Saturday Night Live: 50 Years of Music - Oneshot

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[00:02:15] Welcome to the Lorehounds one-shots. We're the Lorehounds, where every day is Saturday night and every stage is Studio 8-H. I'm David. I'm Mark from Nevermind the Music. And I'm Nicole from Nevermind the Music. And this is our special coverage of Questlove's new documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of SNL Music. We're going to do this podcast a little different. We're going to have the hot take intro section on our main feed and then the whole episode over on Nevermind the Music.

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[00:04:02] Right. Nicole and Mark, this is pretty exciting to talk about this show. Before we get into the hot takes, I'm just a little bit curious as to both of your individual experiences or what is SNL to you and what does it mean, Mark? Are you a big watcher of the show?

[00:04:22] I am not a big watcher of the show. I have always been one of those people who liked it, but always heard about things the next, I guess, the next Monday morning or whatever, and would then somehow little by little catch the iconic moments. And so, because of that, it kind of feels like the part of this documentary, I know we're going to cover hot takes later, but the part that resonated with me the most was all the Lonely Island stuff, especially like all the Andy Samberg stuff.

[00:04:51] And I was thinking about it later and it's because of what I just told you, which is, I was always an after the fact thing. And not only did that feel like just based on my age, that was kind of talking to me more than other eras might have been, but also that was early YouTube. That was the time when I could actually see, I would basically see all of their music videos after they came out without it just being kind of sporadic.

[00:05:17] Like I saw, I mean, Nicole, we just, a couple of weeks ago, everybody heard our T-Pain episode and I made this big deal about Shaday and all that. And you were like, what? And I realized watching this doc, it's not because of T-Pain that that was always associated with T-Pain. It was because of On a Boat. It was because of T-Pain being in Lonely Island that sort of I associate that nugget of pop culture with T-Pain and with comedy and with sort of the zeitgeist in general.

[00:05:47] So I've always had a retrospective relationship with Saturday Night Live, but that happens to have included, honestly, more often than not musical stuff, whether it's a musical guest or a musical skit. Nicole, are you a big SNL watcher or? True to form. I definitely have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist a little bit more than Mark.

[00:06:13] Often, I watch SNL. I can't watch it live anymore because I'm old now and I can't stay up that late, but I watch it. I used to watch it live. It was like fun to stay up when I was younger and check it out. And also now I'll like watch it the next day on YouTube and actively seek it out. I love the Weekend Update. I find that it gives a great bit of leaveny. I love news parody stuff, so I've always been a fan of the Weekend Update. I've always been a fan of analyzing the writing process of SNL, the grind of it.

[00:06:43] I think that that's really cool. I just love the whole motif. So I'm a fan of SNL. I'm up to speed on it and I watch it frequently. And I'm also just a fan of Questlove. I think that he's really, really talented, obviously. And just this well of creativity and people like that I find really inspiring. So that's where I stand. I get it. I'm following SNL for sure. Cool.

[00:07:09] As a watcher of the original cast while it was on in 1975, it's just sort of been a backdrop for a lot of my life. My strongest recollections of a particular cast or an era was the Eddie Murphy period. So while I have fond memories of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, it's really the Eddie Murphy period that sort of marks the show for me.

[00:07:34] And yeah, and I think like both of you, and I think we can maybe talk about this a little bit later, how we watch the show has changed a lot. And how we engage with it. Back when I was a kid, I remember there are episodes that we saw in this documentary that I don't remember because I wasn't there when it was on and there was no way to see the reruns. And now it's a completely different kind of delivery system. Awesome.

[00:07:56] So, but I'm really just blown away that the fact that we're up to 50 episodes and this big weekend right now is happening as we're recording this. There's going to be a big concert and then there's going to be the 50th episode or season episode kickoff, which I think is going to be on Sunday. So that's pretty exciting. 50 episodes, David, really? Oh, ha. You got me.

[00:08:22] Sometimes my brain and my mouth are not always in sync. So a little setup for what we're going to be talking about, a documentary directed by Questlove. It's a two-hour documentary exploring the Saturday Night Live sort of half century of musical performances. It features a whole bunch of interviews with cast members and crew and people who are involved in the production,

[00:08:47] as well as a bunch of the different musical guests that have been on the show or have something to say about the show and about the show's impact on popular culture and music. So, again, it's Questlove and Oz Rodriguez. So those are the two directors. And Oz Rodriguez is one of the producers on Saturday Night Live. Came out on January 27th on NBC. And then it's also available on Peacock for streaming.

[00:09:14] It's a documentary, so it doesn't get the same sort of ratings as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and stuff. But IMDb has it rated as an 8.3 out of 10. So that's a pretty high score. Mark, what's your hot take for the documentary? What did you think of this as a piece of infotainment, as a piece of produced media? I don't think this is a hot take. It's just fact. This is great. I don't know. I mean, it's a love letter to SNL and a love letter to the music of SNL.

[00:09:43] Even if you don't watch SNL or don't like SNL, it is culturally important. And so I can't say, oh, it's a fact pretentiously like this doc is great. But the fact is, this is a way of tracking the history of the last half century, right? And whether it's through, you know, the Sinead O'Connor political stuff, the Rage Against the Machine political stuff, the comedians that have come and gone in terms of setting the comedic tone of entire generations,

[00:10:13] this doc, I thought, did an excellent job of capturing all. It kind of made me wish that I was watching live, right? And I know people have their favorite eras. And I don't think this era is most people's favorite era. But there's still sort of a magic to it that I think the creators of this documentary did an excellent job capturing. I don't know what else I can say except for that. Are you a fan of Questlove in general? Nicole, I know you've like read books and stuff. He's like, I haven't gone that far.

[00:10:39] But you know, I mean, ever since The Roots, I've been a fan of his work. His whole vibe is just a consummate collaborator, I think, is just such a cool vibe, especially when connected to something like this. That is really is a just perfect capsule of the chaos and magic of collaboration, whether it's the comics on the stage or the artists and the artists with the audience and all these cool things.

[00:11:05] I think he's the perfect person to capture this sort of adventure for us. Nicole, you said that you're a big fan of Questlove. Tell us a little bit more about what it is that he does. I think he's a national treasure. And I'm so glad that we have so much more of his career left to experience because he's not done by a long shot. He doesn't seem done and he seems so humble in his talent. And that is an awesome quality.

[00:11:32] He wrote this really great book called Creative Quest that I actually teach from that book about success and failure. Yeah, like I assign chapters of it because it is a great reflection on how we don't really learn a lot from success, but we learn a ton from failure. And he kind of leans into the fact that every failure is just part of the creative process. And I find that to be a really inspiring thought, especially with this generational cohort that's been taught that they're not allowed to fail. It's really cool.

[00:12:02] They're scared. They're so scared to fail. And Questlove always models behavior that you can fail and keep trying and get better from that failure. So I find him really inspiring for sure. The idea of him as a collaborator is huge. I think he's very eager to work with people and people seem to like to work with him. And that's reflective in this documentary. It's clear that he was like the creative voice behind it, especially I know we'll talk about individual segments,

[00:12:31] but overarching the way that they bin the content for this documentary was really impressive to me. It's so much to cover. Oh, my God. There's so much. And I was wondering how they would find like a thread through it all. And they really did a great job of compartmentalizing certain aspects of Saturday Night Live to make a unified piece of content for us to observe. So, I don't know, not a hot take. It was a great documentary. I'm excited to watch it for a second time for sure. But it's long too.

[00:13:00] It was long. Two hours. Yeah. And it feels like it's almost cut up because the way they do the, they fly in the graphics and the logos every once in a while. It feels like it's set up for commercial broadcast. Yeah. It was probably three hours broadcast. Yeah. You know, it's funny because some of the material I pulled up was calling it three hours, but on the actual end in runtime is two hours. So, yeah, I think you're right with commercial breaks. It would push it to three. I thought that was like a convention to kind of mirror the pace of Saturday Night Live. Right.

[00:13:30] That they like had those segment markers in place just to give the same rhythm. Well, I think it perfectly overlaps though, doesn't it? I mean, it creates that same vibe and same feeling. And they used, I think some of the graphics packages look like it's going back to the original 1975. For sure. And you talk about how much they covered Nicole, like how could they do it? And granted, I'm not a true watcher, but of the iconic stuff I've encountered, you know, even like Wayne's World showed up briefly.

[00:14:00] Right. And that's another, that's another way I've consumed Saturday Night Live is through all the numerous films that have grown out of it. Right. But there's really only one thing. And I'm sure we're going to talk about this later. There's only one thing in terms of musical sketches, at least that felt like it was left on the table and didn't appear. And I don't know if we're going to come back to that, but, but otherwise it's amazing. It feels like they really got it all. And I'm sure hardcore fans will listen and be like 10 things that, that should have been mentioned.

[00:14:25] But, uh, it's impressive what they did include in two hours, which is a long time, but not, it's not the get back documentary. That's, you know, what is that? Nine hours long or something like that. That's a multi-denity sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that took me a week to watch something like that. So I pulled together some background information on Saturday Night Live just to sort of help contextualize, you know, what this show is and represents.

[00:14:51] The show first premiered in October, uh, see October 11th, 1975. And the, uh, main guest was George Carlin, which is a pretty good guest to start with. And Billy Preston was the main musical guest. I don't know much about Billy Preston, Mark. Is he somebody that for you is? It was funny for me to see Billy Preston. So Billy Preston's a really good keyboardist songwriter. I know him primarily from two iconic cultural events. One of them is this one, of course.

[00:15:21] And that's what I was like, oh, cool. The other thing about Billy Preston that is sort of immortalized is he's the fifth Beatle on the rooftop concert and in Let It Be. So I don't know his solo work, but if you watch. I forgot about that. You know, that iconic rooftop concert video. He's the guy doing all the electric piano and he's the electric piano and organ on the song Let It Be or Get Back or kind of that whole album.

[00:15:49] He's basically on almost every track. And it's one of these try to keep the band from killing each other moments, sort of like when they brought Eric Clapton in. And so I don't know his solo work, but I know him, you know, he was a pretty, pretty big guy back in the day and started as a hired gun keyboardist. I forgot that he's totally in that. And they're talking about him and like, do we bring him in officially or not? And yeah, they were almost going to add him in the band. And but then this is a few years after that, right? This is probably six, five or six years after that.

[00:16:19] And so it's these other moments in history. I wish, you know, he were I wish I knew his individual solo music, but it's sort of like I wish he was the main character in history a little more. He feels a little bit more like he's he's appearing in other people's stories to mark historical events like some kind of a Greek demigod or something like that. Like a watcher from fringe or something, you know? Oh, gosh, that takes. Sorry, I'm like.

[00:16:46] You know, I mentioned in that Oscars episode, I mentioned Michael Giacchino doing weird violin effects and stuff. And I was literally thinking of the music from that show when I made that comment. So it's just one of those weeks. Anyways, cut that out. That's not. Poor Billy Preston, huh? You really like didn't make the right choice. Did they kick him out of the Beatles or did he like elect to leave? What was the deal? They they mused about whether he should be added.

[00:17:13] I think I don't remember, but one or two of the guys in the main band was strongly advocating for it. And then they sort of just didn't do it. I don't remember. There wasn't any big reason. So back to Saturday Night Live. Breaking up. The show was developed by so the studio came to Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersole.

[00:17:39] And basically the issue was Johnny Carson, who was the big talk show host at the time, wanted to take one more night off a week. But he couldn't do that because they were doing reruns of his on Saturday night. And he wanted to take Fridays off, basically. And so they were like, well, we can't have two back to back reruns on. So we got to fill in something new for Saturday night. So that's how it got created. It was sort of backfiller so that Carson could have more days off.

[00:18:07] The first cast were nicknamed the not ready for primetime players. And that included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Lorraine Newman, Gilda Radner, and George Coe. And I think the only original cast member that we talked to on this documentary is Jane Curtin. And I'm not sure where everybody else is. I don't know if many of them are still with us. I'd have to go and actually look. So a sketch comedy show isn't a new thing at this time.

[00:18:37] But it was the style and the format that was innovative and the fact that it was live. And it was produced and aired live. Apparently the first five seasons were, there was a lot of drug use. It was sort of the mid-70s. And cocaine was a big part of the working process for the show. In about 1980, Lorne Michaels, who was the main producer, left. There was a short period with a different producer than Dick Ebershaw took over.

[00:19:07] And he brought in Eddie Murphy and a bunch of other different talents, sort of revived the cast during the 80s. And then Lorne Michaels returned in 85 and started rebuilding even further and carrying the show on to now. A couple of stats. So over 50 seasons, there have been 980 regular episodes. That's just the regular Saturday night episodes. There have been 970 musical guest appearances.

[00:19:36] So there were 10 episodes that didn't have a musical guest. But by the best I could figure out, there have been about 1,400, maybe 1,440, 1,450 musical guests, individual guests that have been on the show. And that may be a musical guest who is hosted. Because sometimes they do that. They double up. The host is the musical guest. There are other times where multiple musical guests are joining together.

[00:20:03] So there's two different artists who are playing together. So almost 1,500 musicians or musical people have been on the show. And that's over a span of 167 different cast members over these 50 seasons. I really appreciate you watching all of that content, all 50 seasons, to get that data, David. Right. That's super helpful. And like counting everybody. Wow. That's really impressive. Are you sure you didn't mess up and miscount, like double count somebody?

[00:20:33] I'm sure it's been messed up. I won't tell you how I came to those numbers, but I had a little silicon help to crunch the data. But all that, if you go on Wikipedia, every season has a page, every guest, every musical guest. It's all there. And so you can sort of dig through it. So you can fall down a very big hole.

[00:20:54] But I just think that when we think about the fact that 980 regular episodes, and that doesn't mean the specials or all the spinoffs and everything like that, and over almost 1,500 musical guests, the impact on culture and what the show represents, as you were saying, Mark, and what this documentary represents as this time capsule, this incredible record, this incredible love letter to something that has been so important.

[00:21:24] And so it's kind of influential in culture. And we'll talk about some more details once we get into the episode proper. But it's astonishing to me. And then, I mean, okay, yeah, I had a little bit of online help calculating those numbers. But imagine Oz Rodriguez and Questlove watching. Like, how did they go about going to figure out what they were going to do? Can we talk about the opening yet? Yeah, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. And then we'll take a break.

[00:21:52] Like, oh my gosh, everybody, stop what you're doing. The medley, the musical montage, the mashup, as people used to say a decade ago, of who knows how many songs from live performances put together in a, gosh, more than five minutes long segment. I think it's like six or seven minutes. Dude, it was so long that I was like, is this the whole documentary? Because I went in kind of blind. I was like, is this just two hours of this?

[00:22:22] I was like, that would be awesome. So the reason, yeah, totally. The reason that I thought about it when you were just saying that, David, is, yeah, they had to comb through the footage to think of what they were going to talk about. They had to comb through somebody. I don't know. We have to probably shout out whoever did the editing of this thing. They combed through all of some of these iconic performances and they mashed them up.

[00:22:48] And so I'm thinking of all these things as I'm just struck by the majesty of this moment. Like, did they change the key of this? Did they pitch shift it so it would fit with the next song? Or is it just they maybe do they have AI look through and say, how many performances are at this beats per minute? And they just because it basically goes as one seamless track, one seamless song that is all essentially the same tempo with a few breaks that maybe they were stretching time stretching a little bit of it.

[00:23:18] But they had to have found anything that fit. And there's moments where, like, losing my religion, the vocal alone is above some other song. There's a moment where there's like a call and response between Super Freak and Girls on Film.

[00:23:48] Oh, my gosh. So good. So good. And it's just I just this is one of those things I just don't think people know how hard that is to do. I was watching it and I was like, Mark is losing his mind right now watching this because it is like, how do you even start? Where do you even get started? There were so many mashups that were awesome. I'm going to shout out. That's crazy. Yeah. Sorry.

[00:24:15] I'm going to shout out the the Weird Algorithm podcast, which is a Weird Al podcast. And they talk about his polkas. Weird Al will do like and I want to actually bring up Weird Al later. But they'll do these polkas where he goes through like 20 pop songs at the same time. And the craft, they always talk about how the craft of doing that is so tough to do. But to medley through artifacts like this, through footage, some of it in audio tracks from some of which are what? 50 years old. Some of which are only five to 10 years old.

[00:24:45] Is just makes even writing a polka medley like Weird Al look like a tiny task. I can't imagine people. I'm telling you that was probably 50 hours to me. Just that thing. What was your what was your favorite mashup, Mark? I know you have it. Can you guess mine? Gosh, no, I can't guess yours because I don't remember enough. Like I was just kind of taking it all in. And the one the losing my religion one was the one where I where I realized they're doing something on the next level here.

[00:25:28] That's me in the corner. Spotlight. Because it was two disparate things that just didn't go together. I did not make a note of which one hit me the hardest, though. Nicole, what do you think? I loved the Bobby McFerrin TLC part because I just love TLC.

[00:25:55] And you forget how good Bobby McFerrin is. And I know that you have a history and acapella and that you're very passionate about it. But he has kind of obviously that kind of flavor. It was so good. Sharon Hanson was a really great mashup for me because the juxtaposition was just so funny. Dave Matthews Band and Queen mashed up together. I made a note that that was really cool for me. You are the way.

[00:26:21] But I need to take away the loom since you can know.

[00:26:53] It was awesome to see two very different styles of artists combined. And I think that that's very representative of the nature of Saturday Night Live. That we're pulling a lot of different things from a lot of different areas. And it's like throwing it together and it's working.

[00:27:22] Recognizing that that intro was not thrown together. I'm not sure how you would even get started on an undertaking like that. And when I thought to myself, is this going to be two hours of mashups? Like, I'm on board. But that is a tremendous amount of work. My wife and I were watching. And she's a huge Saturday Night Live fan. She still watches today. She watches the YouTube clips. And she's a big music fan as well.

[00:27:45] We were just stunned at the incredible work that taking not only the audio tracks, but the video tracks. Right. And then seamlessly integrating them. And then they flowed perfectly. And it was... I just couldn't believe what I was hearing or seeing. It was beyond understanding. I mean, it's six minutes of this musical history. I don't feel like as dripping with praise we are.

[00:28:14] I don't think we're doing it justice. Like, people, if you haven't seen it, is there a way to just see that? Like, that's worth the price of admission alone. So, like, check it out, people. It's just a thing of beauty. And it starts out just with the ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen. You think it's just going to be kind of like a talky-talky thing. And then suddenly the music starts. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen.

[00:28:44] Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. And now ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen. Saturday. New York. Jolt of electricity. Iconic. Musical history. Game changing for a network show. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. Excitement. Energy. Adrenaline. Live. Absolutely fucking terrifying. Ladies and gentlemen, it's not. I'm on SNL and you're not.

[00:29:11] Even the ladies and gentlemen was on beat and had rhythm to it and had timbre to it. Right? And you know it was like setting up for something. It was the metronome of it all. But there was no way to expect that until it hits. Right. Until you're like on this musical journey. And then what I thought was really interesting is they sort of transition and then they start talking to people.

[00:29:38] And then one of the things that they do there is you start having these short little conversations with a whole bunch of the people that are going to be voices in the documentary later. Yeah. So he's pre-setting this up to see these people come back later, which is a really great documentary technique as well. Right. So like three quarters of the documentary, you're like, oh, who is this person? We're so far into this and now you're bringing me a new voice.

[00:30:03] So they sort of primed the pump for us to see who are some of the people that we're going to engage with and get their points of view on the show. And so I thought that was just, again, really smart documentary filmmaking. Okay. I've just looked up on IMDb. I just want to shout out the actual editors. There's a whole credit here. There's the editors who do the doc, but then there's music montage editor. And there are three people who I want to shout out. James Lester, John McDonald, and Oz Rodriguez. So. Okay.

[00:30:33] And Oz is one of the main, the director along with Questlove for the overall thing. And he's also a producer on Saturday Night Live. He probably watched a lot of footage. And just imagine all of the people who were involved in pulling up these archival of the archival footage and the material and queuing that up. And it's just an incredible effort. And they just have to, I'm so proud of them. I'm so proud for them. You know what I mean? Yeah.

[00:31:00] Like it's this thing, this medley is a work of art in and of itself. Forget the rest of the documentary. This six minutes of musical history is just phenomenal. Well, I think we're done gushing for now. So from here, we're going to take a quick break. And then if you're on the main Lorehounds feed, this is where the podcast is going to end. And if you want to hear the rest of the podcast, we're going to get into more of the details.

[00:31:30] Go over to Nevermind the Music, subscribe over there, and you can listen to the rest of the conversation. So thanks for joining us on this. I hope you get a chance to see the documentary. See you over. Nevermind the Music.

[00:32:07] Hey, everyone. David here. Severance is back. The Lorehounds are partnering with Properly Howard to bring you in-depth weekly coverage of Season 2. Join me, John, Anthony, and Steve as we unpack every twist, theory, and revelation. We've created a dedicated feed just for our Severance coverage.

[00:32:30] Simply search for Severance Lorehounds in your podcast app or find the direct link in our link tree. Our weekly episodes dig deep into the show's mysteries, themes, and bigger questions about identity and consciousness that make Severance so compelling.

[00:32:48] Season Pass and regular community subscribers get ad-free access to our weekly episodes, plus exclusive content like our Supply Closet bonus series, featuring fascinating conversations with experts like the team from Nevermind the Music. We've explored the Neuroscience. We've explored the Neuroscience of memory and personality, decoded the hidden meanings in the show's musical themes, and there's much more to come. You'll also get Steve and Anthony's complete Season 1 rewatch series.

[00:33:20] We believe in total transparency with our listeners. And unlike Mammalians Nurturable, we're happy to share all of our secrets. Find the link for the Severance feed in the show notes below, or search Severance Lorehounds wherever you get your podcasts. Come theorize with us about what's really happening at Lumen.