Live at 'Saturday Night Live'
By Dennis Broe
"I'm sorry. You can't go up there. Your name's not on the list. I'm going to have to get some kind of clearance." With those words, the attendant strode briskly over to the lobby phone and began making a series of calls. His airtight manner made me feel like an intruder at Cape Canaveral, trying to gain admittance to the observation deck to watch a space shot. Songwriter Nick Lowe's words about the business mentality behind professional rock concerts in "They Called It Rock" ran through my mind. "Security is so tight tonight..."
Well, they call this television. Saturday Night Live to be exact. When I finally did make it up the elevator, I was ushered into the studio to watch the final run through before airtime. I was on the set for both the final dress rehearsal and the live studio show, as part of a Frank Zappa profile that will appear in a later issue. All those things you've heard about how difficult it is to get on the set or get tickets for the studio audience are true. They're booked up months in advance, and the studio is packed for both shows. I sat next to a guy who was there with his wife and two daughters; he told me that he was there only because he knew NBC sports commentator Dick Schaap.
The live audience is enthusiastic, but because of the way the studio is arranged a strange thing happens. There is a main stage in the middle of the studio, which that night held the regular Saturday Night band as well as Zappa's band.
This stage is visible from all points. However, most of the skits, or (as Zappa says the Saturday Night people prefer to call them to distinguish them from the ordinary television show), sketches, are done on side stages, which are blocked or partially blocked from view. Because of this, there are monitors hanging just above the audience and so, though the action is taking place live somewhere in front of you, you spend much of your time watching it on tv. Therefore, as far as the audience goes, Saturday Night Live is "live" in a somewhat limited sense.
That's not my idea of live television, so I decided to go downstairs to see what really goes on behind the scenes. I also had to locate the woman who was my Zappa contact for the night. "Right down those stairs is a paging desk and they'll find her for you," the head usherette said. At the base of the stairs was a corridor leading left and right and at first glance there was no desk visible in either direction, so I hesitated for a minute to get my bearings.
It was at this point that I noticed cast member Bill Murray, standing off to the side. He was wearing a huge yellow warm-up jacket and baseball cap, which was his getup for the "Poly Sutra Records A and R Man" he played in the "Night On Freak Mountain" sketch.
"Go across now, go across now," Murray yelled at me, pointing his finger toward the right side of the corridor. It took me a few seconds before I realized Murray was talking to me. "Go now. Go now," he kept yelling. "What?," I mumbled, but Murray wouldn't take confusion for an answer. He kept yelling and pointing.
So I went. Walked right down the corridor and out into the studio where I spent a few hapless seconds that to this day remain only a blur, though I think I saw Laraine Newman out there. "What's going on," I said when I got backstage. "It was Murray," someone answered. "He thought you were an extra in the scene."
When Murray, who had by this time gone out onto the set to do his bit in the scene, returned, he started screaming and pointing his finger at me. "YOU, YOU," he thundered. "You got on camera. Why didn't you just walk across? Why did you stop to look?" Before I could offer any explanation, he stormed down the corridor to his dressing room.
I had two more confrontations with Murray that night. One in the studio, after the dress rehearsal, and later at the cast party on the second floor of a Village bar. To say these were conversations would be stretching it. The tenor of both encounters was the same; Murray boisterously screaming insults that boiled down to, "How could you?" On the show, Murray's roles, like the obnoxious record company man who tells Zappa on a stormy night, "I wouldn't send my worst group out on a night like this," are funny. He creates brilliant and intense characterizations of some of the more.inhuman elements of society. Unfortunately, offstage, at least from my limited contact with him, those characterizations seem auto-biographical.
Out in the studio, Zappa wasn't faring much better. There were major revisions – as always on the show – between the final dress rehearsal and the live product. In all, two skit-sketches Frank appeared in were out, and the number of songs he and the band would perform was dropped from four to three. Gone was a song he wrote about The Coneheads, which Frank was to sing while Laraine Newman, as the daughter cone, sat watching him and chewing fiberglass. Also dropped was a scene that featured Frank as a doorman named Bob who seduces Jackie Onassis in a laundry room, and a talk show parody where Frank interviews Dan Aykroyd, who plays the battered author of a book on bears called Mauled. In the skit, Aykroyd wants to alert everyone to the danger of riding bears.
During the Coneheads skit, Zappa, playing himself, picks up Conehead Sr.'s daughter to take her to a concert he is giving that evening. But Zappa broke character for a moment, hesitating over a line and gazing too self-consciously at the cue cards in front of him. He says the confusion had to do with the last minute cut which eliminated his Conehead song after the skit.
"There was a line in the sketch that referred to the concert and I was wondering if I should actually say it because it wasn't continuous since there wasn't to be a concert. So I had to squeeze around there for a second and see what was going on. Then I figured, even if it says there is a concert and there isn't, and you don't sing the song, it still makes sense to say the line."
For this Zappa was roundly criticized by Saturday Night writer-producer Lorne Michaels. "Never in the history of the show have we had that problem before. No one has ever broken the reality of a scene. He got into trouble in that sketch and didn't know how to acknowledge it by staying in character.
"I think Frank underestimated the task," Michaels says. "These are pros who do the show and they are well rehearsed."
That, Zappa contends, is part of the problem. "Anybody who is going to host that show is at an extreme disadvantage because all the direction and blocking is aimed toward the regulars. Unless you're a TV performer used to reading cue cards and playing to camera one and camera two, you'll ultimately wind up looking like a baboon because there's no time for anyone to clue you in totally to what's going on.
"It's not really because they want to make you look bad, but because they're still writing the thing right up until the time it goes on the air. It's under constant re-write, and so if you're a regular performer on there and you've lived with that kind of syndrome for three years, it's no sweat. But if you're walking into it for the first time and you have to perform up to their standards, that's a little tough."
Zappa also caused a minor stir when he went ahead and included a line in the Coneheads sketch about his latest album, Studio Tan, which he described, in the language of the Cones, as "an unauthorized collection of my latest sound patterns." According to Laraine Newman, the line was cut after the dress rehearsal because it was considered irrelevant.
To Zappa it was extremely relevant, and the key word was "unauthorized." He is currently bringing a legal suit against the album's distributors, Warner Brothers Records, charging that the company has released the album without his permission, that they have refused to pay the cost of making the album, and that they are likewise refusing to pay him any of the profits. Zappa says he will plug the album because he likes the music on it and wants it to be heard. But, he says, he also wants people to know the circumstances under which it was released.
At show's end, neither side was especially enchanted with the other. Said Zappa, "They have a funny attitude down there now that the ratings have gone up. It's like, 'Our ratings are up, so who needs anybody. They were making a big point over the fact that the ratings for the Rolling Stones were exactly the same as the ratings for Devo (both groups have appeared on the show this season), thereby implying that no matter who's on the show, the ratings will always be wonderful, and they kind of operate on that premise."
Zappa says he went into the show with lots of ideas, most of which were discarded. "When they wanted me to do the show, they told me I could be as involved in the writing as I wanted to be, but as soon as I started bringing up ideas, they turned them all down."
Such as? "Well, they had a sketch on called 'The Killer Trees.' These Christmas trees were running amuck and piercing people through the thorax. I wanted to have one of these trees survive and sprout ornaments that looked like tiny pumpkins that flew off and bit you in the face."
Zappa says that by the end of the week of rehearsals, communication between host and cast had broken down. But there was at least one cast member with whom he remained in contact. "I'm a big fan of his music and I like him as a person and think he's real smart," says Laraine Newman. And, she adds, "You don't have to go a long way to get him to understand what you mean."
But, says Zappa, about the show in general, and the mood during production, "There is a certain kind of professionalism there, if you know what I mean." He says a lot by the way he pronounces the word "professionalism." He chews on it for a while, finds that it has a sour taste and spits it out. And, he adds, "I've always enjoyed the show as a viewer. I've gotten a lot of laughs out of it and I've always been a Conehead fan. But working on it is a different story." Really, Frank, I know what you mean. Being behind the scenes isn't all it's cracked up to be either.