SNL & I

I had the Saturday Night Live dream again last night.

Over the past decade or so, I periodically have a dream that I'm a Featured Player on SNL. Of course, in this dream, I still have my full-time teaching job -- after all, one must be practical -- so I fly to NYC for the weekend so that I can, as a Featured Player, fill out the background in the dress rehearsal and live performance, with maybe a handful of lines that make it to air each week. And in my dream, I've been doing this for four years as a Featured Player, and I'm about to be fired, for, y'now, the obvious reasons of flying back and forth to contribute next to nothing for almost a half-decade.

Like most people, I watched SNL off and on for a good chunk of my life. However, unlike most people, I went hard-core for a few years, never missing an episode, and getting attached to certain casts more than others. While I can certainly appreciate the talent of the folks at the start of the whole thing -- especially Seasons 2-4, when the core National Lampoon cast subtracted Chevy Chase and added Bill Murray -- it's certainly not my favorite period. I watch it more as a cultural artifact, a fevered excretion of the decidedly bent collective unconscious of a post-Nixon/pre-Reagan America, and while it's entertaining, the drug use of the producers and consumers alike distorted the show-to-show reality quite a bit.

Over the past two weeks, I've been working my way through the Season 5 DVD box set. It was a season in transition, much as the country was in transition; Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were out, and Harry Shearer, the future MVP of The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap, was in-ish. ("In-ish" meant that Shearer was originally hired as a writer-performer, but the rest of the cast didn't know this fact until a third of the way through the season, so his work was kneecapped before he even began.) The status of Featured Player popped up for the first time, with such luminaries as Al Franken, Tom Davis, Peter Aykroyd, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Paul Shaffer drifting in and out of the FP designation. In short, it was a bit of a scattershot affair. And if it felt like the end of an era, that's because it was.

To be honest, I broke it out of the vault mostly to watch the musical performances from a pretty diverse crowd: some New Wavers (Blondie, Gary Numan, The B-52s, The Specials, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers), some rock stalwarts (Bob Dylan in his Christian phase with one of the best bands he would ever have, a pre-"Centerfold" J. Geils Band, Chicago entering the Peter Cetera era, a shit-fire-hot two-song set from The Grateful Dead), and a performance from one of the soon-to-be-wealthiest songwriter/performers to ever grace the Studio 8H stage (Desmond Child and Rouge). But two performances stood out the most, albeit for widely different reasons. 

At the end of 1973, David Bowie and Marianne Faithfull closed out Bowie's 1980 Floor Show performance with a ramshackle yet winning cover of "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher. It was the last nail in the coffin of Ziggy Stardust, and was precisely as peculiar as this photo would indicate:

In Season 5, both artists got a chance to appear on SNL, but only one went into history for the right reasons. Faithfull was promoting her 1979 album Broken English -- if not her best album, then certainly at the top of the discussion -- but decided to party before her two-song Episode 10 performance. (This is "late-'70s NYC"-level partying, mind you.) When it came time for her live nationwide shot at the American big time, her vocals had been reduced to even more of a wispy rasp than usual, effectively neutering the impact of her compelling and cutting work, while simultaneously serving up yet another cautionary tale of debasing one's talent with substances upon substances.

Bowie also had a new record out in 1979, but he only promoted it with the last of his three-song Episode 7 set. Instead, much like 1980 Floor Show was a cornucopia of phantasmagoria shoehorned into the mainstream time slot of NBC's The Midnight Special, Bowie used the opportunity to be musically and technologically adventurous in ways that no other musical act had before or since. A rearranged "The Man Who Sold The World" blended bedrock funk with icy New Wave, all with a Klaus Nomi cherry on top. A supercharged "TVC15" featured Bowie in a lady's pantsuit and a dog with a TV monitor where a mouth should be, capturing the capturing of a cultivated image. And "Boys Keep Swinging" had Bowie manipulating a puppet body in green screen, with a porno Pinocchio surprise at the end. 

As for the non-musical content, Season 5 was a peculiar pot. One can see why Shearer was so disappointed with the results, as both he and his work were never given the sunlight to fully flower. The rest of the legacy cast seemed intermittently engaged, as if knowing that the end was fast approaching. It's also interesting to watch as the political material morphed from poking fun at Carter to attempting -- and ultimately failing -- to engage with the oncoming cultural colossus of Reagan, the real man who sold the world. It was a sad way to end a legitimately trailblazing enterprise, even if it ended up seeding my dreams for years to come.