saturday night not-quite-live

i've been setting my tivo to nbc for 11:30pm every saturday night for as long as i've had the thing, and though the pickin's can get mighty slim some weeks these days, i've never been disappointed by seth meyers, and every once in awhile someone from the rest of the cast will pull off a keeper that keeps me coming back, just in case. (armison/obama detenting with forte/jintao alone a few weeks back redeemed the last two seasons). the downside is that "a local anesthetic", broadcasting around that same time, and featuring tons of local musical talent every week that would otherwise make recording it a no-brainer, always gets pushed off.

attentive readers will note that a re-broadcast of every week's show takes place the following friday at 11pm and might wonder what all the difficulty might be, but extra-attentive readers will then realize that the rebroadcast takes place on channel 95 which doesn't have its program information mapped out among tivo's program listings, so there's no easy way to tell the thing to grab the feed...

fear not, intrepid local music fans--tivo does have the ability to turn itself on and off based on the time of day--it's just not that easy to make it work. lucky for me i'm handy with electronics, though, of course, this means you're going to have to hear all about the results... (sorry).

in the meantime, i've been fortunate enough to come by dvd's of the first set of episodes, so i'll try to bring everyone up to speed in case they missed 'em when they aired. show #1 i just finished, and from the opening/closing lowell classics "city of lowell" and "homeless guy" by the reverend justin (jj) burns, to a classic live take of melvern taylor's "sleepy eyes" with his fabulous meltones, (which was the highlight of the show), it's all good. there's some live mayhem from "audrey can't die" (including the misuse of an oversized paddington bear, but i can't say more lest PETA get involved), and some extremely rough takes from the principals of "supa dupa", paula and barry, who came out on the wrong side of some unfortunate vocal mic levels but still found a way to make it work. my other favorite bit was from elizabeth lorrey (of the rafters) doing her angry l-word thing on "blood on the state house". not so much some of the rest of it, but that's the beauty of a show like this, much the same as saturday night live. you win some, you lose some, but if you use your DVR to get it, you can use your DVR to fast-forward through the bits you don't like as much, and it's all good. (i have no idea what fred fest is, but i'm guessing it's one of those "had to be there" fest/shows, where kids pen and perform originals built out of riffs that are essentially smoke on the water, and everyone just mills around in case something good happens...)

but anytime there's even 5 minutes of melvern the sum total is always redeemed as far as i'm concerned, and if you don't believe me, i've got the 5 minutes of video here to prove it.

"sleepy eyes... don't close those sleepy eyes..."