Saturday Night Live's music through lens of Questlove's SNL doc and my visits to the show

My love for Questlove's awesome documentary was only intensified by my experiences visiting the show in the 1990s

Back in the day, Saturday Night Live was the place to check out cool musicians you couldn’t see live anywhere else on TV.

DEVO. Frank Zappa. David Bowie. The Waitresses. Blondie. Talking Heads. The Clash.

The first time I saw all of those acts live, and many more, was when they performed on SNL.

That’s why Questlove’s new documentary about the 50 years of music SNL has presented during its time on air is so instructive and powerful – it’s a film you can watch now on Peacock. In fact, the first 8 minutes of Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music, is the best start to a music documentary I have ever seen, mashing together five decades of performances like Questlove stitching together one of his legendary DJ sets.

In my review of Questlove’s documentary for NPR, I picked out 8 revelations I found most entertaining, from the fact that Eddie Murphy didn’t originally want to do his classic James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub sketch, to the fact that Ashlee Simpson’s infamous lip synching mistake wasn’t necessarily entirely her fault.

The music performance which sticks out the most for me was actually Seal’s performance in 1994, because that was when I spent a day checking out how the music worked at SNL.

Shawn Pelton, an old friend from college who is still the drummer for SNL’s house band, was kind enough to let me hang out with him to report a feature for Modern Drummer magazine. We met at 30 Rock at noon and spent the whole day together, through the band rehearsals to Seal’s rehearsal (with drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., who now plays with Paul McCartney), to a dinner break where Chris Farley – Rest In Power – was cutting up with David Spade and Ellen Cleghorne was trying to figure out why another Black person was walking around the joint.

John Travolta was the guest host that day, and one thing I remember is all the random celebrities who hung out around the show and never went on camera (during my visit, Neil Young, Christian Slater and John Cusack were there.) The other thing I remember is how much funnier the show seemed in person than it came across when I watched a rerun on TV.

I’ve visited the show since, for this NPR feature on Kenan Thompson, and the musical guest then was a surprise: Jay-Z. Music has always been a way SNL distinguishes itself, buy either showcasing the coolest acts of the time, giving the next big thing a chance to spread their wings or allowing a different, live look at artists normally seen only on an arena stage or music video.

Like a lot of things in SNL’s present, the musical performances may have lost a bit of their groundbreaking quality. But by allowing the most talented performers space to perform on live television every week, SNL provides the intoxicating possibility that, just possibly, next week will bring another banger.