coming?  Why am I the only one to realize that Neil is actually groaning, tortured, half-mad folk-rock poet Leonard Cohen, who maintains his astonishing youth and beauty by feasting on the pineal glands of innocent women?!  I mean come on, even the microphone is the same!! Jeez, I feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper here!

Back me up here people, tell me I’m not the one on crazy pills.  I mean 2009 is s’posed to be this big huge Year of Change, so help me unmask a few of these things, okay?!

Gretchen Wilson: REDNECK WOMAN

Believe me when I say I don’t look down on Gretchen Wilson, primarily because if I did she might hit me with her baby and run over me with her Yamaha Rhino. Yet I too leave my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long, and I know too many of the lyrics to too many Charlie Daniels songs, although I’ve been trying to eradicate them of late and I’m considering electro-convulsive therapy.

So hats off to you, Gretchen, although I daresay that among the company you keep no one ever removes his hat.

Do YOU have a bad song you’d like to nominate for bad song of the week? Send us your nominees, we’ll pick only the very worst! Make sure it’s a song in regular national airplay, or at least in annoyingly constant rotation on your local station. Oh, and no filthy lyrics, please.

THIS WEEK: Trace Adkins – Honky Tonk Badonkadonk

Trace Adkins: Celebrity Apprentice finalist and legendary barroom fighter. A large, thick, angry looking man, who comes complete with knife and bullet wounds, and who could reduce me to a bloody pile of tissue with a swing of his hat. Trace’s 2005 chart-topper congeals country and hip-hop into a line-danceable tribute to the buttocks of women who are neither his wife nor girlfriend. It seems that between getting shot at and slapping his grandma, Mr, Adkins just can’t resist buttock. Indeed his career, his aspirations, his philosophic entire are based solely on the getting of badonkadonk. And like the best of bad songs, it refuses to leave the airwaves.

Sure, now you make the connection.

By the way, I’m available to the Executive as a Special Consultant for Ferreting Out Celebrity Ringers In Office. I’ll need to be highly paid. Thank you.

Died ten years ago today. As a singer, I feel I have some measly credential to say that he had a hell of a voice. I can’t vouch for whether he was a nice guy or a jerk, I never met the man. But I can tell you that a lot of horn players wished they could play like he sang. Certainly nobody can sing like he did.

Here’s what I mean, and I’m not going to link any YouTube crap here, no mp3’s. Not near good enough. Find a clean LP copy of “In the Wee Small Hours” and play it on a good system in a comfortable room. Preferably in the evening after bar time. Listen to the whole thing. No other distractions – no cell phone, no computer, maybe a single light. Pour a little Scotch. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Then you tell me: could the man sing, or could he.

Only because some of you seem to have a weak stomach regarding our penchant for cross-celebrity mutations, I present the American Purple-top “Gary” Busnip hybrid (Corbett cultivar). With a stronger, more pungent taste than other varieties, the Busnip is commonly baked, occasionally steamed , but perhaps most popular when smashed, spiked with good-quality vodka, and heaped in a big pile in the middle of the dinner table. Enjoy!

***

BILL adds: Curse you, Randy Bachman!!

This is flattering on many levels. First, as a woman and an unrepentant, self-described tech-video-gaming geek, Veronica demonstrates extraordinary courage. One can only assume that she kicks it on Rock Band, in Solo or Band World Tour modes. Second, she is under thirty, which so few of us around here remain. It’s not that I now consider us cool, but it’s helpful that somebody who is considered cool (to which I would add our own forum members and blog readers, of course) would consider us at all. And as if that’s not enough, Veronica is also a fan of the chili pepper, which is enough for us to provide our own ringing endorsement back.

Thanks for the mention, Veronica. Consider yourself blogrolled. Come riff with us sometime.

First of all, thanks to all of you who feel that I may or may not resemble one person or another. Without you, this exercise would merely be annoying and self-indulgent. After asking you to suggest people that, in spite of my best efforts, I look nothing like, you sent in thousands (dozens) of wonderful suggestions, represented above by the collage sent in by Mgroves (nice, don’t you think?); and though I’m flattered by the question of my resemblance to the likes of Dennis Hopper or Gurudev Rabindranath, I more closely resemble a stalk of barley. Also cleverly suggested, to name but a few, were Howard Hessman, Paul Giamatti, Hank Williams, Jr., Billy Connelly, Wolfman Jack, Dans Haggerty and Fogelberg; the Rat Guy from Beakman’s World, William H. Macy (!), ALF, A drunken beach Santa, one reader’s dad, King Christian IX of Denmark, Mick Fleetwood, Papa Hemmingway, Glenn Close in “Hook,” Harvey Fierstein, Michelangelo’s depiction of God, John Entwhistle, Conductor Krzysztof Pendrecki, Bea Arthur and, by the dozens, Kenny Rogers. I resemble none of these men in any way. Not even reader Adam Electric, who morphed me into a perverse version of James Doohan, could make the cut, clever as it was. However, someone has to win, and so here are my top five picks:

George Carlin (Submitted first by Ninjew)

Several of you suggested that I don’t resemble George – sour, angry, keenly observational, and balding, with the forehead of a bottlenose dolphin. I look more like Kristy McNichol than I do George.

Francis Ford Coppola (Submitted by Dave-O)

I once met Francis, back in 1980 when I was in college. He was then, and possibly still is, charismatic, ebullient and crazier than a shit-fight in a monkey house. I am slightly less crazy, and I look nothing like the man. In fact, for this picture I had to use Photoshop to roughly triple my lower lip size so I’d bear even a passing resemblance.

Rutherford B. Hayes (Submitted first by Jef)

It was a challenge to prove that I don’t resemble our nineteenth president and founder of the White House Easter Egg Roll, in part because I have such markedly antebellum looks in general. Luckily, while the esteemed Mr Hayes has the noble countenance of a Civil War hero and eminent statesman, I look more like an overfed member of The Band (before you ask, I look nothing like Garth Hudson).

Louis Pasteur (Submitted by Yoohoo Riffer)

Try as I may, this pioneer of antibiosis resembles me as much as a kiwi fruit resembles a shoehorn. Perhaps it’s the Frenchness that prompted Mr. Yoohoo Riffer to suggest such a thing, but keep in mind that I am maybe one-eighth French on my mother’s side, tops.

THE WINNER: Tom Hulce (Submitted First by Katie M.)

I looked at this picture of the versatile and accomplished Mr. Hulce and and thought I’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to resemble him. So that’s what I did, after a night of drinking 151 rum and eating fistfuls of salt plums. And it paid off: Ms. Katie M was the first to notice that even after attempting such miserable self-treatment, I still don’t look a whit like Tom Hulce.

Katie M, congratulations. Here’s your virtual autograph.

My only regret is that nobody managed to notice the one person I feel I most resemble: Her Royal Highness The Princess Anne.

Look at those biceps, eh?

Thanks to Ninjew and Chaos (not their real names, God willing) for contending that I look nothing like George Carlin, and even with my best efforts, disembaldening and enhugenating my forehead, dammit, they’re right!

I’m off to San Diego to help lay down some new Rifftrax this week, so we’ll be taking your suggestions all week here at ResembleFest (a term I heard somebody else use, then I invented it). Next Wednesday, February 20th, I’ll post the top five (George is already one of them) and pick an all-round winner. So keep those resemblances coming folks, and remember, none of ‘em look a damn thing like me!

Never sang “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” Don’t know the words to “Let It Ride,” can barely fake it through “Got No Time.” I don’t play guitar very well at all. I’m not even Canadian.

That’s it. Nothing more to say. Full stop. Period, paragraph. End of report. Triple hash marks. Good night Irene. Katie bar the door. Hasta luego Buckwheat.

But some of you are confused, or more likely, goading me. This ought to make it clear:

See? And I even tried my best to resemble Randy Bachman. I had to use my ukulele, because I don’t have a custom made Epiphone (a tricked out Emperor by the look of that pickguard). Does that settle it? Good.

I know this is my fault, since I made the mistake of causing myself to resemble George Lucas. Now everybody and their mother thinks I resemble everybody and their mother.

So I say why not? Bring it on. Send me pictures of people that you think I resemble and I’ll do my damndest to resemble them so you can be certain that I don’t. I’ll pick the top three resemblances sent in. The winner, the person who sends in the picture of someone I most leastly resemble after I prove that I don’t, will get a Rifftrax Virtual Autograph, like the sample below.

So let’s get busy finding people that I will prove don’t remotely resemble me!