Upper West Sider Wins Emmy for Sound Mixing on Saturday Night Live

By Carol Tannenhauser

“Congratulations,” said a man in City Diner at West 90th Street and Broadway, as he reached over the partition to shake Josiah Gluck’s hand.

Word travels fast on the Upper West Side, which Gluck likens to a dorf, meaning “village” in German. So, he wasn’t surprised when his friend from synagogue shook his hand or when West Side Rag contacted him the day after he won an Emmy last week for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series or Special, “SNL 50th Anniversary Show.”

Gluck is one of two people who handled all of the live music mixing for the broadcast. “I am part of a large team of other mixers. 12 of us each won an Emmy for our collective efforts,” he said.

His dog-walking buddy tipped us off about the award. It’s Gluck’s second Emmy. He has worked at Saturday Night Live as a freelancer for going on 33 years; his first Emmy was for SNL’s 40th Anniversary Show.

There is no question that working at SNL is perceived by some as the epitome of cool. Gluck tells the story of an experience during a lawyer’s examination when he was being considered for jury duty.

“The lawyer asked, ‘What do you do?’ and when I said I was a sound engineer for SNL, you could hear the chairs scraping as the whole place turned around and craned their necks to look at me.”

The Rag also asked Gluck what he does: What is “sound mixing”? How did he get into it and reach the pinnacle of success? And most compelling, what’s it like to work at SNL?

Here are some excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity and length.

WSR: Our tipster told us that you were born and raised on the Upper West Side and have lived here most of your life.

Gluck: Well, the interesting thing is that I have a twin brother, and I’m raising my own twins on the Upper West Side. Coincidentally, we live on the same block and side of the street where I spent the first two years of my life. I’m right back where I started, like a John Irving novel.

WSR: What was it like growing up on the UWS in the 1960s and 70s?

Gluck: My parents were both academics. They met as graduate students at Columbia at V&T Pizza. I always say, the pope and the godfather would have to wait for a table at V&T if we came in, because they’d seat us first. That’s how often we would go.

You could walk around with your parents, go shopping, and always know if you went into Lichtman’s Bakery or Cake Masters, you’d get a little danish or something. I went to the movies at the Olympia, Riverside, Riviera, and the Metro. The first time I saw “A Hard Day’s Night” was at the Metro, but then it was the Midtown.

In the 1970s, New York was somewhat of a wild western town. So we weren’t partying or hanging out with friends and whatnot. After school, you came home. You were just always on your guard.

WSR: Did you ever wish you lived in the suburbs?

Gluck: Oh, yeah, all the time.

After high school at Collegiate, Gluck went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he majored in art history and humanities. Then, following a lifelong interest in technology – “record players, TV sets, film projectors, tape recorders” – he went to work at various recording studios and record labels. “By the time I got to SNL, I’d already spent 10 or 11 years in studios doing other audio work,” he said. One connection led to another, and, in 1989, a former boss he’d kept in touch with called him and said, “I need someone at SNL.” 

WSR: What’s it like working at SNL?

Gluck: It’s fun. It’s challenging. It’s arduous. The hours can be really rough. And, let me put it this way: When you’re working on a feature film or episodic television, there are people who handle dialogue, people who handle sound effects, people who handle music. All of that is prepared in advance, edited, premixed, maybe, then it’s all put together by one or two mixers. What we do on Saturday Night Live is the same thing, but it’s all happening live. There’s no going back and saying, well, let’s fix this and let’s fix that. 

The show is run like a tight ship. People always ask me, “Is there a lot of ad libbing?” The answer is no. Why not? Well, you have a line, then this person has a line, and you have a line following that. When you say your line, there’s a music cue or a lighting change or a special effect happens or someone else comes through the door. If you screw that up, it’s akin to those videos you see of the Tour de France when some poor schnook goes down on his bike and everyone else piles up behind him.

Everything is so interconnected. That’s the part of this that I love, where you can sort of stand back, turn around, look at the timeline, and say, I guess I’ve had some sort of a career. And this is year 51 for SNL. You can look at some early shows and think, 51 years? I don’t  know how they got through that first season. 

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.