Fans had wondered whether Saturday Night Live would reference the 49th anniversary of its series premiere on this past week’s episode. It did not—at least not intentionally.
But for those familiar with the behind-the-scenes story of that first episode on October 11, 1975, it was hard not to draw some parallels when it emerged that a faulty audio console was to blame for the show being brought to a brief halt this weekend.
That’s because among the issues that plagued Lorne Michaels and team in the lead-up to SNL’s 1975 series premiere was one that involved another audio console. Ironically, it’s the one major storyline of that night that’s only briefly touched upon in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s exceptionally well-researched biopic that just happened to open in theaters nationwide last Friday.
As the story goes, the sound equipment in Studio 8H was woefully outdated when NBC’s Saturday Night first took residence there, and Lorne Michaels was worried about it.
In their seminal book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad write, “Some new equipment had been brought in, including a new audio console in the control room. Unfortunately, NBC’s engineers were still reading the manual for it when Billy Preston, Janis Ian and The Saturday Night Band began their sound checks. It became painfully obvious then that the problems were even worse than Lorne had feared.”
Until that point, Studio 8H had generally operated with just four-to-five mics on a single stage. With multiple musical acts and different sets spread out across the studio, there were now upwards of fifty sound sources to be balanced, “ranging from a screaming Marshall amp to a blaring horn section to the soft oohs and ahhs of backup singers. Overwhelmed, the technicians simply turned the volume on everything down, reducing the mix to a muddy blur.”
After a disastrous dress rehearsal Friday night, Dick Ebersol, the NBC exec who had hired Michaels to produce SNL, apologized for the audio issues and vowed that he’d get them fixed before the show went live on the air the next night.
“Ebersol started calling around town desperately trying to find some equipment,” write Hill and Weingrad in their book. “At 2:00 a.m. [Saturday morning], he reached an outfit called Hollywood Sound, which was in the process of taking down one of its rock concert systems in Madison Square Garden. Ebersol persuaded them to truck their equipment to NBC, where they worked all night setting it up for the show the next day.”
While SNL’s premiere ultimately went off with nary a hitch, the show has continued to walk a highwire ever since. That it took 49 years (almost to the day) for a technical failure of this sort to stall the show is something of a miracle.
In a thread posted to a TV industry message board this week, one former network audio supervisor wrote of last weekend’s audio console failure, “this is the sort of nightmare I would have.”
