SNL-First Season DVD
batmon
27,574 Posts
I hope they continue this!!!!!!!!!!! 
batmon
27,574 Posts
I hope they continue this!!!!!!!!!!!
Comments
woah.. finally, thanks for the heads up.
I'll buy this for my dad and netflix it for mice elf.
I dont know but all the musical guests are the real gems in the series. 75 - 85....
The music on the show is a box itself. I want the Sun Ra appearence and Funky Four + One.
YES w/ Brian Jackson doin Johannesburg.
I just copped. The highlight so far was The Lockers w/ Toni Basil(ballerina whitechick ala Breakin).
Fred Berry(pre What's Happening) in an Uncle Sam costume.The SNL house/orchestra band played B.T. Express' Express. I swear up and down Micheal Jackson straight ripped his Robot era moves from these cats.
Toni Basil(HeyRicky) does a leg move that is st8 MJ. And this is '1975. YO, I was astounded. I knew MJ was peepin Pop Lockers in the L.A. areas since has was there then, but Daaaaaaammmm.
I've had this for a while. As someone who watched this the first time around, I was shocked at how "loose" it all was, especially the first few episodes which are much more free-form than what the show became.
The musical guests were waaaayyyyy more interesting back then too. Not always great, but certainly not locked into the Top 10 the way they are these days.
no doubt.
Phoebe Snow
John Sebastian
Patti Smith
Carly Simon - who taped her "live" part cause she has those problem w/ the public.
The New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band
About the only problem with the musical guests on Belushi-era SNL is that they just about ignored the NYC punk scene (Talking Heads and Patti Smith notwithstanding). I mean, both the show and the scene reached their peak around the same time, so couldn't they have exposed the Ramones and the Dictators the same way they gave some light to Leon Redbone and Tom Waits?
Otherwise, the musical guests on SNL back then WERE more interesting. Sometimes they ODed on the folky singer-songwriters (on one early episode, Paul Simon damn near bogarts the entire show to himself! I don't mean he's in every skit, I mean there are hardly ANY skits, it's just him and his ginormous acoustic guitar! zzzzzzz), but you gotta give 'em credit for taking chances. You could do a whole SNL DVD jazz compilation (Betty Carter, Eubie Blake, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, etc.), just from the first six or seven seasons or so.
When Ashlee Simpson got busted for lip-synching to a backing track on SNL some years back, the first thing on my mind was: Now why is this supposedly hip comedy show booking teen idols to perform? Back in the seventies, when the show actually stood for something, you knew damn well that [i]SNL wasn't going to book Shaun Cassidy...[/i]
They havent been reppin Counter-Culture for a while now.
Was the folky-singer songwriter thang that hot in America at the time?
weird, they didn't completely ignore the LA punk scene though. Fear practically trashing the set and Ian Mackaye was one of those kids bumrushing the stage. I think Belushi was a Fear fan though. Those guys are stupid dumb.
Admittedly some of the running gags get tired after awhile - I dig the Muppets, but SNL didn't get their best stuff; Chevy Chase opening each show by clumsily falling down loses its' steam; the Killer Bees haven't aged well. And even back then, I couldn't stand those corny showtunes that Elliott Gould used to open the show with, every time he guest-hosted. But when it was good, it was real good. I'm waiting for the second, third and fourth seasons to make it to DVD. I know John Belushi must have been real happy when Chase left, because then he got more stuff to do (not that he wasn't visible during the first season, but this was obviously when he was just another ensemble player and not yet ***BELUSHI***).
Belushi was already gone by the time Fear were on (although it was he who suggested they appear). I'm talking about during the years that Belushi was on the show (1975-79). SNL and punk were two of the hottest things raging in New York during that era, so you'd think there'd be some kind of cross-promotion, but no go.
Yeah, I knew that, but the progression from what they had to what they've got is a long way to slide. At least as far as musical guests go.
Well, it had cooled off a little by '75 (the real commercial heyday was in '71-73), but people like Phoebe Snow and Gordon Lightfoot still had a niche.
completely. i never thought of that!
I would think that even if Punk was hot, Gilda Radner wasnt hittin up those places. All those NBC cats were probably at some schwanky hotel bar w/ some Coke and a smile. Im sure they partied hard but hittin up Punk spots wasnt for regular folk then.
Except for Belushi.
I couldn't see Gilda Radner or, say, straight-laced Jane Curtin hanging out at CBGB's or Max's Kansas City, but Belushi was down with that whole scene.
According to that Belushi oral history that came out a while back, towards the end of his life he got so into punk that he gave all his blues records away.
Keep in mind, he was into NOTHING, more than he was into coke....
Belushi was directly responsible for FEAR, as he was either hosting the show or making some kind of special appearance, and he basically threatened that it was him and FEAR, or he wouldn't do it.
From Wikipedia
The Saturday Night Live affair
Their most famous performance was on the 1981 Halloween episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Donald Pleasence. The band was booked at the insistence of John Belushi. who was a huge fan. Belushi initially offered them the soundtrack for his major motion picture Neighbors. The movie studio eventually forced Fear off the project and to make up for it Belushi got them the spot on SNL. Among the politically incorrect nature of Fear's songs, the band's appearance included a coterie of dancers, several of whom had been contacted for the event by both Penelope Spheeris (another avid Fear booster) and Henry Rollins (contrary to popular belief however, he was not in attendance himself); among them were Belushi, Ian MacKaye, Harley Flanagan of The Cro-mags, and John Brannon of Negative Approach, causing destruction of the set. During rehearsals the director wanted to prevent the dancers from participating, so Belushi offered to be in the episode (it had been a few years since he left SNL) if the dancers were allowed to stay. [2] The end result was the shortening of Fear's appearance on TV. The band first performed "I Don't Care About You", during which, Lee sang the words "fuck you" (albeit away from the microphone) on live television. The band started their second performance by saying it's great to be in New Jersey, to which the audience booed (the show was filmed in New York). Fear then played "Beef Bologna", "New York's Alright...If You Like Saxophones," and started to play "Let's Have a War" when the audio and video of the telecast faded into commercial.
Not much. SNL also had a pretty good track record with New Wave type stuff, i.e. Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Specials, B52's.
They even had Peter Tosh on at one point.
"Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, if only you could bar wars, let this one stayyyy..."
...or Randy Quaid, or Robert Downey Jr., or Gilbert Gottfried.......
Why?? Most of those kinda sucked as I remember. Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest had some funny bits, but a lot of that stuff was pretty lame.
Martin Short as Ed Grimley, however,