Here's some stuff that happened in the past
October 18th, 1975, Paul Simon with guests Art Garfunkel, Phoebe Snow and Randy Newman
Saturday Night Live is a sketch comedy show with music. When Paul Simon hosted its second show, however, the dynamic was reversed. A sketch comedy show with music became a music show with sketch comedy.
Out of deference to the host’s legendary status Saturday Night Live became The Paul Simon Show for one magical week. The episode resembles a once in a lifetime Paul Simon concert more than conventional episode. Yet I can’t imagine anyone in the studio audience, or the home audience, being upset.
From the very beginning Lorne Michaels possessed a golden rolodex. He was connected. He would become more connected and more powerful with time but from the start Michaels could call up one of his rich, famous, powerful friends and have them do his bidding.
If Saturday Night Live was treated as kinda a big deal from the start that’s because important cultural figures like Paul Simon, icons, really, who would become synonymous with the show’s golden age, treated it that way.
With Simon as host and musical guest Saturday Night Live’s tone shifted dramatically from raucous and irreverent to hushed and intimate. Simon plays new and old songs with first Art Garfunkel and then Phoebe Snow but the musical highlight of the evening is Randy Newman performing “Sail Away” while Simon looks on worshipfully.
Comedy does not get darker or more innately tragic than “Sail Away”, a powerfully quiet ballad that depicts slavery as the American dream, a utopian existence full of wine and song and comfort rather than a waking nightmare of humiliation and degradation.
Simon invited Newman onto his show because he admired him as a songwriter and musician but also so that he would have an opportunity to meet him.
The show’s comedic highlight, meanwhile, is a short film by Albert Brooks about how his father’s habit of filming his son soon came to take on a sinister quality when he began chronicling his progeny’s first sexual experiences. This is followed by glimpses into short films that were abandoned, like a prank show with the funnyman trying to freak out laundromat patrons by pretending to be a talking drier, only to have the ostensible victim of the prank figure out the gag immediately and become enraged. In the kind of exquisite detail that makes Brooks such a genius, he concedes that they tried the prank ten times and this was, unfortunately, the funniest and best response.
Paul Simon doesn’t just sing; he also appears in a sketch about professional basketball player Connie Hawkins challenging him to a one on one basketball match that showcases the singer’s dry, understated sense of humor. Hippie icon Jerry Rubin, meanwhile, shows up for a wildly satirical fake commercial for Up Against the Wallpaper, wallpaper with incendiary leftist slogans.
It speaks to the episode’s richness that a three song Simon & Garfunkel reunion doesn’t even qualify as its highlight.
neat, eh? Man, I LOVE this silly newsletter.
Interesting to see George Coe on the cast list, was he in the Brooks film or part of the live cast? Coe is not known as a comedian (at least not to me), but he was a prolific actor -- if you have watched movies from the 70s-90s, then you have seen him. (Or heard his distinctive voice, since he also did a lot of voiceover work for commercials and such.)
On his obit on Entertainment Tonight, they show him playing the part of a judge in a very brief SNL clip. Further research suggests he was listened as a cast member only on the first episode. He seems to be best known recently from playing Woodhouse on "Archer".