The Rockefeller, The Xylophonist, and the Canadian

This February, native New Yorker SNL turned 50 and threw itself a birthday party at New York’s hottest club, Studio 8H. Admittedly the chosen venue was not much of a DJed cesspool (a far cry from Spicy, Kevin?, or my favorite, John’s New Backpack). In fact, the show’s much-anticipated bash, like all the best non-karaoke birthday parties, was thrown at home. It was a weekend-long, star-studded house party in an apartment so sweet, it hasn’t seen the light of StreetEasy in half a century. Some might call it the only place in the city that actually has everything (except a dishwasher).

But long before Homebase was SNL’s home base, studio apartment 8H hosted an impressive roster of other tenants. The 6,102-square-foot room has existed since 1933. It’s as old as Rockefeller Center, and was probably literally built by those guys who ate lunch on that beam. 

Rockefeller Jr. bought the block with the intention of moving the Met Opera House, a plan that crashed and burned with the stock market in 1929. So Lil Rock panicked, ordered literally the most limestone anyone ever had, and decided to just kinda put a bunch of stuff there. Everything, if you will. And it worked! To this day, you can get a lobster roll, try one of those Mormon sodas (recommend), throw back a kiwi gimlet, get your shoes shined, and go ice skating, all in the former Cold War bomb shelter basement.

Upstairs, between 30 Rock’s towering art deco walls, decorated with mildly ominous murals obviously commissioned by a “noted mythology and symbology professor” (Wikipedia), lie the studios. If I were a huge pretentious dork, I might say that these places where we virtually gather to see stories told echo their Ancient Greek theatrical predecessors, and maybe that’s what’s up with all the statues of titans and inscriptions about human progress. But it’s probably a coincidence that Prometheus poses with the gift of fire down the hall from the NBC gift shop. And besides, between Oedpius and Domingo, there was radio.

When The Rock II built his magnum opus, he was probably the only American who owned a TV. Radio was still all the rage, hence the place’s working title, “Radio City.” (The family PR guy was like, “people are only gonna come to this Center if it has your name on it,” and Pebble was like, “Radio City sounds way cooler and radio will never die,” and PR guy was like, “ you can have the music hall.”) NBC, RKO, and RCA were like, “we heard you’re building a Radio City,” and PR guy was like, “damn it,” and thus 8H became the birthplace of podcasts.

Kidding, this was long before people published their three-hour conversations, or broadcasted their prank calls, or even DJed. It was the Depression, and you still had to do actual shows and stuff.

Speaking of the Depression, in one of the most weird-ass marketing campaigns of all time, Nabisco had recently decided to drop a hot new cracker they’d named “Ritz” because it was “a bite of the high life.” Before Pepsi ended racism, Ritz crackers ended poverty.

Nabisco, then known by its government name, National Biscuit Company (I know, holy shit—a portmanteau? In this economy?) decided to sponsor a radio show to get the word out. They teamed up with the other NBC, hatching the very first late-night Saturday broadcast out of a certain brand-new room.

Let’s Dance was a weekly three-hour extravaganza featuring three regular bands, plus solo interludes on a self-designed marimba-xylophone-vibraphone hybrid by my great-grandfather.

Harry Breuer, dubbed the “boy wonder” of any and all malleted instruments, remains the sole member of my family tree to have been graced with the xylophone prodigy gene. I’m not mad about it, but I wish I inherited, like, at least a little hand-eye coordination. He met my ballerina great-grandmother (I can’t dance either, what the hell) the same way all 1920s vaudeville couples met. They’d bumped into each other on the scene, opening for silent films in what were then true movie palaces. Then one day, he was playing, she was pirouetting, and she fell offstage and into the pit. Legend has it she landed in a trombone player’s lap and he said, “‘scusa me, I’m tryin’ ta play here.” Like, rude of him to interrupt the meet-cute. This isn’t about you.

Nevertheless, this pinnacle of meta farce, this inside joke so powerful it reached me 100 years later, kicked off a whirlwind romance. Sunny afternoons spent on Brooklyn stoops and rainy ones at off-the-clock talkies. They complemented each other like music and dancing. Pitfall aside, they fell in love.

And per trombone guy’s request, the show went on. After an acrobat stint, she retired—all dance careers are measured in dog years. But Harry played his whole life, long after movies traded their palaces for malls and Blockbusters. He jammed around the Cities (New York and Radio) for decades, even once he and the rest of the vaudeville gang had drifted out to sea (moved to Long Island). He had his own orchestra, his own technique books, a Howdy Doody arc, a run in the Tonight Show band, and a weekend gig with a biscuit peddler.

It’s been a blast to shit on the guys who brought us the pumpkin spice Oreo. But ironically, Let’s Dance actually became a bite of the high life. On Saturday nights, free for a moment from the worries of work or lack thereof, people could foxtrot around their living rooms. Three hours of escape, a chance to listen to a brand new instrument through a brand new machine, a reminder that things wouldn’t always be the same. 

I never met them, but I grew up hearing of my great-grandparents’ fabled escapades. Their lore was a family rite of passage—his lightning “Flight of the Bumblebee” played with a mallet between each finger, her toes distorted in the shape of pointe shoes. Sepia-toned photos and dated diaries (whose entries mostly read “practiced”) in boxes in my grandparents’ basement. But somehow Let’s Dance slipped through the cracks. I’d worked as a PA in studio 8H for years, without a clue that Harry hung out there a century before, until my great uncle whipped out the ancient family prophecy (a 1980s home video).

It’s summer ‘82: E.T. just came out, the first CD hit shelves like two weeks ago, and my family is sitting around a picnic table in period costume. Long Island is steeped in a bright summer haze, lawn mowers clicking in the distance as three generations pick at neon cheese balls and shit-talk Walkmans: topical. “Listening to music while walking? You’ll walk into a tree,” they scoff. In 25 years they’ll buy me an iPod Shuffle for my First Communion.

Headlines aside, the headliners of today’s barbecue are Harry’s scrapbooks. He flips through page after yellowed page plastered with newspaper clippings (“Xylophone Virtuoso Strikes Again”) and playbills (“Xylophone solo with piano accompaniment, 75 cents”) and telegrams (“Would like to have you at Roxy Theater”) until he finally reaches an 8x10 glossy print. There he is, tucked in a corner of “the big studio at NBC, the one they talk about now whenever they have something really big going on…8H.” Playing a “duet with [him]self,” four mallets in each hand, on his triple-decker creation. “We did the Saturday night program.”

By all Google accounts, the subsequent decades were a rapid-fire montage of brief rentals for our limestone triplex (two floors but three stories—let her have this). The largest radio studio in the world, it could fit a full orchestra, which was super appealing to the NBC orchestra. Called the “auditorium studio,” it hosted shows and specials for audiences of 1,250 at a time.

The Saturday night slot next belonged to Your Hit Parade, Lucky Strike’s tobacco-backed weekly presentation of the Billboard top 15. When video killed the radio star, they were like, “guys, we could just film this,” and suddenly they had a TV show. Mr. Rogers worked in the writers room, and in a few years Mr. Robinson would too.

After a decade of Kraft Television Theatre (shocker: sponsored by Cheese Whiz) and a soap opera episode or two, Lorne Michaels finally arrived on the scene. He threw $250k and a dream at it and they took out like a thousand seats. It became a dream house that Lorne built for yet another cultural phenomenon that had yet to be invented. A chicken and an egg.

If you’re a dweeb who likes SNL or just likes to pretend it’s 2008, you’ve probably seen James Franco’s Saturday Night documentary on YouTube. Towards the end, Bill Hader sits in his dressing room, with a Troy Bolton haircut, beside his iHome-docked-iPod, describing the switch from dress to air. “There is a crazy weight that comes with it…when you actually [go] on air,” he says into the mirror. “There is this energy, this weird kinetic thing happening.” 

Maybe the energetic shift is in Bill’s head, somewhere next to John’s New Backpack. Or maybe there really is something subatomic connecting Lorne to Harry to Rock of Younger Ages. When the signal hits the antenna, you can feel the country huddled in this shrine to human resilience, this beacon of escapism through up-and-down decades, this would-be opera house turned sketch comedy lair. 

I am of course talking about a room that’s been used almost exclusively for making dick jokes for the last 50 years. So much so that everyone who’s ever entered has uttered, out of cosmic obligation, “it’s so much smaller than I thought.” But no one goes to the opera anymore. So. Closest thing. 

Harry Breuer was “one of the few musicians of the space age bachelor pad music era to treat percussion music as something more than a gimmick.” Xylophones were toys, novelties to be kept like Victorians kept moldy pineapples. And yet, home sick from school and bored with the stuffy violin, he became a virtuoso.

That brand of tongue-in-cheek ambition, I think, is the common thread fishing generations of creatives to that particular stage randomly masquerading as Grand Central (who is she fooling). 

8H was always a place where the low-brow was exalted to Greek standards. For 37% of American history, it’s been a home for “unserious” artists, for crafts honed in smoky bars and basements or as party tricks. 

A place where the mastery of sheer fun is celebrated. Where one feels the sun may come out tomorrow, because it’s already 11:30pm.

A place where, in thanks for joy through dark times, the laughed-at are made titans. Today, people line up down Rock’s block for the chance to see the aforementioned dick jokes told up close. So who’s laughing now.