Jimmy Fallon's music booker, Jonathan Cohen, rightly gets a great deal of praise for the quality of guests he brings to Late Night, but I don't think it's taking anything away from him to acknowledge that he has the advantage of working at a time when whatever boundaries separating what we'll call "indie" and "mainstream" music were obliterated years ago. Hal Willner didn't have that luxury when he booked David Sanborn's and Jools Holland's short-lived late night program, Night Music (originally entitled Sunday Night), which aired for two years starting in 1988. Of course, Willner was working with a different sort of advantage: Night Music aired so late on Sunday night that one gets the sense that the network just gave him free reign, assuming nobody was watching, and that led to some wildly creative bookings.*
The video above, of The Residents (or someone purporting to be The Residents, at any rate), bopping along in the background as Conway Twitty performs, is unusual, but by the standards of Night Music it wasn't that unusual. [The aforementioned video is no longer on YouTube so I replaced it with Lou Reed playing "Dirty Blvd" (with Sanborn on sax, of course).] The show unsurprisingly focused quite a bit on jazz, but Willner had broad latitude to book a diverse group of artists including The Residents, Diamanda Galas, John Zorn, Pere Ubu, Christian Marclay, and Sun Ra, all of whom not only would have had trouble getting on TV back then but, arguably, would have the same trouble now.
Even if you take issue with the bookings themselves, or with the collaborations that the show sometimes tried a little too hard to make work, it's hard not to admire the "who gives a fuck, nobody's watching anyway" attitude that the show's bookings reflected. Was anyone clamoring for late night sets from Marclay, Squeeze**, Todd Rundgren, the Pat Metheny Group, and Taj Mahal in 1990? Well, Night Music had them on anyway -- on the same episode. When Sonic Youth appeared on Night Music in 1989***, Daydream Nation was only a year old; they wouldn't release their DGC debut until the following year, and they wouldn't truly break through to anything like mainstream consciousness until after Nirvana hit it big.
This isn't about nostalgia, per se; I was 12 years old when Night Music went off the air and had no idea it existed until something like two years ago, but it's difficult to watch clips of these old performances and not feel that the modern TV musical performance is missing something. Don't get me wrong, it's great that the Menomenas and Ra Ra Riots of the world can get a shot at playing stages that in 1989 were mostly reserved for bands with exponentially larger audiences (well, great for them anyway), but can you imagine being young, and being up late at night on a Sunday and seeing the Pixies blow through "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Tame" in what was probably their first US TV appearance ever? The clip below is not exactly prime Pere Ubu, but if I'd seen it when I was 12, I would have freaked the fuck out.
No offense to Cohen (the guy got Jawbox to reunite specifically for him, for Christ's sake), but I doubt I can say that about any of his bookings for Fallon. There are obviously a lot of things that go into that, not the least of which is that kids these days (wow, I don't think I'd ever used that phrase in earnest until this sentence) simply do not discover or consume music in the same way that I did. Nevertheless, when I watch Night Music clips of David Thomas flailing around on that shitty stage; Marclay wringing pained squeals out of other people's records on four turntables; Diamanda Galas doing what Diamanda Galas does; or even the unbelievably awkward spectacle of Todd Rundgren performing a song from H.M.S. Pinafore with Taj Mahal, there's a sense of real risk that just doesn't happen in today's pre-packaged album-cycle indie rock promo revolving door. Like I said, it doesn't make me nostalgic, but maybe I wish it did.
* He also booked Stevie Ray Vaughan and Ray Manzarek. The guy wasn't infallible.
** Yes, I know Jools Holland was in Squeeze.
*** Their performance of "I Wanna Be Your Dog," which, like many Night Music clips, has recently been taken off of YouTube, is worth seeking out for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the sight of a game Sanborn & band jamming with an equally game SY (making their first network TV appearance).
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