Questlove Goes Deep Into ‘50 Years of SNL Music’ In Documentary

“I really can’t think of another thing that is as powerful, inspirational and huge as SNL is,” Billie Eilish says in Questlove’s Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music documentary.

The Summer of Soul director has dived deep into the archives to put some context around the hundreds of musical performances ahead of the show’s 50th anniversary special next month.

As Mick Jagger says, “If you think about it, what you’ve got is something which wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for SNL, you’ve got this huge, broad, popular music library of performances from this period.”

Questlove opens the two-hour film with an incredible seven-minute remix of some of the most iconic performances on Saturday Night Live (watch below).

Ladies & Gentlemen… features interviews with the likes of Eilish, Jagger, Jack White, Dave Grohl, Debbie Harry, Miley Cyrus, Olivia Rodrigo and Justin Timberlake as well as numerous SNL figures.

The Tonight Show bandleader also managed to persuade Lorne Michaels, a man not known for nostalgia, to talk.

“Remember when we come on the air, we’re following Watergate, the last helicopter out of Vietnam, the city is broke, the church is being questioned and everything seemed to be crumbling… that moment in time, we just came on and did a show that we wanted to see and music was a big part of that,” Michaels says. “When the music changes, it changes. You can say that’s not really music but if it’s the music, it’s the music and the show needs to look and sound like today. You should be able to look at a rerun and tell what’s going on in the country.”

From the first ever performance with Billy Preston, the doc looks at iconic performances such as Sinead O’Connor’s Pope moment, memorable moments from Prince and David Bowie, Rage Against The Machine being kicked out of Studio 8H, Ashlee Simpson’s lip syncing nightmare, Debbie Harry introducing rap to television audiences through the Funky Four Plus One and Nirvana bringing grunge to the mainstream.

As the latter’s drummer Dave Grohl says, “I think it’s important for people to see live music on television. When you see a human being on a stage, actually doing the thing, it can be inspiring because it seems accessible in a way. The most iconic American television show of all time.”

RELATED: ‘SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night’ Trailer: Peacock’s New Docuseries Goes Behind The Scenes Of Classic Moments

There’s also incredible footage of Kanye West having a meltdown in 2016 as staffers tore out his shiny stage floor because of the way it reflected on camera.

The rapper is shown complaining, “They took my f*cking stage off of SNL without asking me. Now I’m bummed. I’m 50% more influential than any other human being. Don’t fuck with me.”

But as Michaels subsequently pointed out to West, “This is more damaging to you than it is us.”

There’s also a focus on the musical sketches such as The Blues Brothers, Lonely Island and James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party.

Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music airs at 8 tonight (January 27). It is one of a number of docs from Questlove, whose Sly Lives! premiered at Sundance last week ahead of its February 13 premiere on Hulu.

DEADLINE: Let’s start with that intro, a seven-minute remix of some of the best SNL performances. How did you decide to open with that?

QUESTLOVE: Doing that intro… firstly the process of being asked to do it, then you got to sit to figure out what do you want to do with the platform that you’re given. Then you think, ‘I’m gonna do the 50 best musical performances of SNL’. Somewhere, as you’re watching it, you’re in your research of watching all these episodes, you start saying to yourself, ‘Wait, there’s actually more musical iconic moments on the show without the musical guests than there is for musical guests, so it’s almost like music is the unspoken co-star of the show, maybe I have to start over. The amount of times I had to knock my Jenga down to start again. For me, the way that I curate things and put things together, especially of this manner, people remember the first 10 minutes of a presentation and then the last five minutes.

Even in The Roots shows, even if we have a sucky show, I somehow curate it so that the intro is so incredible and the exit is so jaw dropping that you almost forget that we did a bad show in between. So, I knew you got to gobsmack them right at the top. I had all this music so I thought I’m going to prepare this montage the way that I would prepare a DJ gig. But that’s a heavy, heavy commitment. This was presented to me in early 2021 when I was doing press for Summer of Soul and I knew that I had to turn this thing in in 2024 so if I go through somewhere between four to eight episodes a day, maybe I can have something, but I gotta really commit to watching four to eight episodes of Saturday Night Live every day. There’ll just be points where you wonder if 1978 is ever going to end. When am I going to get to Jimmy Fallon or Tina Fey in 2002 and then you get to 1992. It is a commitment like I never knew before.

DEADLINE: Where did you start? There’s around 1,000 musical acts during the past 50 years, did you go chronologically?

QUESTLOVE: I started chronologically. I started with the very first episode, and just kept notes. The way I prepare for DJ gigs, my rule is, for every song that you hear, you should know 10 songs that can match that song and add on. Does this song have a bridge in it? Can you pivot to another key? I did this on my own, and then 11 months later, I finally took all my notes to my editor and said, ‘Here are the notes I took over the last year and a half’. He kind of laughed at me said that he took the liberty of doing the same thing, but I didn’t do your process, I just put a bunch of stuff in the computer, and this is what it spit back to me. I was laughing, so I didn’t have to sit through a year’s worth of SNL viewing? Then, we just kind of went through my notes. That that to me is the most important part of where we are right now in terms of technology, do we still trust humans to do this stuff or can we just type a command in and let A.I do it for us? There’s still a human touch that’s needed and a nuance that’s needed to bring a human quality to it.

DEADLINE: What was the first SNL musical performance that made you sit up?

QUESTLOVE: The deal is that I am four or five years older than SNL. I grew up in grew up in a no TV household, but music shows were allowed. My all-time favorite music show is Soul Train. Soul Train is on 24 hours no matter where I am, even now as I speak to you, Soul Train stays on in my house like an aquarium. Pixar was Prince’s aquarium. He would keep Finding Nemo and Toy Story on every television. I’m like, ‘Wait, are you watching this stuff or you just have it playing?’ He’s like, ‘Finding Nemo is my aquarium. I like watching it.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cute’ and then I started doing it. Philadelphia happened to be one of the rare markets in which Soul Train was not a Saturday afternoon activity. Most of America knows Soul Train as a 12pm on a Saturday activity, and instead, in Philadelphia, Soul Train was a 1am activity. My parents were just cool enough to be like, ‘You got to go to bed still at 8:30pm on a Saturday night, but we’ll wake you up at 12:30am so that you can watch the two musical performances on SNL and Soul Train. I’m five or six. That was the only way that I could watch Bill Withers. It’s not like my parents were going to take me to nightclubs to see Bill Withers or Gil Scott Heron or Keith Jarrett or Frank Zappa or Billy Preston or The Stylistics perform. This was my only chance to see groups of that caliber perform on TV. We didn’t have a VCR. I remember all of season one and season two and season three, I grew up with the show.

DEADLINE: The rehearsal footage really stood out to me. That must have been a joy to go through?

QUESTLOVE: It’s like Billie Eilish’s verse in What Was I Made For? She sort of stops mid performance and ask us ‘Did I hit a wrong note? Was that good?’ Dude, you’re Billy Eilish. But it just shows you that, for me, with all my documentaries, and this is like one of three that’s coming out this year, like there’s also Sly and the Family Stone and Earth, Wind and Fire –  in all of my stories that I’m telling, you kind of know one thing about the story, but then there’s something else that you’re going to learn. How can I not make this a clip show? What’s the human experience that I can have with it? The subtext that I want people to know about this show is that risk is important to make history, I want creatives to see that. When talking about Celebrity Hot Tub, or when you talk to Mick Jagger, every story about this show starts with self-doubt. The way that Justin Timberlake has to convince Beyonce dude saying this could be a moment that could change your life. When history is written, I believe the tipping point moment for Beyonce from being leader of Destiny’s Child, might date Jay-Z, has a solo record coming out to her being the culture, is that sketch. Before then, we just knew of the performer, you needed to see her in a moment that’s not curated by her, out of her comfort zone. She needed convincing. All of those stories, are people that could have easily talked themselves out of the moment. Belushi and Akroyd could have been like Lorne didn’t like that so if they’d given in, no Blues Brothers. What would have been of James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles’s career in 1980 if Blues Brothers wasn’t there to nuance them for the next generation.

DEADLINE: Obviously you have these huge stars from Paul McCartney, Paul Simon or the Stones, but there’s also these alternative artists from Fear or The Funky Four Plus One, Frank Zappa and Sun Ra. Where did that come from?

QUESTLOVE: That building is 30 Rock University and I’ve been a student there. This is my 16^th year there so I’ve gone from kindergarten to 12th grade and four years of college at 30 Rock. If you look at my evolution in my life, from 2009 until now, everything that I’ve learned about the business now, I learned from being there. When you first get there, you just stick to your corner, we’re 6W, we’re just the Tonight Show, and that’s all we are. You hear about the myths upstairs, can I go upstairs and watch Paul McCartney soundcheck? Am I allowed to do that? Am I allowed to go with the older varsity jacket cooler kids on the eighth floor? One of the first people that I befriended in that ecosystem was Hal Willner, who I later learned is the heartbeat and the spirit of Saturday Night Live. He’s the person that insisted that we give a seat at the table to people that we otherwise wouldn’t think of or consider twice. SNL has to grow and go through metamorphosis, so yes, it starts out as a subculture, an underground secret that only you’re privy to, but then 20 years later, you should have the most popular singer on Earth, because now SNL is the culture. It is the epicenter. In the first 20 years, to see those acts that you otherwise couldn’t see nowhere else, that’s the spirit of Hal Willner.

DEADLINE: Lorne Michaels famously doesn’t love looking back. Was it tough to persuade him?

QUESTLOVE: That’s one of the biggest shocks I’ve ever gotten. Having been a fan of the SNL system and having read all the oral history and then listening to Marc Maron’s podcast WTF, which is the best podcast to listen to about someone that fantasizes about SNL, in which for every cast member who’s been on the show, it almost becomes a grilling session of ‘What’s Lorne like?’. His Lorne obsession is well known. That was the person that I had in mind that I’d be dealing with? This person that you should hide from if you see him. Imagine my pleasant surprise… his love for the show is deep and the stories that he has are deeper. It would be very easy to get cynical. 30 years into my career – shit, I’m just realizing that 30 years ago my first album came out – it’s almost very easy to be cynical and kind of old hat and be grumpy about it. [Lorne’s] not that at all, he’s very much enthusiastic about it. Knows what he has, knows what he created, shares stories with you, you got to love a person that is in it and of it.

DEADLINE: Were there any artists that you were surprised didn’t play SNL?

QUESTLOVE: Besides The Roots? I’m playing but I’m not playing. Practically, every six degrees of separation, magical moment of SNL, has happened because I believe that artists know and respect that this show is a game changer. I think for the first 10 years, you’re one of the cool kids, if you’re asked to play on Saturday Night Live. The next ten years, only the important people can make it and legacy acts. To see the process that leads up to “Hey Jude” when McCartney does it in 1993, that was such a magic moment. To have access to the footage that you as a viewer at home don’t get to see, that’s incredible. That was a moment for that audience to come full circle. What’s so hilarious about it is Hey Jude is already a seven-minute song and there’s a person in front of Paul McCartney that’s sort of like ‘OK, wrap it up, three round of na-na-nas and we can go to commercial’. There’s a point where McCartney is ribbing that person, are you going to stop Paul McCartney from a magic moment. It’s little small nuances like that that, we don’t get the witness, and it’s so magical.

DEADLINE: Talking of Prince earlier, he played SNL four times including the 15th anniversary. I know you’ve seen Ezra Edelman’s Prince documentary series for Netflix, which is facing some legal issues. Do you think we’ll ever see it?

QUESTLOVE: I don’t think it’s ever coming out. It changed my life. Seeing it has influenced all these docs that I’m doing now. I have three coming out in this year alone. That [Prince] documentary influenced how we should all tell stories, telling the human experience. With the SNL documentary, I want people to know that you just have to show up and take a risk. Don’t talk yourself out of history. We often do that. I’m for the better of it, so even if you don’t personally get to see that documentary, through my work, especially these next three [docs] coming up, you’re seeing the aftereffects of it.