Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (18 page)

DAN AYKROYD:

All week you’re wound up. That’s the thing about
Saturday Night Live
. Once you start on Monday pitching ideas, the pump starts, that adrenaline pump — sst sst sst sst sst — so Tuesday you’re writing sketches, Wednesday you’re reading them, you’re rewriting them Wednesday night, you’re blocking Thursday and Friday. All week that pump is going. And by the time you’re done at one o’clock Saturday night, that pump’s still going at full race. And you can’t just go home and go to bed. So we needed a place to party. And frequently I remember rolling down the armor at the Blues Bar and closing the building at eleven o’clock Sunday morning — you know, when it was at its height — and saying good morning to the cops and firemen.

JANE CURTIN:

I didn’t even know where the Blues Bar was. I sort of stopped going to the after-show parties after the first year, just because they weren’t fun. They were strange. I’d just go home.

JOHN LANDIS:

I went up to the
SNL
offices, John was giving me a tour, when a very sexy girl walks by. Tight jeans and a T-shirt, no bra, curly hair. “Oh my God, who is that?” And John says, “That’s Rosie Shuster. That’s Lorne’s wife and Danny’s girlfriend.” Which is true. It was wild. Rosie’s the one who coined the best line about Aykroyd. Danny had studied in a seminary to be a Jesuit priest the same time he was doing Second City jobs in and around Ontario. Rosie’s the one who said, “Danny’s epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself.”

HOWARD SHORE,
Music Director:

I wasn’t great friends with John. As one musician to another, I don’t think he felt a real respect from me for what he was doing musically. A lot of the players in the band I created for the show had real careers in rhythm and blues and had made great records, important records, and our whole lives as musicians were steeped in this tradition. Yes, we were on a television show, but being musicians was really our life. So comedians who were kind of tinkering in music were not always taken seriously by us.

When the band did warm-ups for the show, some members of the cast wanted to get involved. I knew Danny from Toronto, so I let him do a few things. Then Danny wanted to bring John into it and I said okay, and I did a couple of things with Danny and John. I used to introduce them as “those brothers in blues, the Blues Brothers.” I think John looked to us as more serious musicians, something he wanted to be.

DAN AYKROYD:

When Carrie Fisher did the show, we used the Blues Brothers to warm up the audience, but we had played a couple of times prior to that. We played with Willie Nelson as our backup band, and Mickey Raphael on harp, and Willie Hall, and then the Uniforms at the Lone Star, and then we had Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues playing behind us as well. We wanted Duke to be our backup man, but he was with Roomful of Blues, and I think he felt that Belushi would dominate, so he kind of backed off that gig. And we ended up recruiting through Tom Malone, the horn player in the
SNL
band; we ended up getting Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn, and Lou Marini and Alan Rubin and Matt Murphy. Matt Murphy we found in a bar on Columbus Avenue, and we heard him play. He was playing with James Cotton, and we said, “We want this guy in the band.” And then Cropper and Dunn, they had to be convinced, because they weren’t sure that we could acquit ourselves to the music. But they saw the respect, the reverence we had, and that we wanted to do a Memphis-Chicago fusion band — which ultimately the Blues Brothers turned out to be, doing Chicago electrified blues, and Memphis Stax R&B, and that was our set. They came on, and we did the first appearances with Carrie Fisher and then with Steve Martin.

JOHN LANDIS:

Lorne was hysterical that Chevy was making a movie, and he refused to give me Danny for the part of D-Day in
Animal House.
He refused. He wouldn’t release Danny and he told him, “You have to be here and write or I’m going to fire you.” He threatened Danny, and it was ugly. And by the way, that’s what happened on
The Blues Brothers
later, which is he wouldn’t release Paul Shaffer, who was a member of the band, who was the star, who put the band together.

As the stakes got higher, the atmosphere at
SNL
grew more fractious. Actors fought for airtime and for the attention of writers. After Chevy Chase’s ascent, and then Belushi’s, appearances on the show came to be looked upon by many performers as auditions for movie careers, as if the show itself were no longer the object all sublime.

Many of those who were there for those first five gold-standard years look back not in regret but in rueful resignation, or a kind of pained joy. Some had required chemical stimulation merely to maintain the show’s mind-bending schedule, working through the night, especially Wednesday and Thursday nights, and virtually living in the building. Taking a cue from Dan Aykroyd and his office bunk beds, Anne Beatts famously demanded that the network install a hospital bed in her office during a contract negotiation and got her wish. They and their cohorts were not just the staff of a TV show. They were still a commune, a subculture, and most of all, a family; sadly, the family was splitting asunder. That became evident when the prodigal prankster Chevy Chase returned to host a show. His stint as host set a new ratings record for
SNL,
but behind the scenes he was not warmly embraced.

JANE CURTIN:

My husband and I had tickets to the ballet, and I had on my best clothes, and Lorne called about ten minutes before we were leaving to go uptown and said, “I need to talk to you. Can you come up to 30 Rock?” I said, “We have tickets to the ballet,” and he said, “It will only take a minute.” So I went up there, and Chevy proceeded to say that he thought that he should be doing “Update” that week, and I said okay, and then he went through this whole thing about how his fans wanted to see him — I said okay — and Lorne was backing him up, and backing him up, and I’m going, “Okay, okay.” They were expecting a fight, and I honestly didn’t care, because it was just one week and I wanted to leave! I wanted to go to the ballet. But they had to make their point. So we were late. The two of them were on this feeding frenzy in the sense that Chevy was expecting something that he wasn’t getting from me, and he became more intent on selling his point of view and then Lorne would jump in. You sit there and you have pieces of your arm bitten off and then you leave. But it heals. It grows back.

CHEVY CHASE,
Cast Member:

It was difficult the first year I went back to host. Because I went back feeling that I was still part of the family there and at the same time feeling probably, in retrospect, full of myself because I had become pretty famous. And I think that I had never really realized how envious John had become of me or had been while I was on the show. In fact, it was Lorne who verified that for me later on — that John had been pretty upset that I had become the star and not him, even though I told John many times that it was because I said my name every week, because others couldn’t pronounce his or spell it, and it would happen for him — that these things were more luck than talent or ability and that, of course,
he
should have been the star.

And that he could become one, you know, albeit dead later on. But what the hell, who knew? I wish he were around today.

So that first time I came back, two things were at work. One was my feeling that if I were to come back the audiences would really want to see me do a fall, and they’d want to see me do “Weekend Update.” That was somewhat egocentric of me, because Jane had been doing it all year. It was not thoughtful in that sense, I think — in retrospect again. But in any case, John had also, as I later found out, been spreading some pretty apocryphal stories about me out of his jealousy and anger or whatever to Billy Murray, who was protective of Jane and also, generally speaking, a feisty fellow. And I’m sure Billy wanted to take me down, you know. So Billy and I got into a kind of a preliminary fistfight that never really came to fruition but came close. And it happened just before I went on the air. It was not very good timing. That was painful for me.

In a sense, John caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake. Billy was out of line. I’d been out of line to some degree — certainly in Billy’s mind, initiated by the things that Lorne later told me about. So Billy came after me and tried to throw me off a little bit just before I was going on the air. Ultimately, Billy’s still Billy and I’m still me, but it didn’t faze me for the show. I was sure upset, but I noticed John when I was going into Billy’s dressing room, and John was like the Cheshire Cat — sitting there like “mission accomplished.”

I felt at the time I was a lot tougher kid than maybe Billy or anybody might have thought. I had grown up on the edge of East Harlem. I had been in a lot of fistfights. And I didn’t feel like anybody could take me — Billy Murray or anybody else, for that matter. And so, as intimidating as he can be, at the time I just let it pass. I was angry and I just let it go, thinking, “Big deal. This happened but I’ve got a show to do.” Others might have withered. I had a certain tensile strength about me from childhood with an older brother who had already kicked the crap out of me through much of my younger life. And there’d been a number of times where I was in violent situations. So it wasn’t as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks. I had. And so I guess I simply weathered it. In other words, rather than be filled with the adrenaline that gives you the shakes and doesn’t allow you to concentrate on what you’re doing, that simply passed, and it may be because I was in shape and I played a lot of soccer and had been in situations where I could calm down readily after something like that happened.

I think Billy was trying to take me down a rung, and I probably was up a rung. I was probably a little too full of myself, you know.

I realized when I left that maybe I hadn’t been such a great guy. Maybe we weren’t so close. Maybe I’d been somewhat of an asshole. I left with self-doubts. And as time went on, it was a little easier to do it over the years because, you know, it was water under the bridge. But it did change my perception, because my perception had been all along that that first year was really a tight, close-knit family and that I just happened to emerge because of something someone had written and because people were responding to me as the first breakaway star.

BILL MURRAY:

I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host. That was because I was the new guy, and it was sort of like it was my job to do that. It would have been too petty for someone else to do it. It’s almost like I was goaded into that. You know, I think everybody was hoping for it. I did sense that. I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving and making his own career go. Everybody else was from the improvisational world, where you didn’t make it about you. You were an ensemble, you were a company. So when he left, there was resentment about that. It was a shock.

At the same time, Chevy was the big potato in the stew. He got the most sketches, he had the most influence, he got the most publicity — all of those things. So they didn’t miss that part of it. But there was still hangover feeling that he shouldn’t have left until everybody had that. You make sure everybody else is there and then you do it.

It did leave a big vacuum, because he was really heavy in those shows. You look at those early shows and he’s heavy. And so you had a whole year when the writers ended up writing, like writers do — they write for the guys who can get it done, who can get it on the air — and Chevy’s sketches got on the air because he was “the man,” you know. The other actors had to start over from scratch and teach the writers how to write for them. They were “new” people who had to be written for, but they weren’t new people, they’d been there all year; they just hadn’t gotten on. So the show had to sort of start up again from the beginning without him. I remember just sort of a general animosity that they felt, and he did come back as a star.

When you become famous, you’ve got like a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got like two years to pull it together — or it’s permanent.

JOHN LANDIS:

I’ve only been to
SNL
three times, and one time I was there, Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and Michael O’Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows. I mean, it was a huge argument. And the thing I remember about Bill Murray — I don’t know Bill Murray, but he’s screaming, you know, foaming at the mouth, “Fucking Chevy,” and in anger he says, “Medium talent!” And I thought, “Ooh boy, that’s funny. In anger he says ‘medium talent.’” That really impressed me. I went, “So, Bill Murray — wow, who is that guy?”

LARAINE NEWMAN:

It seems like there was a tension between Chevy and Billy all along during the week. I don’t know why. I don’t know if Chevy provoked it or not. But it culminated with Billy saying to Chevy, “Why don’t you fuck your wife once in a while?” And I don’t even remember who threw the first punch, Billy or Chevy. But it was ugly. I’d never seen guys fighting like that, let alone people I knew. And you know, I don’t know how he did it, but Chevy went out and did the monologue a few minutes later. Watching him from the floor, he seemed shattered.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Billy Joel, the musical guest, was out there singing his heart out while all this was going on backstage.