Yesterday we looked at one artist who acted up on Saturday Night Live and got banned from the show – Sinead O’Connor. Today, we look at the other one who did the same – Elvis Costello. Although his relationship with NBC apparently healed much better than Sinead’s seems to have. In fact, Costello was back on another NBC hit show, Frasier, this day in 2003.
Costello got in the network’s bad books back in 1977 when he famously played just a couple of seconds of the song he’d been told to play on SNL, “Less Than Zero” before he stopped, apologized saying “there’s no reason to do this song here” and kicked into another tune of his, “Radio Radio”. The show’s producer, Lorne Michaels and NBC itself were less than amused, especially since the song he did play knocked commercial radio – of which NBC was one of the leading owners in the U.S. They banned him from the show and in all likelihood from anything that would appear on the “Peacock network”.
Eventually the anger faded and as he transitioned from an artist seen as a slightly-threatening punk rocker to a respected song-crafter, he was invited back to SNL in 1989. One imagines the network was happier with his performance that time since as we fast forward to 2003, he made a guest appearance on one of its flagship shows, Frasier.
Although Frasier had won numerous Emmys and for much of its run been a ratings winner, by 2003, in its tenth season, it was running a bit dry. For the first time it was out of the top 20 in ratings and they were running short on catchy story ideas (now that Niles had married Daphne, as regular viewers will recall). So, nothing like a few high-profile guests to try to revive interest in a show! In this case, Elvis played “Ben” a, loud and not entirely terrific folk musician who is playing at the Cafe Nervosa, the show’s namesake star’s favorite quiet place to unwind. And of course, he can’t stand Ben. It didn’t do wonders for the ratings (about nine million tuned in, less than half what it was normally drawing two or three years prior) but it did give fans a chance to see Costello play the ’60s Australian novelty song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down.”
Appearing on the show wasn’t so unusual for Elvis. He’d dabbled in film and TV for much of his career, often playing himself (as on the Larry Sanders Show twice and in the movie Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me).