On 22nd November 1980 The Magic Band gave a storming performance of Ashtray Heart and Hot Head in front of a studio audience for Saturday Night Live. Here you can download excellent quality mp3s of the tunes, kindly sent to me by Hammy, and a video of the complete performance kindly sent to me by Benjamin Horrendous.

• Hot Head - 2,198K (audio mp3)
• Ashtray Heart - 2,241K (audio mp3)
• Complete performance - 8,501K (video, needs RealPlayer)

According to Doug Stacey, who maintains an excellent Beefheart Video List:

"The person yelling "Shit!" at the end of the SNL performance was Radames Pera, the once child actor playing "Grasshopper" in the TV show "Kung Fu." He was disgusted with the Beefheart performance. It was evidently his first exposure to Don's music."

Robert Williams, the Magic Band drummer, commented on this heckling:

"He said, 'Shit!' as in 'that sucks!'

"After the show we went to an after show party at a bar in Manhatten with the cast including Malcom MacDowell. Charles Rocket introduced me to Radames and we became friends. I gave him the Beefheart sales pitch and managed to convert him into a fan.

"Two days later we played a show at the Beacon Theatre and when the union guys cut our show short, Radames got on the microphone and tried to rile the audience with something like, "Hey! We're not going to take this, are we?!"

"He later moved to LA from New York and we hung out a lot. When he was doing the Kung Fu TV show his mother was getting the checks and spent every penny on herself. Sometime around the late 80's he married a woman named Marsha and moved up to Portland. I haven't heard from him since. Gee, this sounds like a high school book report."

Many thanks to Robert for this story.

Apologies for the lack of full band shots here - every capture I tried to do blurred everyone but Don - divine intervention, perhaps?

Many thanks to Hammy for the mp3s, and to Benjamin Horrendous for sending the videos which provided these pictures and the digitised file.