When Finn Wolfhard introduced A$AP Rocky on Saturday Night Live, he also quietly reminded viewers of one of the show’s most memorable and chaotic musical guests.
Wolfhard’s T-shirt payed homage to The Replacements, who headlined SNL themselves almost 40 years ago to the day—and were swiftly banned from the show forever.
A noted Replacements fan, Wolfhard is currently writing a biopic of the band alongside his father, Eric Wolfhard. (“One of my parents’ first dates was to a Replacements concert,” Finn revealed when announcing the project several months ago. “Then I was born!”)
Wolfhard’s debut as SNL host fell on January 17; The Replacements’ fateful SNL appearance aired January 18, 1986. The inside story of that troubled night was chronicled in Bob Mehr’s 2016 book Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, which also serves as the source material for Wolfhard’s script.
According to Mehr, Lorne Michaels booked the band as a favor to their label, Warner Bros. Records, giving them a last-minute opening when The Pointer Sisters dropped out.
That booking marked not only their SNL debut, but their first time on national TV altogether. Saturday Night Live was already in the middle of its own disaster, with the show’s floundering ratings putting it in a precarious spot on NBC’s chopping block despite the fact that Michaels had just returned as showrunner after a five-year absence.
By the time The Replacements appeared to play their first song, “Bastards of Young,” things were already going off the rails. They had spent the hours between soundcheck and showtime getting drunk in their dressing room, even convincing host Harry Dean Stanton to imbibe for a time. As SNL‘s then-bandleader G. E. Smith recalled, one band member was soused enough that he fell on his way to the stage, breaking his guitar.
But even once they were safely onstage, to the SNL crew, the band was a mess. They had turned their amps up without telling SNL’s sound engineers, and they moved around the stage with no regard for camera blocking.
And then the worst happened: mid-song, frontman Paul Westerberg shouted “Come on, f**ker.” Though barely audible to audiences at home, it was enough to catch Michaels’ ire.
A tear in the backside of guitarist Bob Stinson’s outfit hadn’t helped matters. Again hardly noticed by most, a song-ending somersault caused him to inadvertently flash the camera.
After the performance, Michaels went to the band’s dressing room to berate the group and their managers.
“How dare you do this? Do you know what you just did to this show?” Mehr recounts Michaels shouting. “Your band will never perform on television again!”
That’s when Michaels noticed the band had trashed their dressing room.
“He saw that and reamed them a new a**hole,” band manager Gary Hobbib recalled to Mehr.
The destruction continued outside of 30 Rock. When the band trashed the hotel room SNL had booked them, Michaels was briefly stuck with a $1,100 bill for damages. The incidents-upon-incidents even led Michaels to threaten that he wouldn’t book any bands from Warner Bros. Records in the future.
While Michaels ultimately relented on the wider Warner Bros. threat, he stuck to his guns when it came to The Replacements. The group was never asked back to SNL, though Westerberg appeared solo in 1993.
Minneapolis punk, hell yeah