After decades on air, we’re used to seeing rock ‘n’ roll artists on Saturday Night Live, but when the show first launched in 1975, there were obstacles to overcome.
“Rock and roll people did not do television because they sounded terrible. So we had to figure that out, and that was a big, big fight over the first season,” SNL‘s creator Lorne Michaels said to Entertainment Weekly in 2025.
“If you look at, say, Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show [in 1956], or the Beatles [in 1964] for that matter, it’s all on a boom [microphone], you know, and the sound was more than good enough for that period for them to catch fire and all that,” he explained. “But by the time we came on, the music was recorded in a completely different way, and television was still using a boom. So that was the biggest sort of fight at the beginning.”
The very first episode of SNL featured musical performances by Billy Preston and Janis Ian, but even then, Michaels was focused on how the sound could be improved for episode two and all other future episodes.
“When Paul Simon did the second show, I brought [producer] Phil Ramone in, who was working with him that summer on Still Crazy [After All These Years]. And the television audio guy was not thrilled about that,” Michaels continued. “Just the idea that we were gonna mic it differently. Remember, Elvis is him and the Jordanaires, and a boom is covering all their music. And now it was different.”
READ MORE: 20 Rock Artists Who’ve Never Played ‘SNL’…But Still Could
Clearly, the kinks were figured out so that bands and solo artists that appeared on SNL could sound, well, good on TV, something viewers came to expect more and more as broadcast technology developed over the years.
Many seasons of SNL later, the musical guests on the show have run the gamut of musical genres and there’s no sign of slowing down. But there are, of course, some acts that would have made excellent guests who simply never got the opportunity, some for reasons we may never know. In the below gallery, we’ve rounded up 21 examples of such artists that unfortunately won’t ever get this chance.
21 Rock Artists That Never Got a Chance to Play ‘SNL’
Unfortunately, things just didn’t work out for these acts.
Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
