These days, Saturday Night Live runs like a well-oiled machine. Fans can count on Lorne Michaels, the cast, and the writers creating a hilarious show each Saturday night with the help of a celebrity host and a musical guest, who is sometimes also the host. After 50 years on the air, the sketch comedy series has weathered its fair share of storms and come out the other side.
However, this hasn't always been the case with SNL. When the show first made its premiere on NBC in October 1975, the show was still getting its bearings and finding its footing. Not to mention, 50 years ago, technology wasn't nearly as advanced as it is today, or even 20 years ago, which made the early days of Saturday Night Live naturally a bit different and more challenging.
While chatting with Entertainment Weekly at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's SNL: Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of Music exhibit, creator Lorne Michaels shared the "big fight" he had during the show's inception on behalf of the musical guests. Because music was recorded in lower quality for television back then, Michaels needed to fight for artists and rock stars to appear.
"Rock-and-roll people did not do television because they sounded terrible. So we had to figure that out, and that was a big, big fight over the first season. If you look at, say, Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show [in 1956], or the Beatles [in 1964] for that matter, it's all on a boom [microphone], you know, and the sound was more than good enough for that period for them to catch fire and all that. But by the time we came on, the music was recorded in a completely different way, and television was still using a boom. So that was the biggest sort of fight at the beginning," Michaels explained.
Michaels knew after the very first episode of Saturday Night Live that the sound needed significant improvement in order for the music to sound the way it deserved to be heard by viewers. After Billy Preston and Janis Ian performed two songs each in the premiere episode, Paul Simon's double-duty act in episode 2 earned the talents of music producer Phil Ramone, per Michaels' request.
He admitted that the person working on the audio on the television side "was not thrilled" that Michaels brought someone else on board, but the creator knew that as SNL's profile would rise, "television had to keep up" with the changing landscape of sound systems and music recordings. Obviously, Michaels' strategy worked as the show still remains a huge platform for musicians.
You would think that one of the biggest fights Michaels would have had to have when it comes to Saturday Night Live would somehow involve cast members or pushback from the network or political commentary. Surely, all of those fights have happened in the show's 50-year tenure, but hearing that Michaels helped pioneer a new era of music on TV sounds like a great fight worth having and winning.
Something that would be interesting to hear about from Michaels would be the whole evolution of Saturday Night Live's relationship with music and how it was recorded. How did the methods change when the digital era began in the 2000s? Was there another change when CDs took over vinyl's popularity in the '90s? Is it different now with streaming? Maybe someday he'll share that story.