Especially when it comes to the musical guests.
Leon Redbone, playing Kuss Auditorium on Oct. 16, made two appearances on the show’s legendary first season back in 1976, which suggests one of two things — that either pop music in 1976 was a lot more inclusive or that the drugs were just that good.
It’s now impossible to envision Redbone back on “SNL.”
His last appearance on the show was in 1983. The next week, Duran Duran was the musical guest.
He never returned, but it’s not like he’s waiting around for an invitation.
“Is it still on?” he deadpanned.
Redbone has made a career out of singing songs from the turn of the century.
The last one.
We’re talking ragtime, folk-jazz and the blues.
Can you say cult figure?
If it seemed kinda weird in the ’70s, it’s flat-out strange now — a Tin Pan Alley man in an iTunes world.
“Most people,” he confessed, “don’t have a frame of reference for it.”
Redbone — if that’s his real name — doesn’t seem to be the least bit concerned with having hits, getting on the radio, making small-talk with Ellen or Jay, or generally being a musical celebrity in the 21st century.
He hates rock music.
“How loud do you have to hear something?” he said. “Volume is only good when it’s presented in its natural way.”
He hates pop music.
“It doesn’t do anything for me,” he said. “It’s hard to fathom sometimes. All I know is what I like and that’s what I concentrate on doing. Perhaps there are a few diehards who still see it my way.”
Thanks to the Web though, his concert crowds are “not any older now than they used to be,” he said.
In fact, a guy like Redbone would seem to be custom-fit for the Web — after all, where else are you going to hear music like this anymore?
But he likes it and he doesn’t like it.
“It’s all thrown into the same cement mixer,” he said. “It’s a diverse grab bag of consumerism, and I’m wondering if the sentimentality has disappeared along the way by creating a hoarding mentality.”
Unbelievably, Redbone was signed to Warner Bros. Records back when he first surfaced in 1975, and even had a Top 40 album (1977’s “Double Time”).
He still makes records (he has his own label) and plans to make another, he said, “sometime in the next hundred years.”
But if Leon Redbone never made a red cent, you get the feeling he’d probably be OK with that, so long as he goes to his grave knowing he never once disrespected the memories of Irving Berlin, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton.
“All I ever was interested in was making the song live again,” he said. “Apparently, I was unsuccessful.”
Unsuccessful, he said, because people have always been more interested in him than the songs.
“I’m here to sing a song,” Redbone said, “not to tell you about my life. “It’s the song that lives, not the person.”
Bob Dylan once told Rolling Stone that if he had a record label, Redbone would’ve been his first artist.
“The songs sing themselves,” Redbone insists.
But don’t call him retro.
“It’s the only lifestyle I have,” he said.
How to go
Who: Leon Redbone
When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16
Where: Kuss Auditorium, Clark State Performing Arts Center, 300 S. Fountain Ave., Springfield
Tickets: $25 adults, $20 seniors, $15 students; visit pac.clarkstate.edu or call (937) 328-3874 to order.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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