PLUME: What roles did you start out with?
NELSON: I don’t think I had any roles. Background stuff… Letters, right hands.
PLUME: Richard started at the same time, didn’t he?
NELSON: No, Richard came in about a year or two later. At least a year later. I think I did Herbert Birdsfoot that same year. I think the Count came along in ’72 or ’73, but I’m not positive about that. It was Norman Stiles, one of the writers, idea. All the writers used to come up and watch the show, because they’d get a lot of ideas watching us work. That’s the way the two-headed monster came about… It was Richard and I clowning around. Norman told me he was writing this piece with this new character who’s called the Count… He’s a vampire, but not a real vampire… He just has a jones for numbers. He obsessed with counting things. So I went, “Oh, cool,” and I went to Jim and said, “You know, Norman’s writing this new character called the Count.” Jim said, “Let me hear it.” So I went (in Count voice), “Yes, I would love to do it!” and Jim said, “Yes, you can do it.”
PLUME: So it was that easy…
NELSON: Even up through the years, we would all try out for stuff… “Let me hear you do that character.” We wouldn’t always do that, but if it was a major piece of work, we wanted to make sure everything would work together.
PLUME: And the opposite would happen, where he’d just assign characters, right?
NELSON: Often he would just say, “We’re doing this piece and I’d like you to do this.” It wasn’t always one way or always another way. It’s like Jim wouldn’t always stick with one music guy… He liked to use different ones. Joe Raposo would write something, and then for the next show he might go to Jeff Moss. He did that so the music wouldn’t always sound the same.
PLUME: Now, were you always working on Sesame at this time, or were there side projects in-between?
NELSON: Throughout Sesame, and this gets us back to the adult things, Jim wanted to do an adult show… Something that would appeal to all age groups. We did specials… One was a Valentine’s special with Mia Farrow. That was where we tried to mold something. Then we did something called Sex and Violence. That one had even more of the form of what would become The Muppet Show. Jim started taking that around to people, and he showed it to everybody. Eventually, CBS said, “We’re willing to give you half the money.” So Jim had to find the other half somewhere. Somehow, he got it to Lew Grade. When Lew saw it, he loved it. He said, “I’ll put up the other part of the money, provided you do it in my facility.” That’ll do two things,” he said, “That’ll get your people busy, and it’ll keep my people busy.” Lew Grade was great at that… The art of taking money out of one pocket, giving it to you, then taking it back with the other hand and putting it in the other pocket. That’s big business, man. Thank God for him. He was one of the true showman. He and his brother.
PLUME: Very British and reserved…
NELSON: They used to be hoofers, he and his brother. So we started The Muppet Show in ’76. We had gone to England before to do other things… We had done a Herb Albert special, a couple of Julie Andrews shows. We did the Julie Andrews show, then we did Julie Andrews visits Sesame Street.” They built the street over there. Back to The Muppet Show… In the first season, I did the first two episodes, and we did those in February or March, just to see if everything would work out. Then they went back in the summer to start the rest of the season. I went to Jim and I said, “You know, I want to do the show. I want to work on the show.” My daughter had cystic fibrosis, and I spent summers with her. Those were good growth periods for her. Winters are very hard on CF children. Infections in the lung were one of the things she had to deal with in her short life. I said, “I want to go on, I want to work on the show, but I really think I have to spend this time with Christine.” And he said, “All right.” As a consequence, I had to give up characters like Statler, whom I had done in Sex and Violence and one other show…
PLUME: The Valentine Special?
NELSON: Possibly. I haven’t seen the Valentine show since it originally aired. The only thing I remember really well is me as Thog dancing with Mia singing “Real Live Girl.” I remember we did Statler and Waldorf in an old gentlemen’s club. Very stodgy, and there was a big clock in the back going “Tick… Tock…” At some point in the bit, it stopped, and they looked at each other wondering if it was them or the clock. They remain great characters, and Richard went on to do a superb, wonderful job with Statler. So as a consequence, upon returning to England, I became a utility man. I did a lot of the one-off characters. I had some pretty good, fun characters to play. I loved playing Uncle Deadly…
PLUME: And Floyd carried through…
NELSON: Floyd was mine through the whole thing. I loved Floyd. I loved Pops, the doorman, who came along in the later years. He was a funny, cantankerous old guy, which is what I can be very easily without trying too hard. Just ask my wife. The Muppet Show was a great experience. If you can imagine working with the people you admired, who were or were becoming star performers. If, for example, you had told me when I was a kid going to Saturday matinees to see Roy Rogers… If some seer had walked up to me and said, “Son, someday you will work with that man,.” I would have thought he was the craziest man in the world. And it happened that I not only worked with him, I sang a song with him.
PLUME: I wanted to ask you, what was the transition like to the short-lived Saturday Night Live gig?
NELSON: That was short-lived mainly because we were starting to do The Muppet Show. We started doing SNL, then we left and went to England.
PLUME: So it wasn’t that you were pushed out of the show…
NELSON: No, although they would have pushed us out if they could have. I think the only reason we were on the show – because I don’t think Lorne Michaels ever really wanted us on the show — was probably because we were part of the deal. We all had the same manager.
PLUME: The skits still hold up. They weren’t unfunny…
NELSON: No, I think the problem was that those guys would get together at the beginning of the week. They had a big board where they would tack their stuff up and start working out routines, and somebody would be assigned to write for us.
PLUME: So it was a chore…
NELSON: That wasn’t the worst part. I think that would have been all right. If it had just been that. But what would happen was that then on Thursday, they would bring it over to Muppets – the writers and maybe a director – and we would rewrite it. Then they would try another writer. We went through just about every writer on the show, and I think it became a chore for them. I don’t think it was a happy marriage from either point of view, except I loved it. One of my favorite moments was with Scred and Lily Tomlin singing “I Got You Babe.” And the reason that worked out okay was because I said, “Well, I’m going to go there from the beginning.” I went over on Monday and went to all the meetings and rehearsals, and was there for the whole week and worked on it and reworked it. I went through a little bit of what they went through.
PLUME: Did they seem to appreciate it?
NELSON: I think they did. John Belushi always hated the puppets. He just hated them with a passion. He would have been just as happy if we had fallen in a big hole. I think part of it was that it wasn’t part of what he thought the show was… And it wasn’t. We were doing skits and they were trying to make them topical, and they did. They did one revolving around marital aids, which I performed with the girl who played Peuta while Jim and Frank were doing something in England. They were away. So the writers wrote this thing and we did it. Jane Henson was not happy. Jane said, “But that’s not Muppets,” and I said, “This is a different show. This is real adult comedy. This isn’t kids, and if kids are staying up and watching this, they’re in trouble already.”
Again, the main problem was that we were never really a part of the show. We were like a tacked on thing that they resented. I guess rightly so, but we only did twelve. One of the shows that really worked well was one that Chevy wrote. It was one where he came into the storage room and all the characters were in a box.
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