Jimmy Kimmel paid tribute to his longtime friend and bandleader Cleto Escobedo III during Tuesday night’s monologue.
The comedian struggled to fight back tears as he opened “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” sharing with his audience that he lost someone very dear to him.
“We’ve been on the air for almost 23 years and I’ve had to do some hard monologues along the way,” Kimmel started off. “But this one’s the hardest because late last night, early this morning, we lost someone very special who was much too young to go. And I’d like to tell you about him, if you don’t mind.”
As Kimmel continued, he recalled first meeting Escobedo, who grew up not far from the late night host in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“We became friends and not just regular friends. We became like 24/7, ‘Mom please let me sleep over,’ kind of friends,” Kimmel recalled. “One summer I slept over at the Escobedo house 33 nights in a row. For real. My mother used to make me get down on my knees and beg to sleep at his house in front of him. And I would gladly do it, cause we were never bored. We were always up to something.”
Per Kimmel, he and Escobedo used to get into all sorts of high jinks, including playing pranks on the neighbors and knocking the wind out of each other.
While Kimmel noted that Escobedo was “wild” in his youth, the late night host remembered his friends as a dedicated father and family man.
“We had so many adventures. We would laugh so hard,” Kimmel added. “We had our own language that like almost no one else understood. We didn’t have to say anything. We’d sit here at rehearsal every day. We didn’t have to look at each other.”
In fact, Escobedo was so important to Kimmel that the latter said he made it his mission to bring him along when he landed his ABC late night show. Kimmel, who praised Escobedo as a “phenomenal saxophone player,” had to “work up the nerve” to ask the network to cast his best friend as bandleader.
“I knew, ‘My best friend from growing up plays the saxophone. He could lead the band,’ wasn’t a great pitch,” he shared. “But it had to happen. And, not only did I want Cleto to lead the band, I wanted his dad to be in the band.”
From there, Kimmel said he orchestrated an audition for the Escobedo father-son duo, who nailed it. Kimmel noted, “I’ve often said that the single best thing about doing this show was getting the opportunity to allow Cleto Senior to pick up where he left off in 1966 and become a musician again with his son.”
Later on, Kimmel thanked the medical team that looked after Escobedo before his death and expressed gratitude for the number of years they had together. Before concluding his monologue, Kimmel shared he’d be taking “the next couple of nights off” to grieve.
Kimmel’s speech comes hours after he penned a lengthy tribute to the musician on Instagram, where he remembered him as a “great friend, father, son, musician and man.”
“To say that we are heartbroken is an understatement,” he further wrote. “Cleto and I have been inseparable since I was nine years old. The fact that we got to work together every day is a dream neither of us could ever have imagined would come true. Cherish your friends and please keep Cleto’s wife, children and parents in your prayers.”
Watch Kimmel’s full poignant monologue above.
