Hes more like Jim Carey with his over-the-top orgasmic facial expressions. Very irritating.

What's with the hatin' on GE? Great guitarist. Seems like a great guy as well. Hell thats from the 80's. Wouldn't be surprised if some majik powder is responsible for all the jumping around. That was the great T-Bone Wolk on bass.

Always liked G.E. Smith. Great player and music director. Much prefer him to Paul Schaeffer, just as an example (nothing wrong with Paul Schaeffer either).

G.E. is/was a fan and supporter of Col. Bruce Hampton so can't be all that bad. Bruce was a special guest of the house band for an SNL episode in the early 1990s, but only for the bumper music to/from commercial breaks. Might've been only one commercial break, now that I think about it. I believe it may've been the episode where Sinead O'Connor was the featured musical guest and insulted Catholics everywhere. It was during the time when Bruce/ARU was signed to Capricorn/Warner, and G.E. had them on the emergency back-up list in case one of the featured artists had to cancel at the last minute, although nothing ever came of it for ARU being on SNL. Big digression.

There is a terrific interview of G.E. on Archive of American Television where he talks about his gig and a lot of the musical guests, including this snippet on the EVH sit-in as well as Clapton's 1994 appearance on his first blues tour:

Full interview of G.E. Smith here: http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/ge-smith

I appreciate GE Smith's musical abilities and his role as the musical director on SNL all those years, I just think some of his mannerisms and facial expressions are over the top.

As far as famous musicians sitting in with the house band, just for to/from commercials, I recall seeing Johnny Winter do that on SNL one time, he's hard to miss sitting back there.

Yeah, I don't really disagree about the dork-factor, but I also think it was partly due to the times and also his role as a tv bandleader. Don't recall seeing him do it so much when he is in the background such as with Hall & Oats or Dylan or Roger Waters. I certainly could be wrong about that though. Also, as the 'Nator notes, there was lots of majik powder around both generally in that time as well as specifically at SNL.

The special guests were fun. David Gilmour. Richie Sambora are a couple. I'm sure more than a small handful of others over the 10 years G.E. was running things there musically.

Click on the youtbe link a posted earlier, and then look at the "similar" or "up next" vids and there are lots of snippets of G.E. talking about Keef, Bowie, Dylan, and others. Some fun stuff on there.

Say what you will about his mannerisms, but GE Smith is not only a very good player, but also a very diverse one as well. I remember watching that episode of SNL and really dug the jam with EVH.

In the interview posted above he mentions how they basically wrote "Stompin 8H" from a riff that EVH had written and was playing while they hung out in the music room while Valerie Bertinelli was on set rehearsing her lines for the show....Eddie was not even supposed to be on the show but came along with Val and simply wandered into the music room and GE convinced him to sit in on that weeks episode. It sounds like they wrote it out in no time, rehearsed it, and performed it live later that week.

The story about Clapton appearing as a musical guest and using GE Smith's Fender amps is pretty cool too. In the interview G.E. gives major props to both EVH and Clapton.

Here's a link to check out...not sure if this is the same as above. This one is G.E. actually being interviewed and you can watch and hear him share he story about EVH and Eric Clapton...

http://www.vhlinks.com/vbforums/threads/62059-G-E-Smith-talking-about-EVH-on-SNL

[Edited on 3/2/2016 by Chain]

[Edited on 3/2/2016 by Chain]

To me, this performance is more notes than music.