For Saturday Night Live's 50th anniversary, we're featuring interviews with some of the early cast members/writers. Dan Aykroyd talks about the moment he and John Belushi came up with the Blues Brothers. Writer Alan Zweibel talks about working with Gilda Radner on two of her most iconic characters. And Al Franken tells us about a sketch he wrote that didn't make it past the censors. Jon Lovitz tells Terry how his character Master Thespian came to be. Also, film critic Justin Chang reviews The Annihilation of Fish, a romantic comedy starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave and Margot Kidder, made in 1999 and released now for the first time. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the significance of SNL's 50th anniversary?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. NBC's Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend with a triple header of special events. Tonight, Peacock streams a live music concert featuring scheduled performances by everyone from Bad Bunny and David Byrne to Lady Gaga and The Roots.
On Saturday, in its regular late-night slot on NBC, SNL repeats the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by George Carlin and introducing the original not-for-prime-time players. John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Lorraine Newman, and Garrett Morris.
And on Sunday, NBC presents a three-hour live anniversary special, preceded by an additional hour on the red carpet. Today on Fresh Air, we're noting that anniversary by replaying interviews with some of the performers and writers who were there at or near the start, when producer Lorne Michaels created and shaped the show's first five seasons.
After a five-year hiatus, Michaels returned and has been there ever since, presiding over many decades of cast changes, musical trends, and political shifts. Even though Michaels and NBC are celebrating the 50th anniversary of SNL this weekend, the very first episode, then called NBC's Saturday Night, actually premiered on October 11, 1975.
Michaels had selected a cutting-edge counterculture comic as the show's host, but the comedian, George Carlin, suggested he do only the first one, making room for guest hosts from then on. Michaels agreed, establishing a template that still works, while Carlin established another one, taking the stage at Studio 8H to deliver an opening monologue.
We're talking about a live show. Wow. Nice to see you. Welcome, and thanks for joining us live. I'm kind of glad that we're on at night so that we're not competing with all the football and baseball games. So many, man. All the time. And this is the time of year when there's both, you know? Football's kind of nice. They changed it a little bit. They moved the hash marks in.
Guys found them and smoked them anyway.
One other noteworthy element from that first show, still part of the format 50 years later, was a TV news parody called Weekend Update. Chevy Chase was the first update anchor, and thanks to that showcase, the first star to emerge from SNL. It helped that he started most updates with the opening line, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not.
But the jokes he read, written by original writer Alan Zweibel and others, helped too.
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Chapter 2: Who were the original cast members of SNL?
But I think my father really influenced me when he started to get into the Jack Hilton, Ray Noble, Freddie Gardner, English swing band music. That was really something because, you know, the value of horns was there. And then later, as I started to buy, of course, was the Beatles and the Stones and the Animals and then the Paul Butterfield record.
But my dad was into the swing band music, as many people were in Canada at that time.
Now, I read about you that you had a pretty strict Catholic upbringing, that you went to Catholic school. Seminary. Seminary. Wow, okay. So you're growing up in Canada. You're going to a seminary and listening to blues and rock and roll and rhythm and blues.
And seeing guys on stage in my high school imitating Mick Jagger. imitating the animals.
Okay, that's where I'm heading. Long before you became part of the Blues Brothers and you developed this kind of alter ego for yourself, did you have a pose when you were in high school? Did you want to be black? Did you want to be a blues musician? Did you want to be somebody who you weren't and kind of take on that pose in real life? Sure.
I wanted to be Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, and I used to
walk around in a long trench coat, a long brown trench coat with shades, and I'd slick my hair back, and I'd try to find any little band up in the bars up in the Gatineau and up in Ottawa and Hull and where I was living, and I would get on stage with them, and they'd be country bands, and I would turn to them and say, well, can you do it like this?
And I would kind of show them a basic, you know, 8, 10, 12-bar blues pattern, and then we'd just take off from there. And, of course, I was posing as Paul Butterfield. Yeah. Absolutely. And then my friend Gary O'Dwyer, who is now a school principal up in Coburg, Ontario, he was pretending to be Eric Burden. And I had, you know, the math whiz in class in grade 11 was pretending to be Mick Jagger.
So everybody was posing and it was all based on rock and roll and music and blues then, all of it.
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