I held out for as long as I could. The riches now available on YouTube are truly, truly staggering, as absolutely everyone knows…which means that I never felt compelled to embed a video on this blog, because anyone can go to the site and dig up all manner of unimaginable treasures.

I resisted posting, for example, the incredible footage of Jon Vickers agonizing through the final delirium of Peter Grimes, not to mention the rather delectable homemade video someone produced for what is quite possibly the utter nadir of western pop music to date, "My Humps" by Black Eyed Peas. (Hang in there for the piano break — it’s so worth it. Mute it if you have to, won’t make any difference.)

But on Wednesday, the fine folks at Destination Out celebrated Ronald Shannon Jackson’s 1983 masterpiece, Barbeque Dog, in the process uncovering an old discography I spent long months compiling and had no idea was still to be found on the Interweb. Sadly, as I commented there, despite my having compiled this third and last version of the discography in 1998, it’s still essentially up to date apart from a handful of Knitting Factory-released reissues and archival live dates.

In reponse to the original post, commentator Peter Breslin noted that a 1979 Saturday Night Live performance by Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time — with Charlie Ellerbee, Bern Nix, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Denardo Coleman and RSJ — had been posted to YouTube. It’s an amazing clip, as much for the fact that this aired on national television as for the performance itself. Poking around just a little bit more led me to another clip uploaded by the same user: a performance by the avant-punk-splatter-metal supergroup Last Exit, a band I’d never actually seen in action. My conception of the group was completely overturned; I’d always imagined a fairly stolid presence, but these guys were AC/DC onstage.

Exploring further still, I found this tiny, indescribable gem — and found myself unable to keep it to myself…

EDIT: It seems that YouTube and TypePad aren’t embedded with one another any more, so to speak. So I can only urge you to follow this link, to witness a collaboration even Ronald Shannon Jackson couldn’t have imagined.

P.S. Unlikely as it might seem, my efforts to find a way to embed the video I wanted to share somehow also led me to discover that former Texas governor Ann Richards passed away yesterday. This flamboyant yet utterly down-to-earth woman, who gained national acclaim by proclaiming that George H.W. Bush had been born "with a silver foot in his mouth" at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, was also my last point of pride in my more-or-less home state. Unless Kinky Friedman wins the current gubernatorial race, I guess I’m at long last officially a New Yorker, no longer an estranged Texan.