*Editor’s note: With the recent passing of longtime Saturday Night Live music coordinator Hal Willner due to COVID-19, I wanted to resurface this piece I wrote last year about something particularly awesome that he did in his lifetime that few people know about. (Updates throughout, obviously.) If you didn’t get a chance to see SNL’s recent tribute to him, please do. It’s awesome.* Today in Tedium: There’s always something to admire about a well-considered touring bill, where the bands on the lineup fit together so well that it makes you want to drop everything and go, where the bill is stacked all the way down. (Example: If Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters ever co-headlined a tour, every Gen Xer within 50 miles of the venue would show up.) It’s not easy to put this kind of lineup together in a non-Coachella-style environment, and it’s even harder to have such lineups appear every single week. Not just one great musician. Four or five. But a TV show, long forgotten about by modern music fans, managed to perfect this model, and it deserves a place in the modern discussion. Today’s Tedium talks Sunday Night, a Saturday Night Live spinoff that put music legends on the stage week after week after week. — Ernie @ Tedium

1988 The year that Sunday Night, originally envisioned as a musical counterpart to NBC’s SNL, debuted on the network. The show was designed to bring together a whole bunch of disparate musicians, many of whom were big names, and have them perform both older songs and newer tunes. The concept was formulated by a number of figures who had close associations with NBC during the era, including jazz musician David Sanborn, who spent time in the SNL house band and frequently guested with Paul Shaffer’s band on Late Night With David Letterman. Sanborn reportedly sold the idea to Lorne Michaels, who gave it the room to breathe on NBC, where it spent its first season. During its second season, the show was syndicated and its name was changed to Night Music, in part to allow syndicators to air it at any time of the week; during both seasons, the show was presented by the beer brand Michelob.

Here it is, folks, the greatest moment in television history. (YouTube screenshot) The musical producer that helped make the show just a little bit weirder It’s one thing to get Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on a stage. That’s inspired. But one has to be a particularly offbeat mind to place Conway Twitty, a particularly stoic icon of the country music establishment, in front of The Residents, perhaps one of the most willfully weird music acts to ever exist. But an episode of Night Music actually did this in 1990, and the result was truly something else. (Apparently, based on what he told me on Twitter, R. Stevie Moore was there that night.) It’s one thing to consider that a televised Lou Reed and John Cale reunion, airing not long after Andy Warhol’s death, was something people wanted to see. But this? Clearly, a desire to melt brains was at play. “That was a pretty interesting moment [laughs],” Sanborn told Nashville Scene in 2013. “The guy from Michelob actually came up to us afterward and said, ‘What was that?!’” Hal Willner. Sanborn may have produced the seed that created the show, but oddball music producer Hal Willner helped make it weird—in a good way. As a 1990 Spin article notes, Willner, who served as Saturday Night Live’s music supervisor for skits for 40 years, helped to push the show further into bizarre realms as one of the producers. He felt it was a service to music fans, who often weren’t served their music with the right amount of culture. “Beyond putting on music that we love,” Willner told the magazine, “I feel an obligation to expose people to other things. I mean, watching MTV, they don’t tell you about Ornette Coleman.” Willner’s career includes a lot of interesting moments like this. As a producer, he worked closely with Lou Reed on a number of albums near the end of his career, most infamously Lulu, his collaboration with Metallica. He produced albums with artists such as Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson, Metallica collaborator Marianne Faithfull, Lucinda Williams, and author William S. Burroughs. But Willner’s own projects, generally all-star tributes, are something else. Over the past four decades, Willlner organized tribute concerts and albums honoring a wide variety of figures, both somewhat cult (German composer Kurt Weill, best known for his work on the standard “Mack the Knife”) and totally mainstream (the music of Disney). Some of these events have proven important stepping stones for others, such as when Jeff Buckley’s career got an initial boost after he took part in a tribute concert for his late father, Tim. Willner, who died last week from symptoms consistent with COVID-19, became so well-known for his tributes that he became the recipient of one in 2018. An obituary in the New York Times last week emphasized that the performances he organized were often in the spirit of Night Music: “Maybe you’ve dreamed of hearing U2 with the horn section from Sun Ra’s Arkestra in a one-time-only performance at the Apollo Theater. If so, Hal Willner made your dream come true.” A 2017 Times article on Willner helps to expose what made his musical stylings so vibrant: New York, the city where he made his home for decades, and particularly the weird culture it fostered. In that 2017 article—something of the definitive document on why he was so awesome—he worried about that culture going missing. From the story: “I don’t know what inspires people now,” he said. “Maybe they don’t need to be inspired in that way. Do these last two generations have heroes? I’m not sure they do. I go to Avenue A now and listen to what people are talking about, and it isn’t culture. When John Lennon died I couldn’t go to work for two days. I wonder if they have someone that they look at like that—an author, a poet, whatever. Those are people who made us what we are.” When looking at episodes of Sunday Night/Night Music, one gets the feeling that the people involved were trying to bring a touch of New York’s musical culture—not just artists from New York (many of the above listed artists live elsewhere), but the city’s musical vibrancy—to the small screen. With that view in mind, it makes a ton of sense why Lou Reed keeps popping up in this story.

“It’d be great if the show could go on, if we could really reach and audience and feel an impact. I don’t think there’s anyone else doing what we’re doing. Unfortunately.” — Willner, speaking to Spin in 1990 about the show’s fate. At the time of the Spin piece, the show was near the end of its second and final season. After it was cancelled due to low ratings and its unfortunate time slot, everyone went their separate ways: Beyond Willner’s long resume, Sanborn maintained his long career as an often-adventurous jazz musician, Holland returned to the UK and became a well-regarded TV host, and Lorne Michaels is still Lorne Michaels.