Minnesota has Some Great ‘Saturday Night Live’ Connections

Saturday Night Live is celebrating their 50th Anniversary this year.  And that special is coming up this week.  Ther has been a lot of hype surrounding this show and it's 50 year celebration.  So, I thought I would check out how many of their hosts and/or musicians hail from Minnesota.

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Al Franken is probably the most famous person from Minnesota to not only host, but was also a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live.

There have also been several musicians from Minnesota who have perfomed on SNL.  Prince did it several times.  The first one was in 1981, right after the album 'Dirty Mind' came out.  The album didn't really get any radio play because the songs were not "radio friendly".  But they did play the song "party up", and it was a hit.

Bobby Z, who was the drummer for Prince was telling the story on KARE 11, and it turns out when they played SNL that day, they were not actually the featured muisical guest, Todd Rundgren was the scheduled guest.

...somehow, someone convinced Lorne Michaels to let this "new talent" play one song — "Party Up" — before the final skit.

"They wanted us to run off the stage,” he recalled. “I escaped through the side, he runs off, throws the microphone down in typical Prince fashion, but it was all pretty new back then, his renegade ways."

They were just kids — Prince was 19, and Bobby, 21. All these years later, that moment in time is still special to Bobby. 

“It's one of the best memories,” 

Prince went on to play 3 more times as the musical guest on SNL.

There were others from Minnesota as well, including Bob Dylan, Soul Asylum, Morris Day and the Time, and also the Replacements.

The story about the Replacements was interesting because they are one of the few bands who have been banned from playing on SNL ever again.

Why?

Well, apparently they were fairly intoxicated when they took the stage.  The normal gig has each musical guest playing 2 songs. The lead singer, Paul Westerberg dropped an expletive during their performance in 1993.  That mistake got them banned for life. However, it was still basically a win for the band.  Rolling Stone magazine did a ranking of the 50 best musical guests on SNL and the Replacements wound up at number 2 right behind David Bowie.  Yeah, that's a win.

The big 50th Anniversary Special will air on Sunday, February 16th.  Odd that they aren't airing it on Saturday nght.  It will be a 3 hour special shown on NBC.