OTHER TECH

THE iPOD GANG

You have an iPod, right? How many songs do you have on it? Oooh ... a couple thousand?

What kind of stuff do you like? What do you put on there? Lately I've been listening to the Black Crowes' Amorica. But there's also old hip-hop like Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth and a lot of Biggie and Nas - plus Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, and the James Gang.

James Gang with or without Joe Walsh? There's only one James Gang, brother. C'mon, dude; what are you saying? It's his band.

I agreed to do this one gig for nothing. It would've been a long flight, a real pain in the ass - and I'm thinking to myself, "Why did you accept this? Why are you doing it?" And it was because the James Gang was performing. Are you shitting me? I was so pumped up. And then my guy goes, "No, reread the e-mail. That's the Jones Gang." And I said, "Oh, no, then I don't want to do it."

BACK TO TV

Would you ever consider doing another TV gig? Yeah, I'm working on a show right now for NBC [Community Service].

If they filmed your book Gasping for Airtime, who would play you? Morgan Freeman. He's an Academy Award winner, right?

Yeah. It could be Driving Miss Jay. Or Driving Mister Jay, in this case. Oh, I'll be Miss. That's fine. I don't mind.

And he was on The Electric Company. We can't discount that. With Maurice the Man-Eating Plant.

COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

You were in two pretty big commercials that aired during the Super Bowl. Now it seems like everybody wants to watch them on the Internet. I watched them that way, too. I was at the game, and when I got back to the hotel room, the first thing I did was watch all the commercials on my AOL screen. I loved the FedEx caveman commercial. Kicking the baby dinosaur made me piss my pants.

How wild is it that people now go to the Web to watch commercials? Well, it's the culture. I mean, I did. [laughs] And I voted for my own commercial 50 times.

I had the flu once. I was stuck in bed, and I dropped the remote - couldn't pick it up. The channel was stuck on MTV; this was in the '90s. I was hallucinating so bad with my fever that for a day I thought there was a storyline between all the videos. There I was trying to piece it all together: "What is Usher trying to tell Sebastian Bach? And why is this guy selling vacuum cleaners stuck in between them?"