Devo is finally in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame! Hold on, spuds. They weren't inducted. They're part of a new exhibit on 50 years of music from “Saturday Night Live.”
The Akron New Wave band appeared on the show Oct. 14, 1978, with host Fred Willard, a Shaker Heights native. The intersection of Northeast Ohio-bred music and comedy is at the heart of “Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL music.”
“I know growing up, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is where I would hear new bands,” said Rock Hall CEO Greg Harris. “You'd be at home watching on your basement TV or in your den and the rest of the neighborhood was asleep. You felt like you were part of something subversive because the comedy was subversive. The rock'n'roll was very pure.”
It’s only the second major exhibition on the NBC show, following one in 2017 at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. The all-new exhibit in Cleveland includes every SNL musical performance aired since Oct. 11, 1975, including about 150 Rock Hall inductees.
Harris said he began talks years ago with the show’s longtime music producer, the late Hal Willner, about finding a way to bring the massive music archive to the public. (Most clips are not cleared for streaming or DVDs due to copyright issues.) As a museum, they can exhibit video for educational purposes, allowing visitors to see everyone from James Brown to Taylor Swift. There are also stage props and costumes from musical-themed sketches.
“So many of the sketches that have gone viral from SNL are the music-related ones or the digital shorts,” said lead curator Amanda Pecsenye. “We have artifacts from a lot of those, including the iconic ‘More Cowbell’ sketch about Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don't Fear the Reaper.’ We have the 'Wayne's World' outfits. Obviously, that spun off into a feature film that helped bring ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen to a new generation. Even Dooneese, which is kind of a silly character by Kristen Wiig, was a parody of the ‘Lawrence Welk Show.’”
The exhibit puts visitors inside Studio 8H in New York City, which was originally designed for Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937. A facsimile of the home base stage is flanked by artifacts from Paul Shaffer and Quincy Jones, while costumes spanning everyone from Ringo Starr to St. Vincent are encased throughout. There’s also a video wall of SNL’s iconic bumper photos, usually seen briefly after commercial breaks. Pecsenye said they even recreated the steamed spinach paint color used inside Rockefeller Center.
The exhibit isn’t just a greatest hits machine. There are nods to controversy such as Sinead O’Connor’s 1992 performance of “War” — shown in both its dress rehearsal and aired version.
“In the dress rehearsal, she held up a picture of a child and said she was going to use her performance to speak out against child abuse,” Pecsenye said. “When it came to air, at the end of her song, she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II and said, ‘Fight the real enemy,’ protesting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church — which was maybe the most controversial moment on the show’s history.”
Harris said that the collision of live rock ‘n’ roll and live comedy is what’s set the show apart for five decades.
“It was different because they would pull out Patti Smith and Gilda Radner would also do her Patti Smith,” he said. “They would jump around in bee costumes but sing great music. The house band was always killer. They also were pretty cutting-edge on who they booked. So, to see Elvis Costello up there just ripping it up, that was different than the other shows. MTV was terrific, but they were canned videos. This was live. Anything could happen.”
