When Art Garfunkel hosted Saturday Night Live on March 11, 1978, it was more or less like when Ray Charles hosted: Artie ended up doing more songs than sketches. He did "Wonderful World" instead of a monologue (interrupted by John Belushi when a speaker started feeding back), then came back and did a two-fer of "All I Know" (a lovely version of his loveliest song, accompanied only by piano and cello) and "Scarborough Fair," then finished up as the show was ending with "Crying in My Sleep," which was his current single.
I think he was only in two sketches, which is odd, because as all Bad Timing fans know, he was an actor as well as a singer, and not a half-bad one. But even stranger was that someone felt the need to book a musical guest as well, and then they chose Stephen Bishop. Stephen Bishop! Who needs a poor man's Art Garfunkel when we've already got the real one?
Bishop appeared in a sketch too, outside the stage door of a Kiss concert, in which John Belushi played a roadie turning a bunch of people away who were trying to get backstage. Bishop came up and told him he was Stephen Bishop and he had a big hit song called "On and On," which Belushi recognized and sung a few bars of before barking out, "I hate that song!" And I'll bet he did, too.
3 comments:
And it's Stephen Bishop's guitar that John Belushi smashes in Animal House.
Bishop may have been a poor man's Art Garfunkel as far as singing, but he wrote better songs.
That's not saying much, though, since Garfunkel never tried writing his own songs until his 2002 album "Everything Waits to Be Noticed."
Prior to that, he always had excellent taste in song selection, by which I mean he usually sang songs I liked.
Whoops! I didn't know that. I ought to have said, then, that Bishop wrote better songs than the ones I heard by Garfunkel in the 1970s. I'm a lot less confident of that now, though, and should go back and listen again, separated by decades from the disdain of my youth.
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