Looking Back at Conan's Night in Nashville

Every aspect about Conan O'Brien's Live at Third Man screams "bootleg."

The all-black album cover and a plain white sleeve are the earmarks of an illegally pressed record. The reel-to-reel recording could have circulated through collector after collector - if O'Brien friend Jack White hadn't pressed a few copies of the pre-Bonnaroo performance.

For those of us with jobs or unwilling to spend almost 24 hours in line, Jack White's label has come with with a document of Conan's performance, one that almost makes up for two Dead Weather albums ('almost' because that's quite a hill to summit).

This definitely isn't a comedy album; it's a fun performance from a band no one knew they wanted to hear. Fortunately, O'Brien is solid on the guitar, his vocals never grate and he's got a solid band behind him.

Live at Third Man cannot escape its novelty, but possesses enough depth and humor to escape those trappings (unlike O'Brien's spoken word single about the Frankenstein legend, which is best seen as a pure failure). The show benefits from retaining the intimacy of the small room which hosted O'Brien's Legally Prohibited Band.

Given the tumultuous year O'Brien had, it's a fitting memento full of covers and banter befitting his self-deprecating persona. He tore up Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky, which he tested out during the writers' strike several years ago. From King Creole to Eddie Cochrane's Twenty Flight Rock, the setlist doesn't stray far from Fifties rockabilly (until White breaks out a solo on the Cochrane tune. Someone called out a Tears for Fears request, and O'Brien warbled the opening lines to Shout before spitting out, "There's your Tears for Fears."

Insisting he can only perform Radiohead when mimicking a 19th century Cockney chimney sweep, O'Brien jumped into Creep. With Jack White as encee, O'Brien's band dumped the vocals and turned Seven Nation Army into a bottom-heavy instrumental. His ad-libs perfectly fit On the Road Again; near the end he confesses "I just can't wait to get off the road again, I just can't wait to have my own show again."

The concert's loose feel recalls O'Brien in the late 1990s at his Late Night peak, not the awkwardness of The Tonight Show. I could hardly imagine other late-night hosts in such a setting. But Conan has always been more of an outlier, slightly bizarre and willing to mock himself. Post-Tonight Show, he sounds relaxed and in a groove for the entire record.

Novelty or not, I think this Live at Third Man will earn many more spins, and outlast the Tonight Show fracas that made it possible.