
Long before Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope, it was musician Patti Smith who courted controversy with the Church on Saturday Night Live.
Smith’s first appearance as musical guest came on April 17, 1976—during the seventeenth-ever episode of what was then called Saturday Night. It was a big night for the show, as the episode’s host was then-President Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen.
Nessen hosting meant a ton of curious viewers would be tuning in, including Ford’s conservative-leaning supporters and likely the Commander in Chief himself. What’s more: that particular Saturday was Holy Saturday, meaning the broadcast would roll into the early hours of Easter Sunday.
It was a big night for Smith, too. The poet laureate of the punk rock scene, Smith’s seminal debut album Horses had been released five months earlier, and her performance that night with her band Patti Smith Group would mark both her network television debut and the first earnest representation of punk music on SNL.
Downtown at New York City’s punk mecca CBGB, the venue’s tiny television set was tuned to NBC to watch their mainstay bring punk to the masses. Knowing this, Smith ended her first song with a shoutout: “Happy Easter, CBGB’s!”
But Smith’s electrifying performance made an impression from the very first line. Taking the stage a few minutes past midnight with her lead single “Gloria,” she ushered in Easter Sunday with the song’s big non-secular kickoff: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Later in the show, she returned for her second song, a cover of The Who’s “My Generation.” Smith’s rendition was a regular part of her repertoire, and typically included an alternate lyric in the first verse that wouldn’t fly on television. Whereas The Who sang “Things they do look awful cold,” Smith opted for “I don’t need their f*cking sh*t.”
Unsurprisingly, network censors asked the musician to change that line for the live broadcast. Smith relented, but in true punk fashion, she used the replacement line to call out the suppression. “I don’t take no censorship,” she sang instead.
(Despite executives’ concern over the original line, Smith was somehow still able to end the song with the chant “I’m so goddamn young”—particularly notable given the intersection of the Easter holiday and the lord’s-name-in-vain context of the profanity.)
Censorship was a sensitive subject for Smith, who faced the similar pressure to alter “My Generation” when it was released as the b-side of her “Gloria” single. The “f” and “s” words were censored on the UK pressing without her knowledge, leading her to tell fans to boycott it. “They bleeped it, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be,” Smith said in an interview about the release, just weeks after her SNL appearance. “One of the things that our group is really fighting for is to break censorship from rock and roll.”
“They’re two very important American slang terms,” she added. “They’ve been abstracted from the physical act. When people say ‘f*cking sh*t’ they don’t think of a big turd or two people making it anymore. It’s just words, you know?”
Ironically, the band’s decision to bring “My Generation” to SNL at all was a reaction to the show attempting to rein them in.
“The funniest thing about Saturday Night Live to me is the fact that, however hip they were—and they were very hip—they really drove us crazy asking to see copies of lyrics and what songs we were going to do,” Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye later recalled. “While we were sitting in the dressing room and feeling like we were being studied a little bit too hard, we decided to go out and do ‘My Generation’ and knock a few things over.”
Indeed, a few things were knocked over. The performance ended with drummer Jay Dee Daugherty taking wild swings and kicks to his drum set. (Then-SNL Band member Paul Shaffer later recounted that he’d suggested Smith end the performance with some destruction, but the band was way ahead of him. “I could see that something was up,” he remembered. “But they were afraid to indicate that they were going to do that.”)
“Kill censorship!,” Smith shouted before leaving the stage.
Nearly a year later, Smith opened up about her SNL experience on SNL itself. The moment came in a short film directed by Gary Weis on the show’s April 9, 1977 episode.
In the video, Smith sat with her guitar and casually detailed her somewhat meandering thoughts on censorship. “We’re all working very hard to release ourselves from the bond of censorship, and it’s happening slowly,” Smith began.
“It was exactly a year [ago] when my group performed for Saturday Night Live,” she recalled. “It was really a great privilege for us to be able to reach and communicate with so many people so immediately. But the one sadness that we had was that before we went on—before we were able to completely exert the total abandon that we felt the immediacy of live television ought to have—we were told that because of FCC regulations, we would have to change our words to ‘My Generation.’”
That ask, Smith felt, meant the censors would literally be “changing the words of our generation.”
“We did this,” she explained, “because we felt like we would be able to at least fight by saying ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’ [during ‘Gloria’].”
In retrospect, it was a noteworthy moment for Saturday Night Live: one of the first instances of the show acknowledging the behind-the-scenes frictions that went into making it.
Smith’s appearance also introduced SNL to the world of punk—a lesson undoubtedly underscored by her rebellious attitude toward censors. In 1978, Smith would be the loose inspiration for a character Gilda Radner would bring to the show twice: inebriated punk rocker Candy Slice.
SNL’s next punk band booking wouldn’t come until the Sex Pistols were lined up to visit the show in December 1977—an appearance that never happened. Instead, Elvis Costello took their place, making musical guest history of his own.
The whole concept of censorship is just obsolete when we’ve got a sociopath president spewing obscene hatred and lies every goddamn day and the networks just show it all with hardly a whimper of pushback.
Music performers have pushed the envelope so far that they are full on enacting actual fucking, so as Patti Smith said, the word means very little any more.
For an exquisite take on “Fuck”, enjoy this The New Yorker video vocabulary lesson!
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/screening-room/a-father-daughter-swearing-lesson-in-the-f-word