Weekend Playlist: Fridays' Greatest Musical Guests

My parents let me stay up way too late on the weekends. So when ABC rolled out its own competitor/knockoff of Saturday Night Live in 1980, I was parked in front of the TV for Fridays every week. Not for long: the show lasted barely two years because it wasn’t very good. It’s remembered, if at all, as a footnote in the careers of Larry David and Michael Richards, who would later work together on a sitcom you may have seen.

Since I was six years old, I didn’t get the pot and sex jokes, or most of the other jokes. But even at that tender age I noticed a lot more of the musical guests on Fridays had shorter hair, and moved weirder, and sounded jumpier, than the stuff my parents listened to.

SNL had booked bands like Devo, Blondie, the B-52s, the Talking Heads, and the Specials before Fridays aired its first episode. But in general, the older show was developing a whiff of premature fogeyism, embodied by the Simons Carly and Paul. Fridays saw new wave as an opportunity.

Commercially, it didn’t work any better than Fridays’ comedy ideas, like casting Larry David as Larry Fine in a foul-mouthed, drug-addled Three Stooges parody. But it was the first show to bring some of the most exciting and influential music of the time into American living rooms - including one in a ranch house at the end of a cul-de-sac in south St. Louis County. Here are 10 of my favorites (also compiled in a YouTube playlist) for your Friday night.

The Cars - "Shake It Up"
Hard as it is to imagine now, there was a time when even the Cars were considered a little risky, a little too weird, to put on network TV.

Graham Parker & the Rumour - "Stupefaction"
The British firebrand busted out one of his more caustic numbers for his American network TV debut. Alas, there would prove to be room for only one wiry, bespectacled, angry Englishman in US pop culture, and Elvis Costello landed the job.

Stray Cats - "Runaway Boys"
After knocking 'em dead in the UK, the ultra-American rockabilly trio didn’t even have a US record contract at the time of their appearance. A crawl on the screen invited interested labels to get in touch.

Devo - "Uncontrollable Urge"
Could there have been a more perfect band for a circa-1980 TV show that wanted to present itself as edgy but not too off-putting? Devo’s robotic antics were practically sketch comedy in themselves, making them the only musical act booked twice on Fridays, along with an earlier SNL appearance.

The Clash - "Clampdown"
I remember seeing a lot of these acts on Fridays. I must have gone to bed early this particular night. The Clash absolutely sizzle off the screen on their first live American TV performance. They did four songs that night - Fridays often let bands play longer than the SNL quota of two songs. That’s one upside to the show’s shortage of strong comedy material.

Split Enz - "I Got You"
The theatrical Kiwis had toned down the more visually outre aspects of their show by this time, just as Neil Finn would smooth away the twitchy new wave edges a few years later in Crowded House.

The Jam - "Start!"
No question the band of the era with the biggest disparity between UK success and US indifference, the Jam landed single after single at the top of the British charts but couldn’t get arrested in America. There, they made too many live TV appearances to count; here, they made one. This one.

The Bus Boys - "Minimum Wage"
A black rock ‘n’ roll band with a sense of humor and bucketloads of charisma, the Bus Boys should have been huge. They’d later come within hailing distance of the big time with high-profile soundtrack contributions to 48 Hrs. and Ghostbusters, but Fridays was there first.

The Boomtown Rats - "I Don’t Like Mondays"
For whatever reason, I distinctly remember this performance more than any other from Fridays. I thought it was weird that these punkish-looking guys were doing a quiet song with strings.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - "American Girl"
The late Petty in his prime, as were the Heartbreakers. Just great.

As you may have noticed, Shout Factory released many of these clips on a Best of Fridays DVD set, accompanied by their own YouTube playlist that overlaps some with mine. Fridays was cancelled in 1982. New wave would culminate in an awesome wave of pop hits in 1983 and 1984, then vanish: by decade’s end even megastars like Blondie and the Cars would be passe. And that was that.

More very special musical guests are appearing in our weekend playlist archive.