Questlove stands out as one of the premier music historians of all time. He also happens to be a Saturday Night Live expert and combined his two worlds as director of the documentary Ladies and Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music. But Questlove left out one performance despite admitting it completely blew him away.
The documentary explores Saturday Night Live's musical legacy as both a showcase for popular music and a factory for some iconic music comedy. Questlove initially intended the documentary to count down the 50 greatest musical moments on SNL, but the project evolved as he dug deeper into the show's musical history.
“I felt like, ‘We’ll just make a really sophisticated clip show,’ and mid-recording, we started to notice an arc that keeps happening with every single story we get,” Questlove told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a story of someone being presented with a daunting challenge, and it’s met with hesitancy, and it’s met with fear and trepidation.
To do that, the Roots drummer watched three to seven Saturday Night Live episodes per day. So it's fair to say no one has seen more SNL musical performances than Questlove.
When asked which performance was most emblematic of the show, Questlove had a somewhat surprising answer. An otherwise unremarkable show from 1990 caught his attention.
"I didn’t think I was going to learn anything from Neil Young’s 'Rockin’ in the Free World' in 1990, but it’s just looking at five guys, just the equivalent of musical anvils dropping on your head," Questlove said. "It’s one of the loudest, most energetic performances I have ever seen."
But fans who have seen Questlove's documentary may recall that the performance does not appear at all. The Tonight Show band leader had a good reason for that, too.
"The performance that really just blew me away I actually decided not to put in the doc because if I couldn’t put the whole five-minute performance in, you wouldn’t have felt the energy of it," he shared. So rather than give audiences an incomplete experience watching Neil Young, Questlove decided to keep it out of the SNL documentary.