To the surprise of few, Mick Jagger’s performances with Arcade Fire (featuring the Strokes’ Nikolai Fraiture on bass!) and the Foo Fighters on SNL this past weekend were pretty great – the former was an enthusiastic, raucous take on a seldom-heard Rolling Stones classic, “The Last Time” from Out of Our Heads (at least here in America), while the latter featured Dave Grohl & Co. blazing through a medley of “19th Nervous Breakdown”/”It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).” Also, the Stones frontman impersonated Steven Tyler in a sketch called “So You Think You Can Dance at an Outdoor Music Festival,” which was quite amusing and contained a now-obligatory mention of Burger King’s Crispy Chicken Strips.
What was unexpected, however, was how TERRIBLE Jagger’s collaboration with guitar hero Jeff Beck ended up being. They played “a blues that [he] wrote about the presidential election” called “Tea Party”; it contained such lines as, “If you want to sleep in the West Wing, yeah, you got to strategize a bit/If you want to sleep in the West Wing, you wanna keep that private boat, yeah, you got to strategize a bit/Yeah you’re gonna have to raise about 100 million dollars, or you’re gonna end up so deep down in the shit.” In case you weren’t sure who the song was about, Jagger clarified: “Mr. Romney, he’s a hard-working man and he always says his prayers/Yeah, but there’s one little thing about him/Don’t ever let him cut your hair.”
It was a slog to get through, and Jagger’s lyrical jabs weren’t pointed enough to really mean anything. Much better, however, was the episode’s capper: a tribute to Kristen Wiig who will soon depart the hallowed halls of Studio 8H for a career hopefully more successful than Rachel Dratch’s, set to “She’s a Rainbow,” sung by not only Jagger, Arcade Fire, the Foo Fighters, and the show’s entire cast, but also Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Amy Poehler, Chris Kattan, and Rachel Drat…oops. Jason Sudeikis and Andy Samberg, who are both also likely to leave SNL, bizarrely received less attention, though they do have Olivia Wilde and Joanna Newsom to go home to, so don’t cry any tears for them.
Samberg basically got two smaller but pretty clear send-offs: last week’s 100th Digital Short was a callback-packed mock-tribute, and then his actual final Digital Short aired on Saturday with “Lazy Sunday 2” (which explains why there weren’t any references to it in the 100th). Pretty much a victory lap for him.
I wonder if Sudiekis isn’t actually leaving, at least not right away — because yeah, there really wasn’t a hint of goodbye for him except maybe in reviving the ESPN Classic sketch last week. There are rumors he’ll stick around through the fall to do Romney for the elections (not that his Romney is so dead-on irreplaceable, but on the other hand, who’s going to do it… Taran Killam?!). I imagine if he was really going away, they would’ve done one last Two A-Holes sketch for him and Wiig. I bet he’ll be back in the fall, maybe leave in December and get a proper goodbye. They don’t always have official goodbyes like Wiig’s or Fallon’s or Ferrell’s, but usually there’s at least a sense of greatest-hits run-through when someone central to the show knows he or she is leaving.
Too bad your hulu clip only displays the Ford ad-video over and over… I would have liked to see and hear “The Last Time.”
Ug terrible isn’t even the word for that song with Jeff Beck. But unexpected? Jagger hasn’t written a good song in 20 years (there were a couple on Wandering Spirit that were ok) and everything since then has been cringeworthy bad.