Copious Notes

Jerry Seinfeld was the life of The Jay Leno Show's opening night party. Photo by Justin Lubin | NBC.

Almost half-way through the first episode of The Jay Leno Show, Jerry Seinfeld sat down and cracked a joke about how in the 1990s, when Seinfeld went off the air, people actually retired. But now, in the Brett Favre ’00s, people retire, take a three-day weekend and come back.

It didn’t feel quite like a compliment.

After all, though Favre had a good first game as a Minnesota Viking yesterday, he hasn’t exactly come out of retirement and won Super Bowls.

And really, the initial episode of The Jay Leno Show felt more like the product of a three-day weekend than a three-month break. At half time of Sunday Night Football, Leno joked that NBC was throwing a big Hail Mary pass with his new prime time comedy/variety/talk show that will run at 10 p.m. five-nights a week.

Even if it fails to achieve, Law & Order- or ER-like ratings, the Leno show reportedly could be a success because a whole week of the show costs less than an hour of a scripted drama.

But the debut episode felt like a pass that went through the receiver’s hands and fell to the ground. And despite all the chatter about this being different from The Tonight Show, Leno’s gig until May, the only things that seemed to differentiate The Jay Leno Show were changing the order of some Tonight Show staples and taking away Leno’s desk.

The show opened with a title sequence that looked like something out of the first few years of Saturday Night Live. Then Leno emerged on a set that looked smaller than his old Tonight Show digs — or Conan O’Brien’s new Tonight Show digs, for that matter — though it is reportedly a bigger studio.

Leno came out and delivered a mildly amusing, topical monologue which led into two taped bits. In the big spotlight piece, Hangover actor Dan Finnerty sang to a car wash customer who seemed as uncomfortable experiencing this as it was to watch it.

Seinfeld finally sparked the show to life, including a short Oprah Winfrey interview in which he asked all the questions before a faux flummoxed Leno.

The most compelling moment of the show wasn’t humor, but actually Kanye West coming out to discuss his classless hijacking of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech on Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards. Leno clearly hit a nerve with West by asking what his late mother would have thought of his behavior. Then West joined Jay-Z and Rhianna for a solid performance of Run This Town.

But Leno’s first show was far from solid — a routine Tonight Show at best. Of course, Leno’s Tonight Show is proof you can’t count the man with the anvil chin out early. He struggled early, only to dominate his time slot for most of his 17-year late night run.

But there, he was facing news and other talk shows. At 10, he’ll contend with scripted dramas and other standard network fare. And it’s first night out, The Jay Leno Show was a not ready for prime time player.

Note: 35-minutes later, on The Tonight Show, O’Brien welcomed viewers to NBC’s “night of a thousand monologues,” and proceeded to deliver a much funnier one than Leno’s, covering many of the same topics.

Some other views:

• Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall.
• Atlanta Constitution’s Rodney Ho.
• Ed Bark of Uncle Barky’s Bytes.
• Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times.
• Time Magazine’s James Poniewozik. (Interesting here that several commenters seem to be people who never stayed awake for the musical guests on The Tonight Show.)

The Hold Steady are keyboardist Franz Nicolay, guitarist Tad Kubler, drummer Bobby Drake, bassist Galen Polivka and frontman Craig Finn. Photo by Judson Baker.

While my main musical beats here at the HL and LexGo are classical and Christian pop, which I weighed in on last week, I try to listen to most everything I can get my ears to. So, before the year is done, I thought I’d share my fave mainstream pop album and single of the year:

Favorite album: The Hold Steady, Stay Positive

It feels somewhat appropriate to say my favorite album of the year was The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive, because the sentiments of both the band’s name and the album title are balms for the lousy year that was 2008. But I would love this album, even if it came out in the midst of a bull market, because literate and honest songwriting is timeless.

The song that sells this album to me is Lord, I’m Discouraged. I’ve heard plenty of songs from the perspective of a guy trying to “save” a girl, particularly in Christian rock, and plenty of confessional songs to God, but rarely this real. Singer Craig Finn comes into the cathedral to talk about a girl who used to come out dancing, used to sing in the choir, but now stays in a run down house for “days at a time.” That’s the first two-and-half minutes, then he subtly lays out the seriousness of the situation.

She keeps insisting

The sutures and bruises

Are none of my business

She says that she’s sick

But she won’t get specific . . .

This guy from the northside comes down to visit

His visits, they only take five or six minutes

That blows into Tad Kubler’s cathartic all-over-the neck guitar solo that leads into a bridge where Finn apologizes for questioning the Almighty’s wisdom and pleads, “I mostly pray she don’t die.”

Most of the album isn’t that harrowing, but it is that real, in a Spingsteen-esque tradition of building compelling characters in three-to-five minutes. Stay Positive is also a lot of fun, in its wit and even in the pure power-chord rock of its title tune. Finn bellows:

there’s gonna come a time when the true scene leaders

forget where they differ and get big picture

I know it’s not what Finn is talking about, but maybe there’s a cure for what ails us in there.

Also catching my ears:

TV on the Radio, Dear Science — A sonic journey that shows true growth in one of our best bands.

Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak — I really didn’t think I could stand a whole album of Auto-Tune, but the effect frames an arresting memoir of the isolation of fame.

Favorite single: Estelle, featuring Kanye West, American Boy

Estelle and Kanye West.

And somehow it feels appropriate to have fun in singles land, which this Trans-Atlantic collaboration certainly was. It bops along on a little three-note riff with Estelle showing off a range of her vocal skills and Kanye offering a pair of fun raps about Estelle’s native England.

It’s also a fun reminder of some of the United States’ most storied locales such as Broadway and L.A. and has that infectious spirit of young romance — O.K., romance among two people people who can afford to kick it across two continents. Estelle and Kanye gave us pure escapism.

Also catching my ears:

MGMT, Time to Pretend — Speaking of escapism, an irreverant look at the (ahem!) possibilities of a life of fame and fortune.

Fleet Foxes, White Winter Hymnal — I’m still not sure what you would classify this little chorus as, but it is as hypnotic as anything I’ve heard since The Dream Academy.

Walter Tunis is, of course, the pop music authority at the HL and LexGo. Make sure to check out his year-end Top 10.

Kanye West at a Dec. 12 performance in New York's Madison Square Garden. Copyrighted AP photo by Evan Agostoni.

For decades, I have been a big fan of Saturday Night Live musical guests. It is a premier spotlight of exposure for artists, whether they are new or already chart toppers. I can recall performances by the likes of Sting (in the midst of the early days of the Gulf War), U2 (in a special it’s-about-time performance in 2004), and even Power Station (the only live performance on record with Robert Palmer) that were as riveting as the comedy was hilarious.

In years when I haven’t been paying as much attention to the pop charts, SNL has been where I discovered Fall Out Boy, Arcade Fire and others.

And all that has created a Fall 2008 mystery for me: What’s with the lame performances on SNL this season?

No one’s knocked my socks off, and several have let me down, particularly Coldplay and Kanye West.

Coldplay.

Coldplay was shockingly bad, especially since I’ve seen them be so good on shows like Austin City Limits. I am not part of the legion of Coldplay haters, and for the most part, I liked the band’s summer release, Viva La Vida. With all that in mind, I was geared up for another great SNL performance when they played Oct. 26. And then, Chris Martin hit the stage bouncing around like a jumping bean and doing something that looked like faux martial arts — maybe they were real moves, I dunno. Not only was Martin’s routine during Viva La Vida’s title track annoying, it was killing his performance. Before he hit the first chorus, he was out of breath. And the whole set with the timpanis out front and string players apparently being broadcast from the 1950s onto a little onstage TV was just bizarre.

Even more bizzare was whatever happened to Kanye last Saturday, performing Love Lockdown. The man was flat-out flat, in a way that had me and my wife and daughter wondering what was up: Was the Auto-Tune effect, the Cher-like vocal processing program West uses throughout his new album, messing him up live? Was his monitor throwing him off? Was his band pitched too low? Did he have a cold? Can he really just not sing? The problems and questions persisted into his next number, Heartless.

Each number looked great, with Kanye performing in front of large video screens that, at times, turned him into a lunging, posing silhouette. But it sounded awful and certainly didn’t do justice to 808s and Heartbreaks, West’s new album that really establishes him as a bona fide artist and is easily his best effort since his debut, 2004’s The College Dropout.

“At least we know he’s not lip-syncing,” my 11-year-old said, recalling Ashlee Simpson’s SNL debacle.

The thing is, neither Kanye or Coldplay are Ashlee Simpson. They are established stars — I’d say superstar in Kanye’s case. They’ve played Saturday Night Live before. So how did they show up and lay such colossal eggs?

Coldplay’s debacle prompted several chats I’ve had with friends about whether the pop charts are being filled with people who can’t hack it live. I don’t know. Love or hate it, American Idol shows there’s still a premium on live performances, and reigning champ David Cook may be the most satisfying SNL musical guest this fall. There are still plenty of current acts, such as the aforementioned Fall Out Boy and Arcade Fire, who are great live.

These unfortunate performances should just remind performers that key word in the show’s title is “Live,” and if they’re going to go on, that’s how they need to bring it.