I’ll let Jimmy Fallon and The Roots explain how I feel about Conan leaving the air for seven months.

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I’m sure like a lot of other people my age who remember Conan from way back when he first took over for Letterman on the late Show like myself, some of you feel kind of bad that you didn’t watch Conan’s Tonight Show more often. Maybe it would have helped. But the reality of the situation is that it doesn’t really matter. The way that TV ratings work is a mess that needs to be updated like whoa. Don’t have a Nielsen box? Then it doesn’t matter what you watch.

Anyway, mini-rant aside, the missus and I sat down to watch Conan’s last episode tonight and he killed it. After the monologue Steve Carrel came out as an NBC employee doing Conan’s exit interview, then Tom Hanks came out, Neil Young played (if you hadn’t told me it was him, I would not have recognized the man until he started singing), then Conan gave an impassioned speech to the audience about how much he’s enjoyed working with NBC (for about 20 years) and how he hates cynicism and then, the show ended with Conan playing “Freebird” on guitar with Will Ferrell singing, The Max Weinberg Seven, Ben Harper, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top and Beck, who did not seem to know how to play “Freebird” and looked generally confused. Unfortunately he got cut off at the very end and couldn’t give his final goodbye and they didn’t post this clip on Hulu which is a bummer. Anyway, hit the jump for all the clips that did get posted.

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If you do want to check out Conan talking to his fans and the the final jam go to about the 31:45 mark on this video of the whole episode. It’s definitely worth it.

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