No one thought they would win, not even the people who signed their paychecks. And who could blame them? After all, the time was early 1976, and for its televised entertainment, most of America was happy to watch Laverne & Shirley, a sitcom about blue-collar working girls, or The Six Million Dollar Man, a fantasy about a half-man, half-robot who made strange creaking sounds when he ran. The idea that those viewers would click to a channel for a show spotted with gags about pot, sadism, and Yippies seemed as silly as, well, a half-man, half-robot.

Even when that show, NBC’s Saturday Night, was nominated for five Emmys, it was hard to imagine its winning … [De stakk av med prisen for fire av de fem kategoriene de var nomert i (for writing, directing, supporting actor in a variety show (Chevy Chase), and, most remarkable of all, outstanding comedy-variety or music series)].

Rock & roll was never the land of the most popular kids in class, the big men on campus, the jocks. Whether it was the people who made it or the people who absorbed it, it was home to the geeks, outsiders, and misfits, and it had been that way from the start about two decades earlier. In that regard, the Saturday Night cast really were akin to rock stars.

[Om Ramones]

“The general opinion is that they were incapable of making a record,” says Craig Leon, then an A& R rep at Sire Records. “And even if they did, no one would want to know about it.”

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In 1976, America went rock & roll.