John Mulaney Is Doing Whatever He Wants
I wrote about the music of "Everybody's Live with John Mulaney" and having the freedom to book whoever you want whenever you want
I love the supercuts of David Letterman asking if it’s their drums or they rent them. It always felt like a little nod that he liked the musical act. I also would do the same thing because I like drums. Letterman rarely fully fawned over acts, unless they did something really over the top like when the guy from The Orwells crawled around the stage and ended up sitting next to him in the chair. He liked when guys broke the rules a little, even if it was his show, because it was clear he didn’t like the rules much either.
Conan was always pretty open with his enthusiasm over certain artists, too. Seth Meyers always seemed like the guy I’d probably most like to share a car ride with thanks to his fondness for bands like The Hold Steady and PUP.
Now we’ve got John Mulaney hosting “Everybody’s Live” on Netflix, which is clearly using him and his show as a guinea pig to see if more live content is worth the squeeze. It probably is, and the whole streaming versus TV thing is just gonna get murkier.
Mulaney has used his show as a vehicle to book bands and artists he loves, even if they have names you can’t get past Standards & Practices or might not even have a new album, or might be two artists who aren’t even in the same band. He’s just doing whatever he wants, free from the shackles of cable or network TV. And part of that is he gets to nerd out over bands and artists he loves because there is no forced objectivity or relationship between the network and the label using each other for exposure or whatever.
So, I wanted to learn more about it, and I ended up talking to the music booker for “Everybody’s Live,” Kevin O’Donnell. O’Donnell has been friends with Mulaney for years, and they have a lot of musical interests in common. So when Mulaney got his talk show off the ground, he enlisted O’Donnell to book the acts.
Check out my interview with him for Paste, where we go into how Mulaney and his team pick the artists for the show, the freedom that comes with Netflix versus a network, putting together these fantasy-draft collaborations, who else is on his dream list of gets and, of course, who Richard Kind wants on the show.
You can read it here:
Behind the Music of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
It was pretty fun exploring how music is such an integral part of the American variety show tradition, and how Mulaney’s show is changing what that show looks and sounds like. I’m not here to be all “hooray Netflix!” but I am a fan of good comedians getting shows where they can showcase bands like Mannequin Pussy without having them have to censor their name, or get Kim Deal and Kim Gordon to dust off a song from the ‘90s they’ve never played live.
I’ve been trying to work on something larger about the crossover of comedy and music — not comedy music — but you’ll have to wait on that. In the meantime, please read my interview with Kevin O’Donnell.