Posterized

I saw this highly unusual item from 1975 recently, from an odd source - Albert Brooks (@AlbertBrooks) tweeted it. It's a poster advertising the imminent debut of a new late-night comedy show on NBC:

There's a lot of fun stuff in there; for instance, Billy Crystal is listed as appearing, even though he got cut after dress rehearsal and took a lonely train ride home to Long Island. Albert Brooks is the second-leading draw, after Carlin. And I don't know what channel 20 in New York City was - the whole time I lived there, channel 4 was the only NBC station.

But what's really wacky is the title of the show. As you probably know, Lorne Michaels wanted to call his show "Saturday Night Live," but Howard Cosell beat him to the punch with his own show of that title several months earlier. So when Lorne's show went on the air, it was called "NBC's Saturday Night."

Contrary to what the poster reads, to my knowledge, at no time was the show ever called "NBC Saturday Night - Live." It's possible that some zealous adman thought the show was called "NBC Saturday Night" and then added the "Live" to emphasize that aspect, but then the "Live" shouldn't have been in the quote marks. And it was always "NBC's," not "NBC."

Is it possible that the show had this tentative title at some point prior to its initial airing? I doubt it - since the poster says "tonight's host," it couldn't have been printed much before the show's debut, long after they would have settled on a title. I think it's just another example of advertising people not paying attention.

Top Three Paul McCartney Songs About Dogs

1. "Hey Bulldog"
2. "Jet"
3. "Martha, My Dear"

Yes, I know "Hey Bulldog" was mostly written by John Lennon, so it arguably doesn't belong here. But it was originally called "Hey Bullfrog," until McCartney started barking up a storm on the outro, at which point they changed the title. So Paul is responsible for whatever canine leanings that song has.

You know how that song came about, right? The Beatles went into the studio to film a promo clip for "Lady Madonna" just before they went to India, and "Paul said we should do a real song in the studio, to save wasting time," Lennon said later. So while they were being filmed allegedly playing "Lady Madonna," they were in reality laying down "Hey Bulldog." Some bright boy recently had the idea of going back into that footage and recutting it to show the song the band was really playing. Here it is:

Bob Welch, 1945-2012

Bob Welch, singer-guitarist for the pre-Buckingham-Nicks Fleetwood Mac and solo artist in his own right, dead at the age of 65. Welch grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of the producer of several Hope-Crosby movies. After graduating from high school, he moved to Paris supposedly to attend the Sorbonne, but in reality he "mostly smoked hash with bearded guys five years older," he said later. He went back to California to attend UCLA for a while, joining an unsuccessful band called the Seven Souls, then settled in Paris. After spending two years "living on rice and beans and sleeping on the floor" and befriending Ed Bradley, Welch was asked to join Fleetwood Mac upon the departure of guitarists Jeremy Spencer, who found Jesus, and Peter Green, who went nuts. Supposedly, the Mac asked  Welch to join without ever hearing him play, which I don't quite believe.

Fleetwood Mac had churned through a lot of personnel in its early years, and the band was already three years old when Welch joined in 1971. In fact, two months after the first album in which he appeared, Future Games, CBS released the first Fleetwood Mac greatest hits compilation. He was instrumental from the get-go, writing the title track to that album, and his "Sentimental Lady" appeared on the next Mac LP, Bare Trees. His FM-radio staple "Hypnotized" appeared on 1973's Mystery to Me, and Welch wrote most of the 1974 Heroes Are Hard to Find. But even though he engineered a move of the band's base to his hometown of Los Angeles, Welch claimed that he felt alienated from the other, British members of the group, and quit the band in December 1974.

He couldn't have been too alienated, since Mick Fleetwood was reportedly still his manager as Welch embarked on a solo career. After leaving the Mac, Welch formed a power trio called Paris, which released a couple of quickly forgotten LPs. His first proper solo album, 1977's French Kiss, contained a re-recording of "Sentimental Lady" produced by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (who had never even been in a band with Welch), with Christine McVie on backing vocals and Mick Fleetwood on drums. It sounded Fleetwood Mackier than the version he had cut with Fleetwood Mac, and went to Number Eight on the pop charts very early in 1978. (The single's cover art, a detail of the French Kiss cover complete with that Mary Tyler Moore Show font, was kinda gross, if you ask me.) French Kiss had two follow-ups that also made the Top Forty, "Ebony Eyes" and "Hot Love, Cold World."

Welch's next album, 1979's Three Hearts, contained another hit in "Precious Love," which creased the Top 20 in the spring of that year. He continued to release solo albums throughout the 1980s, to diminishing returns. Eventually, he also released two albums worth of re-recorded Fleetwood Mac material.

In 1998, Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The five Rumours-era members were all included, as were Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan.  Bob Welch, who was a key songwriter, guitarist and vocalist through five Mac albums, was not. I have no idea who makes this kind of decision, but it kinda sucks.

Bob Welch died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. I wish I could say I find this surprising, but I don't; we live in a time when meaning falls in splinters from our lives. Bob Welch's fame and success (and possibly his money) all happened a long time ago, and there were stories that his health was poor. After years of being a full-on rock star, I'm sure it's hard to go back to living on rice and beans and sleeping on the floor.  

If It's Not Scottish, It's Crap!! A Birthday Salute to Mike Myers

All of us here at Debris Slide wish a very happy birthday to Mike Myers, one of the foremost comic minds of this or any other generation. As with Jonathan Richman, I first saw Mike Myers in Chicago in the 1980s, when he was performing onstage with the Second City E.T.C., the second string for that venerable show. (Since I now seem obligated to offer birthday tributes for people I first saw in Chicago in the 1980s, I probably ought to look up Ron Kittle's birthday.) I recall he did an improv as a Jamaican toaster, soliciting suggestions from the audience and incorporating them into his rap. Someone had thrown out "Pop-Tarts," and Myers made mention of Milton the Toaster, which was not only a pun but a highly impressive reference for a Canadian.

I've been thinking about Mike Myers lately because all the episodes of "Saturday Night Live" from the 1990s are now available on Netflix Streaming, and I've been plowing through them. After the early years, this was probably the most impressive era for the show; it was certainly the most talented post-1980 cast. At the time, it seemed to me that Dana Carvey was touted as the breakout member, but his work doesn't stand up as well of that of some other members:

* Phil Hartman was just devastatingly funny, deadpan and note-perfect in the commercial parodies while also serving as maybe the best straight man the show ever had.  Watching the show now, I can see Carvey letting the audience in on the joke far too often, especially in his overcooked impersonation of Bush the Elder, but Phil Hartman is always completely within his characters. (Carvey's Bush got very insufferable very fast, but in his defense, it was probably easier to take seeing it once a week rather than having to deal with it a couple times a day, as I have been lately.)

* Victoria Jackson was perhaps the most underrated cast member ever. She seemed to be hired to play the  blonde bimbo, but she had a sparkling quality that elevated every sketch she was in, even when it was just as wallpaper (which happened far too often). Every line reading was fresh and unexpected. I find myself often hoping she'll turn up in every domestic sequence, just because she's such a pleasure to have around. And her Roseanne Barr/Arnold was hilarious.

* With all due respect to Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Norm Macdonald and Tina Fey, Dennis Miller was the best Weekend Update anchor ever. Things were pretty freewheeling back then, and he'd do anything from his trademark abstruse allusions to one-liners in reference to wacky news photos. He was very smart and always seemed like he was having a great time up there, which helps.

* And there's Mike Myers. I am astonished at how well he could create a fully rounded character in even throwaway skits like All Things Scottish, the store whose motto was "If It's Not Scottish, It's Crap." (He basically played the same guy in So I Married an Axe Murderer.) You can see this most clearly in "Wayne's World" and the subsequent movies: Dana Carvey is playing a caricature, while Myers is playing a character. You would no more want to see an entire movie about Garth than you would want to see an entire movie about Pat, but it's always nice to spend time with Wayne. Mike Myers is also the only cast member who was able to translate incredible sketch-comedy skills  into a long and fruitful movie career, as opposed to people like Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy, who ended up just playing themselves.

It couldn't last, of course: Miller left in the spring of 1991, to be replaced by the horrible Kevin Nealon. Nealon brought nothing to the table; it wasn't just that he had no spin or personality to put on the news, he often couldn't get through the jokes without stumbling over some words. At some points, he seemed to be racing through the items just in order to get them out with mispronouncing something. The audience sometimes didn't even know where the joke was supposed to be.

Victoria Jackson, whose tenure at SNL was reportedly not happy, left at the end of the 1991-92 season. Her replacements were undistinguished, to say the least, including the remarkable Beth Cahill, surely the least talented performer ever to appear on the show, with her weak voice, lack of stage presence and penchant for looking around for the cue cards. She starred in the short-lived Delta Delta Delta series of skits alongside Siobhan Fallon and Melanie Hutsell, and while those two were hardly Jane, Laraine and Gilda, Cahill might as well have not been on the stage for all the impression she made. If you didn't know  better, you'd think Cahill had won some sort of contest in which random civilians were invited to appear in one of the shows.

The show would soon be taken over by the likes of Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider. And while those guys could be pretty funny - Sandler was to East Coast working-class goombahs what Bill Murray had been to Chicagoland working-class goombahs - it's no surprise that they went on to make a series of movies targeted at 15-year-old boys.

But if I were to put together a dream SNL cast, probably half of it would be from circa 1990. Here's a first pass at it, with an appropriate mix of gender, race, and comedic skills:

John Belushi
Jimmy Fallon
Phil Hartman
Jan Hooks
Victoria Jackson
Dennis Miller
Eddie Murphy
Bill Murray
Mike Myers
Gilda Radner
Chris Rock

I'd watch that show.

Top Ten Rock Hits With a Trombone Solo

1. "Let 'Em In," by Wings (1976)
2. "A Message to You, Rudy," by the Specials (1979)
3. "Wrong Way," by Sublime (1996)

Well, I guess that's all I got. Make that "Top Three Rock Hits With a Trombone Solo."

Happy Birthday, Jonathan Richman: There's Somethin' About That Sound

I first saw Jonathan Richman, who turns 61 today, at Chicago's legendary Lounge Ax back at the tail end of the 1980s. I had literally never heard his music before (although I remembered a hugely fun-sounding review of his 1985 album Rockin' and Romance in Rolling Stone, which ended "Has there ever been a cheesier-looking album cover?"). My impetus for going was a rave preview in the Chicago Reader, which briefly encapsulated Jonathan's career and concluded, "Live, he's just great."

And he was. We had spent the earlier part of the evening seeing the Kingston Trio on the lawn of some elementary school in the south suburbs, and they were terrific, but Jonathan was even better, onstage with just his hollow-body guitar. I went out the very next day and bought Jonathan Richman: The Best of the Beserkely Years, and have never looked back. That CD had a selection of songs from The Modern Lovers and the great one-shot "Government Center" as well as some of his later child-like songs, such as "Ice Cream Man" and "I'm a Little Dinosaur." Surely, I thought, this is what Bob Dylan sounded like in the third grade.

Jonathan's lack of pretension is a big part of what makes him so endearing. The last time I saw him, at Maxwell's in Hoboken (accompanied by just his hollow-body guitar, as always), he played a song for us that he said we hadn't heard before, because the last time he had come through, he hadn't made it up yet. Jonathan doesn't "write" songs, much less "compose" them; he makes them up. God, I love that.

Jonathan has always had a small but extremely enthusiastic cult following. Back in the early 1990s, the cast of "Saturday Night Live" guest-edited an issue of Spin magazine, and the one contribution from Julia Sweeney was a rare interview with Jonathan Richman. David Bowie, Iggy Pop and John Cale have all (separately) covered "Pablo Picasso." He's probably best known for his appearance as the troubadour in There's Something About Mary, directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, two other guys who love New England. I certainly hope Jonathan got a nice check for that, because he deserves it. The Modern Lovers showed up at Number 381 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, although it's surely one of the more obscure titles on that list. (I am proud to say I wrote the entry on that record.)  

Jonathan (no one in the history of the world has ever referred to him as "Richman") encapsulates something I am constantly seeking out, the ability of art to illuminate the truth and beauty in the quotidian details of life. From "cruisin past the Stop 'n Shop" in "Roadrunner" to an entire song about a "Crummy Little Chewing Gum Wrapper" to the beauty of his wife wearing "something from the hardware store" in "Everyday Clothes," he has always noticed the tiny things that make his life richer, and I'll bet they make your life richer too.

Not that he misses out on larger emotional truths, too; in fact, that probably makes him more receptive to emotional truths. In one of his greatest songs, "That Summer Feeling," Jonathan gets wistful about a little girl he dated back in grade school, then asks, "Do you long for her, or for the way you were?"

I don't know, Jonathan. But I do know you were right: That summer feeling was gonna haunt me one day in my life.

Love You "Live"

There's been a great deal of hoo-ha over the fact that Mick Jagger is hosting the season finale of "Saturday Night Live" next weekend, including this article in Billboard. Jagger sort-of hosted back in the first episode of the fourth season, in 1978, when the Rolling Stones were the (terrible) musical guest and there was no official host, although Jagger appeared in a few sketches.

But the relationship between Jagger and SNL producer Lorne Michaels goes back even further than that. Lorne Michaels has always been a man who knows which side of his toast has been buttered, and he was tight with Jagger before SNL was even on the air, at a time when Jagger was possibly the biggest star in the world. In the book Live From New York, writer and filmmaker Tom Schiller recalled this scene from the early days:


When I first arrived in New York, I slept on the couch in Lorne's apartment. He would entertain people like Mick Jagger at the apartment, and Jagger would be sitting on the very couch that I was going to sleep on. I just couldn't wait for him to leave, because the second he got up, I would go to sleep.

A "Quincy" Mystery

Episodes of "Quincy, M.E." recently appeared available for viewing on Netflix Instant, so of course, I have begun watching them. One thing has always puzzled me about the "Quincy" ensemble, and that has to do with the appearance of Joseph Roman as Sgt. Brill. If Brill ever had more than two lines in any one episode, I haven't seen it, but there he is, every time. According to the IMDB, Brill appeared in 146 out of a possible 148 episodes. As the Scottish say, nae Brill, nae Monahan, nae Quincy.

Danny never had more than one or two scenes in a show either, but at least Danny served a purpose, giving the other regulars a place to repair to where they could talk over that week's case and drink heavily. But what was the point of Brill? You'd think sooner or later the producers would have said, "You know, Monahan is already a supporting character, so I don't think he needs a sidekick."

Until someone tells me otherwise, I'm going to assume that Joseph Roman was a guy that Jack Klugman owed a huge gambling debt to, and this was Klugman's way of repaying it.

Bad Lyric of the Week

We were so close, there was no room
We bled inside in each other's wounds 
  - From "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)," written and performed by Melanie Safka

Gross!

Sale of the Century

Do you know what the biggest-selling album released in this century is? It was rather alarming to me to learn that the answer is 1, by the Beatles, which came out on November 13, 2000. It has sold, according to Wikipedia, around 31 million copies worldwide. That an album of material that was all 30-plus years old at the time of its release could be the biggest seller of its time may seem highly unorthodox, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.

First of all, the tunes are all real good. For another thing, the Beatles, for reasons I never understood, were rather late to convert to the CD era. Their original albums weren't released on compact discs until 1987, and they never bothered with the compilation albums. The Red and Blue albums came out on CD in 2010; Hey Jude never did come out on disc, and doesn't really exist any more. When 1 was released, it was the first Beatles compilation to be available on CD. So there was a lot of pent-up demand, especially among casual Beatle fans, to have those songs on compact disc.

The other half of the story is that iTunes was foisted on the public on January 9, 2001, just two months after the release of 1. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that since January 10, 2001, no one has bought a CD. The other best-selling albums from this century are all also from 2000: The Backstreet Boys' Black and Blue and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory have both sold 24 million copies, and Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP sold 22 million. The biggest-selling album released in the past ten years is Adele's 21, which has sold 20 million copies worldwide.

1 is, at this point, the second-biggest Beatles album of all time; the best seller remains Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, despite the lack of a hit single, has moved 32 million units, as they like to say in Billboard.