Tom Davis

A wasted life?

Today people want to see cash. In the sixties and seventies, we wanted to see God. And one way to do this was through drugs.

Now I'm not going to lionize illegal substances. Hell, I was never much of a partaker. But although drugs can be utilized to soothe one's pain, back in the heyday of the counterculture, they were about expanding your horizons, gaining insight, and that's what Tom Davis did...he conceived of the Coneheads while high on LSD, on Easter Island.

And he was there at the creation of Mr. Mainway.

Don't know who that is you say? You never saw the famous "Bag-O'" series?

Once upon a time, Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi were the two biggest stars in the land. All the press has been given to Chevy Chase, but Danny and John were the heart of the show. They were team players who winked at the audience, in the case of Aykroyd, without even breaking character. They were the ones who were testing limits. They were our heroes.

John Belushi doing Joe Cocker was bigger than the man himself. And when John and Danny formed the Blues Brothers, they got the best hands in the land to back them up. Back then there was no short term memory. No Internet. People had already forgotten how great Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn and their compatriots were. Now we only yearn for the chance to see those Stax guys together again, an impossibility.

To tell you the truth, I didn't always like Franken & Davis when they were on the air. But unlike the all time "Jeopardy" champion, I never forgot them.

I watched the first SNL on a whim. Because it was Saturday night and I was home alone and had nothing better to do.

And then I talked about it the complete following week, to anybody I came in contact with. It was like a band. It was like today, but in this case the word I was spreading was about something fantastic, not driven by PR and Facebook likes, but sheer unadulterated quality.

A lot has been written how Norman Lear reinvented television.

And his shows are iconic. But not as important as SNL. Because that's when we took over television. Yes, this was when the old men knew better, when we couldn't be trusted with the controls, when sponsors were wary and they didn't play rock music at sporting events. But with one baby inroad, the whole paradigm shifted. SNL might have aired at 11:30 PM, but soon its influence was felt throughout the day, on every outlet.

And Tom Davis was there at the beginning. He was about charting the cultural zeitgeist, testing the limits, making himself laugh so everybody else would too. He and Al Franken were about the content, not the money. Hell, they shared one $350 a week salary. Today, everybody wants to pay no dues and be paid upfront. Quality is not as important as one's station on the economic totem pole. Today every conversation is trumped by money. You can't say an artist sucks if he sells out. Can't say anybody with money is an idiot. But back then we were playing by different rules. Back then, who you were was much more important than what you owned, how you looked. Call it the anti-Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian era. One started in the sixties that continued to run through the seventies, until MTV co-opted the youth culture and we all lived together under one unthinking monolithic roof until today.

I want to tell you something. You can never be as rich as the bankers, as the hedge funders. But ideas cost nothing. One good idea, delineated clearly and executed exquisitely, has more power than any amount of money.

We knew that then.

We need to learn that again.

"Tom Davis Dies at 59; ‘SNL’ Writer and Comedy Partner to a Future Senator": http://nyti.ms/OcWpqO

"Tom Davis, ‘SNL’ writer and comedy partner of Al Franken, dies at 59": http://wapo.st/MMA2pV


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