Live Schmive
Here's a gargantuan excerpt from Live From New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. I think it's the entire first chapter.

An excerpt from the excerpt:

ALBERT BROOKS:

I always said one thing to these guys - and they didn't take my advice, and in this case I'm sure it's good they didn't—but I said, "This 'live' stuff, it's absolutely meaningless to me. I grew up on the West Coast. I didn't see anything live. It was always tape-delayed. If Ed Sullivan takes his pants down, I'm not going to see him." To me Johnny Carson was as live as you want to get. If you were bad, you were bad; nobody did it over again. But you did it earlier. You didn't have to stay up until eleven-thirty. So what happens when you stay up until eleven-thirty? Guys like Belushi do nine gallons of coke to make it up that late. I know from being a stand-up, the late show, the midnight show, was the one I hated the most. So my suggestion was, tape a show without stopping tape, do one at four, do one at six-thirty, put the best of those two together, and show me that at eleven-thirty. I'm in California; nothing's live.