SNL 10/12 Music Guests

[lbpesq]

Stevie Nicks was the musical guest on SNL tonight.   And her band included Waddy Wachtel!  They are 76 and 77, respectively.  And they were better than 90% of the acts on SNL.   I keep saying, “middle age begins at 70!”


Bill, tgo (still a youngster at 69)

[cozmik_cowboy]

Waddy can pick a little.

Peter

[StephenR]

Not sure I heard anything he played but did notice him in the band. Agree that I find it hard to listen to, and enjoy, a lot of the SNL musical guests... Stevie's performance sounded like modern music but you could definitely hear that there was an actual song being played, sometimes that aspect of a SNL guest performance is lacking.

[edwardofhuncote]

Waddy Wachtel has been in Stevie's musical orbit since all the way back to the Buckingham-Nicks Polydor days, and maybe even before that. He's a monster player. (I've been listening to him with Linda Ronstadt's 70's band lately too.)


I think most of the folks in Stevie's band are long-term employees who have been there for years, decades even. Gotta' hand it to the ol' girl, she might not be what you like, or in large doses, but she evidently runs a class act. Just from my personal experience at Fleetwood Mac shows, it's remarkable how she has this magnetic effect on an audience. I've seen her bring an arena from pin-drop silence to deafening cheers... in one song. Spell damn near worked on me.


~Gregory (who has no idea what is on SNL anymore...)

[hieronymous]

When I was in college in Worcester Mass. around 1990 I knew a guy named Alan Wachtel - he said he was Waddy Wachtel's cousin and he looked like it, so I had no reason not to believe him. Never managed to turn that connection into anything lol

[lbpesq]

Ahh, famous musical relatives!   Senior Management and I partied with Michael Bolton’s brother, Orrin, at a few NORML Conferences.   

Bill, tgo

[cozmik_cowboy]

A former GF was the hot-stuff pianist in the home town, and as such was hired to play one year for the Miss Southeastern Ohio Pageant.  I went to the rehearsal as her page turner (a role I often filled), but the President of the Zanesville Jaycees (who ran the thing) told her to leave me home henceforward, as it seems my bearded, hair-to-the-waist, faded-tie-dye, ratty elephant-bells-sporting, chain-smoking self did not present the wholesome image they wanted to project while parading underaged girls like cattle in bathing suits.
But I did get to meet his brother, whom he'd dragooned into playing drums - Russ Kunkle.

And my recently-retired dentist is the brother of Frankie Sullivan, lead guitar for Survivor.

Peter