Saturday Night Live kicked off its fourth season in 1978 with one of many present's most unconventional emcees to this point, your entire Rolling Stones band, pulling double responsibility as host and musical visitor. However what transpired after the episode was simply as stunning because the internet hosting alternative.

Within the new guide Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Evening Dwell (out at the moment), creator Susan Morrison outlines SNL co-creator Lorne Michaels being requested a favor by pal and Stones frontman Mick Jagger: assist maintain Keith Richards from a possible life sentence over a drug cost in Canada. Michaels agreed to journey to his hometown of Toronto to take the stand on behalf of the guitarist who'd fronted the sketch present earlier that month.

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In an excerpt shared with Leisure Weekly, Morrison takes readers behind-the-scenes of Michaels' inside battle over worrying he could need to lie below oath to guard Richards, whose substance abuse the SNL boss had witnessed firsthand. It additionally particulars the wild antics of the "Gimme Shelter" rockers' internet hosting gig, together with a community censor being unable to get Jagger to placed on underwear beneath his famously tight trousers.

Learn an unique excerpt from Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Evening Dwell beneath.

On a Sunday in October 1978, Michaels discovered himself again residence in Toronto, looking for a tailor store that was open. He had flown in after a bumpy episode of SNL hosted by Frank Zappa. Mick Jagger had organized a personal airplane; he’d requested Michaels to return to Toronto to testify as a personality witness in Keith Richards’s heroin trial. The 12 months earlier than, Canadian Mounties had busted Richards as he nodded out within the presidential suite of Toronto’s Harbour Citadel Hilton; they’d discovered twenty-­two grams of heroin, sufficient to cost Richards with intent to visitors, a criminal offense that might carry a life sentence. When Michaels landed, he went into producer mode, serving to to get Richards out of his pirate getup and right into a tan three-­piece swimsuit, in order that on Monday he would look presentable when the matter of Her Majesty the Queen, and Keith Richards commenced.

Richards arrived on the courthouse by way of a again entrance, wobbly in his new duds, which he wore with white socks and a loud tie. The Canadian prosecutor wished a troublesome sentence (the minimal was seven years), arguing that the Rolling Stones’ lyrics promoted drug use. Richards’s lawyer portrayed his shopper as a troubled artist, evaluating him to Vincent van Gogh and Sylvia Plath. Within the courtroom, he quoted from a biography of Baudelaire, sustaining that true artwork comes from “items of the shattered self.”

Michaels, a neighborhood boy made good, was a great character witness. The week earlier than, in New York, he’d been jumpy; he was happy to be requested to do a favor for his shut pal Mick, however what if he needed to perjure himself? He knew that Richards wasn’t clear. (In a again room on the courthouse, Richards took a fast snort from a bag of coke he had in his pocket.) Seated within the Toronto courtroom, Michaels mounted on the portrait of the queen trying down at him and Richards. He stated to himself, “I’m Canadian. I’m not going to lie.”

He didn’t need to. When he took the stand, he was requested solely concerning the defendant’s inventive function within the Stones; he responded that Richards was “the catalyst of the band.” He stated that he selected the Rolling Stones over Muhammad Ali to host his present’s fourth-­ season opener, as a result of the Stones had been “the primary rock and roll band on this planet.” In a call that stunned many jurists, Richards obtained off with a suspended sentence and an order to play a profit live performance for the blind.

“Canadians wouldn’t need to put an actual artist in jail,” Michaels stated later. Whether or not the end result was on account of his testimony, or to the intercession of a blind teenage superfan who had made a personal attraction to the choose, is unimaginable to know. Inside hours of the decision, members of the press corps had been making “blind justice” jokes.

Michaels got here to view the episode for instance of How Issues Work, versus what they seem like on the floor: he believes that the Mounties who arrested Richards weren’t within the resort that night time to make a bust, however to keep watch over Margaret Trudeau, the fifty-­seven-­year-­previous prime minister’s twenty-­eight-­year-­previous spouse, who was in one other resort room with Stones guitarist Ronnie Wooden. The bust occurred nearly by chance. He refers to that sort of bigger perspective as “having a large shot” on a scenario. Richards despatched Michaels a thank-­you notice, on stationery from a Jamaica resort.

Two weeks earlier than the trial, Richards had been on the RCA Constructing making ready to behave as host, with the remainder of the Stones, on SNL’s season premiere. A memo had circulated beforehand, about recruiting the viewers: “No subtle ‘Elaine’s’ higher east siders, no mothers and pops, no showbiz people, simply younger rock and roll followers.” The directive got here from the Stones. Like Michaels, the band wished to take care of its nonconformist cred, although its members had been verging on gentility. (Days earlier than the band confirmed up, Michaels arrived residence from a visit to Paris and ordered a lightning-­ quick sprucing up of the dressing rooms that the band would use; furnishings was cadged from govt workplaces everywhere in the constructing.) Ultimately, the priority a few glut of society varieties rattling their jewellery was misplaced.

Tickets had been so intently guarded and safety so tight that there have been empty seats simply earlier than air, and NBC pages scrambled to fill them. (Henry Kissinger had a secretary name to request tickets for his teen-age son, David; [Al] Franken occurred to select up the cellphone and defined to the previous secretary of state that he “might have had the tickets if he hadn’t bombed Cambodia.”) The band appeared in sketches—­ Jagger interviewed by Aykroyd as Tom Snyder, and Charlie Watts and Wooden as prospects within the Olympia Cafe “cheeseburger cheeseburger” sketch. Richards was scheduled to be in two items, however his components had been minimize when, in rehearsal, he didn’t seem to know the place he was. The censor had waged a failed marketing campaign to get the costume individuals to ask Jagger to put on underpants beneath his tight, stretchy orange trousers. (The male solid members wanted prodding on this regard, too. Franne Lee, whose employees helped with fast costume adjustments, as soon as posted an indication studying ALL CAST MEMBERS MUST WEAR UNDERWEAR ON SATURDAY.) The censor didn’t have the foresight to request that Jagger chorus from licking Ron Wooden on the mouth in the course of the track “Respectable.”

From LORNE by Susan Morrison. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Morrison. Reprinted by association with Random Home, an imprint of Random Home, a division of Penguin Random Home LLC. All rights reserved.

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