John Mulaney Had Phish In Seinfeld Costumes, John Cale & Maggie Rogers Discussing Dental Surgery

Whenever I watch Everybody's Live, John Mulaney's experimental Netflix talk show, as it's actually happening live, I'm like, "Damn, this is wild, I'm having fun!" Whenever I miss an episode and I have to write a blog post about it the next morning, I'm like, "What is happening?" When you have to scroll through an episode of Everybody's Live to look for music-related content, the entire experience feels even more surreal than it otherwise would. Last night's episode was a prime example because you get to a certain point, and you're like, "Wow, that really is John Cale and Maggie Rogers talking about dental surgery." And that really is all the members of Phish, in Seinfeld costumes.

Mulaney has a regular bit where he'll look through a telescope and see something crazy happening in someone else's window. On Wednesday night's episode, he found an apartment that looked exactly like the Seinfeld set -- presumably it was the Seinfeld set, which must be preserved somewhere. Trey Anastasio was dressed as Jerry, Mike Gordon as George, Jon Fishman as Elaine, and Page McConnell as Kramer. (I'm glad Mulaney narrated the entire thing because I do not know the names of Phish members.) Eerie Twin Peaks-ass keyboard drones played under the entire thing. Later on in the episode, Phish did more inexplicable Seinfeld bits, and the editors chopped it up into something mind-shredding. I don't know, man! It's a thing they put on TV!

John Cale, the Velvet Underground legend, and Maggie Rogers, the much-loved singer-songwriter, were the musical guests on last night's episode of Everybody's Live, and they got some time on Mulaney's couch before they got around to performing together. The episode's theme was this: "Can major surgery be fun?," and its other guests included Marc Maron, Molly Shannon, Ronny Chieng, and anesthesiologist Dr. Emily Methangkool. Cale, being 83 years old, naturally has plenty of medical history, and Rogers has apparently had some recent dental issues involving errant microphones, so they clearly had some fun getting into their histories. There was also a brief moment where Mulaney seemed to be fishing, trying to get Cale to tell him that he's a true avant-garde artist of the current day, and Cale did not bite. In a heartwarming moment, Mulaney also fanned out about Cale's viola scrapes on "The Black Angel's Death Song."

And then there was the performance. Near the end of the episode, Maggie Rogers accompanied John Cale on his very silly 2024 song "Shark-Shark," and it was cool as hell. It's just fun to hear those two yelling about sharks. For now, you'll have to pull up the Everybody's Live episode on Netflix to watch that whole performance, but here's a clip.

John Cale's album POPtical Illusion is out now on Domino.