Late Night with Seth Meyers’ 8G Band is getting laid off due to budget cuts

Late Night with Seth Meyers‘ 8G Band, who has been the late night talk show’s house band since the start, are being laid off due to budget cuts at NBC/Universal. Vulture reports they play their final show at some point this summer before the show’s 12th season premiere in September.

The 8G Band was put together by Fred Armisen in 2014 who was the show’s original drummer and bandleader and featured lineup of indie rock vets, including Girls Against Boys‘ Eli Janney, Les Savy Fav‘s Seth Jabour and Syd Butler, and frequently guitarist Marnie Stern. (When Fred’s career got too busy, the band would bring in guest drummers which over the years include Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, Guns N’ Roses’ Matt Sorum, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam’s Matt Cameron, and more.) In an interview with Vulture, Janney said that they band will still make music for Late Night, they just won’t be in the studio playing live.

“I know that we’ll have Fred drumming with us for the last week, and there’ll be a little bit of a celebration, I’m sure,” Janney said. “There’s been a bunch of ideas floated, but nothing has been written in stone yet. It’s also just a sad day for Late Night, because it’s been going for over 40 years now. But, sadly, it’s the reality of broadcast and a shrinking market — streaming eating into this, and YouTube eating into that. Streaming is not making money, either. So budgets everywhere have been cut and cut and cut. I liken it to a Spotify moment in music, where suddenly it’s like, Nobody wants to pay for music. Music gets devalued.”

Janney added, he has nothing but good feelings about the show. “My God, it couldn’t have been better: a union gig where you get paid to create music every day. It was a little bit like winning the lottery. I thought I was going to get fired every week, so to make it ten and a half years is pretty amazing.”

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