The B List: It’s Saturday Night

1. Queen stopped by Studio 8H in 1982 to perform Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Under Pressure:

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2. There was a point when Bryan Adams crossed the threshold from writing great rock songs to prissy pop songs. Before he jumped over that line, he played Somebody on SNL in 1985:

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3. There is nothing quite as surreal as seeing Richie Cunningham introducing The Clash. Joe Strummer and the boys play an interesting version of Straight To Hell. I love the subtitles in this clip:

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4. The Godfather of Soul brought every single person in his entourage out on stage for this 1980 performance of I Feel Good. This could be the shortest song in the history of SNL:

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5. Stevie Nicks shows that she doesn’t need Fleetwood Mac to write synthesizer-infused pop songs with her 1985 performance of Stand Back:

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6. This isn’t exactly a musical performance, but I couldn’t quite pass up the chance to show this great spoof ad from 1983 featuring Stevie Wonder:

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7. One of the most catchy songs from 1983 was Big Country’s In A Big Country. Check out the band’s lone SNL appearance:

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8. I’m surprised “high on cocaine” got by the censors during the Grateful Dead’s performance of Casey Jones in 1978. But it did, bitches:

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9. I’m going to cheat a little bit and go back to 1976 for this clip of The Band performing Life Is A Carnival a month before The Last Waltz. We love The Band so much at Hidden Track that we just couldn’t resist:

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10. You wouldn’t expect to see Free Jazz on NBC, but that’s exactly what happened when Ornette Coleman and his band made an appearance on the show in 1979:

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You may have noticed that Ace posted that unbelievable Ornette clip on Pullin’ ‘Tubes last week. Or you may not, in which case you should really be paying closer attention. Either way, Ornette Coleman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, is a badass and he deserves to get two mentions in the span of nine days.

See anything cool out there from ’78-’86 SNL that we missed here?