From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Yelling “Freebird!” has been a rock cliché for years, guaranteed to elicit laughs from drunks and scorn from music fans who have long since tired of the joke. And it has spread beyond music, prompting the Chicago White Sox organist to add the song to her repertoire and inspiring a greeting card in which a drunk holding a lighter hollers “Freebird!” at wedding musicians. …

Kevin Matthews is a Chicago radio personality who has exhorted his fans — the KevHeads — to yell “Freebird” for years, and claims to have originated the tradition in the late 1980s, when he says he hit upon it as a way to torment Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame, who was giving a concert. He figured somebody should yell something at her “to break up the monotony.” The longtime Skynyrd fan settled on “Freebird,” saying the epic song “just popped into my head.”

Mr. Matthews says the call was heeded, inspiring him to go down the listings of coming area shows, looking for entertainers who deserved a “Freebird” and encouraging the KevHeads to make it happen.

But he bemoans the decline of “Freebird” etiquette. “It was never meant to be yelled at a cool concert — it was meant to be yelled at someone really lame,” he says. “If you’re going to yell ‘Freebird,’ yell ‘Freebird’ at a Jim Nabors concert.”

But the origins are much older and more complicated than that.

In 1983 and 1984, long before he became famous as the star and co-creator of the genius BBC comedy The Office, Ricky Gervais was the singer in an obscure synth-pop duo called Seona Dancing. I’ve seen some pictures of him from that period, but nothing as mind-blowing as this one, which Maura just alerted me to:

In other Office-related news, Gervais and his Office co-creator, Stephen Merchant, are developing a new sitcom called Extras for BBC Two:

Extras is the new sitcom he is writing with Merchant, in which Gervais plays a struggling film and TV comedy actor.

“My character is a moaner who bitches about the stars and laughs in the face of adversity,” Gervais said. “It’s not filmed as a documentary this time, but fans of The Office should like it.”

Movie stars Jude Law and Kate Winslet have signed up for cameo roles in Extras, which is being filmed in March and is due to be broadcast on BBC Two this summer.