The man responsible for one of my favorite recorded guitar solos passed away last week. Not crazy flashy or anything, but funky as all get-out. Dude could do a whole lot with one note. This concert — James Brown’s “Love Power Peace” at the Olympia in Paris — is definitely my favorite live album, FWIW:

Every so often — most recently in the interview with Matt at MetsToday — someone will ask me about my influences.

I struggle with it because I never know if I should just list writers I enjoy or try to determine the ones that have actually influenced my writing. Plus then I get self-conscious that people will judge whatever I say or think it’s pretentious.

But when I really think about it, there are a few specific things I can name that legitimately impacted the way I approach information, the way I make jokes, tell stories, even the way I form sentences. And it runs the gamut: literature, movies, television, song lyrics, conversations, whatever.

One of them this 1991 standup routine by Jake Johannsen. My brother taped it and introduced me to it a couple years after it originally aired. I’ve been looking for a DVD of it since I got a DVD player, and I found it on YouTube today. It’s an hour long but I recommend it if you’ve got time. It’s hilariously early 90s-ish, too: