“Don’t blow this for us, Gene!”
This Saturday Night Live sketch video featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken had to be changed to a version with new music replacing the original Blue Oyster Cult song. YouTube won’t keep the post of the SNL original on their site.
This sketch is especially funny to me because of my experiences in high school band class. One of my good friends used to play electric guitar in our junior high school jazz band. A couple of times after playing an entire song with the guitar completely unplugged from its amplifier, our band instructor would tell my friend that, “we could use a little less guitar in this song”.
He had just been strumming the guitar with no volume in order to practice the song’s chord progressions. We always thought it was a funny request, since my friend was playing the only guitar in a band full of horn and woodwind instruments. After the next run-through of the song, with the guitar still unplugged, our band instructor commented, “That was much better.”
When another friend and I would play two sets of drums side by side, our band instructor would tell us to “turn the drums down a little.” This request was more reasonable, since we were usually playing at a quadruple forte dynamics level. Technically speaking, acoustic drums can’t actually be “turned down,” but they can be played at a quieter level. Fortunately for the band, we eventually learned the art of playing dynamically while keeping solid time.
Our percussion section played much like Gene (Will Ferrell) does in this sketch for quite some time. It was great fun at the time, but I’m sure it was torturous for the rest of our band class. It’s a mighty risky thing to arm 12-year-old boys with drumsticks.
