11/02/2025
FEAR fan John Belushi pave the way to get the band on SNL, hoping to make up for wasting FEAR’s time on a song they’d recorded for the film Neighbors, which had been rejected by the producers. In order to make their national television debut convincingly punk, Belushi brought down a crowd of punk kids from Washington DC to come up for the show and slam dance in front of the stage, including Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, John Brannon of Negative Approach, and Harley Flanagan and John Joseph, who’d later go on to form The Cro-Mags. “He wanted 15 to 20 people,” Lee Ving explained, “but they stopped in Baltimore and Philly before they got to New York and arrived with 35, 40 people.” The SNL director initially refused to allow the moshpit to go on during the show but was later convinced by Belushi to leave it in.
The band rocked through songs “Beef Bologna” and “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones” while their loyal fans went nuts on the studio’s floor. Suddenly, frenzied mosh pits were taken out of the dark, sweaty clubs and shoved directly onto TV screens across America.
The punk fans became unhinged, damaging production equipment, and grabbing a microphone and screaming expletives on live television. The latter offense was the final straw, as the network cut away to a prerecorded Eddie Murphy sketch. “The main NBC guy was at home watching with his wife and freaked out, calling the station saying, ‘Go to stock footage. Cut, cut, cut!” Ving recalled.
Reports of studio damages varied wildly: when a reporter suggested to Ving that figures being thrown around were around $200,000, the singer balked, claiming that the damages were at least twice that (when in fact, the band actually only had to pay around $40 in labor penalties). It all only served to make FEAR more notorious.
