Read Online Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller
Tags: General, Performing Arts, Comedy, History & Criticism, Television, Saturday Night Live (Television Program)
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there is no theme song for Saturday Night Live in the traditional sense. This is inherent in the nature of the show. I wanted the theme music for the show to have an improvisational feel, like the show itself, and I wanted it to grow and change from year to year. And that’s why when I listen to the show now after twenty-five, twenty-six years, it still sounds fresh to me and sort of classic, and it wouldn’t have if you kept hearing the same hummable melody over and over. Because the nature of the music on the show was interplay between the ten musicians, which is completely different than what you have in a big band or the Carson sound, which is very formalized arrangements written very specifically, and everybody plays what is written on the page. So with the ten musicians I wanted to create interplay like jazz musicians have amongst themselves, and R&B musicians.
It’s the same thing as the cast. You have to think of the musicians in the band the same as you think of the cast and how they would play off each other and kind of riff off each other. That was the same feeling that I wanted to create in the music. So it had to have an improvisational nature. The saxophone was just a thing that I loved, and I am a saxophone player, so it was inherent in my soul that it be the predominant voice. Instead of a band playing a piece with a melody, it was an improvisation by a great blues soloist.
On September 17, 1975, only a few weeks before the first live broadcast of what was then called NBC’s Saturday Night, Lorne Michaels and several of his cast members got together in a rented midtown studio for forty-five minutes of “screen tests” to see how the performers looked on-camera.
Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, token older actor George Coe, John Belushi, guest Andy Kaufman, and musical director Howard Shore took turns before the camera, most of them improvising material or summoning up routines they’d done in stage shows like the National Lampoon’s or at comedy clubs in the United States and Canada.
The tape is a hot underground item but has never been shown on network television, though Michaels considered using parts of it in the fifteenth- and twenty-fifth-anniversary specials. What is Bill Murray doing there? Michaels had hoped to sign him for that first crop of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, but at nearly the last minute he learned from NBC bean counters that the budget would not allow him to hire Murray, at least not now. He instead became a member of the repertory company known as the Prime Time Players on Howard Cosell’s short-lived ABC Saturday-night variety show.
The tape shows the young performers at the tender and relatively innocent moment before they burst onto the American scene. Aykroyd, leading off, goes through a series of wacky riffs, starting with his recitation of mangled lyrics from the song “Till There Was You” from The Music Man : “‘There were birds in the sky, but I never sore [sic] them winging, till there was you.’ And ‘you,’ of course, is the Mashimilov UT-1 rocket that Russia has just developed.” In a Walter Cronkite voice he reports on “troop movements across the demilitarized zone into North Korea today,” then does a mock commercial for “Lloyd Manganaro Deltoid Spray… made from the extracted liquid from the spleens of perfumed sheep.” Then he turns into a Louisiana swamp farmer who claims to have been briefly abducted by aliens in business suits: “Now you can believe it if you want to or you can just say that I’m making up this story, but to me it was very, very important, because it killed all the crabs in the area, and my livelihood is threatened, and I’d like somebody to do something about it.” Then he assumes the voice of a man narrating a documentary and talks about “shale and the influence of shale on the topography of the world and how shale was superimposed and brought down by the
It’s the same thing as the cast. You have to think of the musicians in the band the same as you think of the cast and how they would play off each other and kind of riff off each other. That was the same feeling that I wanted to create in the music. So it had to have an improvisational nature. The saxophone was just a thing that I loved, and I am a saxophone player, so it was inherent in my soul that it be the predominant voice. Instead of a band playing a piece with a melody, it was an improvisation by a great blues soloist.
On September 17, 1975, only a few weeks before the first live broadcast of what was then called NBC’s Saturday Night, Lorne Michaels and several of his cast members got together in a rented midtown studio for forty-five minutes of “screen tests” to see how the performers looked on-camera.
Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, token older actor George Coe, John Belushi, guest Andy Kaufman, and musical director Howard Shore took turns before the camera, most of them improvising material or summoning up routines they’d done in stage shows like the National Lampoon’s or at comedy clubs in the United States and Canada.
The tape is a hot underground item but has never been shown on network television, though Michaels considered using parts of it in the fifteenth- and twenty-fifth-anniversary specials. What is Bill Murray doing there? Michaels had hoped to sign him for that first crop of Not Ready for Prime Time Players, but at nearly the last minute he learned from NBC bean counters that the budget would not allow him to hire Murray, at least not now. He instead became a member of the repertory company known as the Prime Time Players on Howard Cosell’s short-lived ABC Saturday-night variety show.
The tape shows the young performers at the tender and relatively innocent moment before they burst onto the American scene. Aykroyd, leading off, goes through a series of wacky riffs, starting with his recitation of mangled lyrics from the song “Till There Was You” from The Music Man : “‘There were birds in the sky, but I never sore [sic] them winging, till there was you.’ And ‘you,’ of course, is the Mashimilov UT-1 rocket that Russia has just developed.” In a Walter Cronkite voice he reports on “troop movements across the demilitarized zone into North Korea today,” then does a mock commercial for “Lloyd Manganaro Deltoid Spray… made from the extracted liquid from the spleens of perfumed sheep.” Then he turns into a Louisiana swamp farmer who claims to have been briefly abducted by aliens in business suits: “Now you can believe it if you want to or you can just say that I’m making up this story, but to me it was very, very important, because it killed all the crabs in the area, and my livelihood is threatened, and I’d like somebody to do something about it.” Then he assumes the voice of a man narrating a documentary and talks about “shale and the influence of shale on the topography of the world and how shale was superimposed and brought down by the
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