Who knew?

[RichardWarner]

SNL's Cheri Oteri worked at A&M. Here's the relevant info from the article in The Hollywood Reporter:

KATHY GRIFFIN Cheri Oteri was a secretary at A&M Records. Cheri would get us free CDs, and we thought that was the coolest thing. Like, we were thinking, "Why would you want to be on Saturday Night Livewhen you could be at A&M Records?"

CHERI OTERI (1994-95) Bands on SNL my first year, like Blues Traveler, would be like, "Aren't you that girl from the office?"

 

[jfiedler17]

What makes this extra-funny is that SNL had a much-higher-than-normal percentage of then-A&M acts on the show during her first season!
SNL's historically never had all that many then-A&M-roster acts on the show, believe it or not. (The list is a bit longer if you include acts that were previously signed to A&M but were with another label by the time they appeared on SNL.) During the show's first five (and generally most fondly remembered) years, only Billy Preston, Joan Armatrading, Joe Cocker, and Rita Coolidge (who wasn't even promoting anything at the time and merely performed two songs she'd never recorded) could claim to have appeared as MG on the show and represented the label. (Preston, though, could boast of being the show's very first musical guest, which is a cool little distinction to have on your resume!)
During the next five seasons, only Joe Jackson, Squeeze, and Bryan Adams [who, oddly enough, for as long of a span of hits as he had, only ever appeared on the show once (in '84, to promote Reckless)] made it onto the show. And most of the few (less than ten!) then-A&M acts that made it onto the show during the next ten seasons are really less-than-obvious ones, like E.G. Daily, The Neville Brothers, Al Green (who was still working exclusively in the gospel vein at the time), and John Hiatt; the only A&M acts who appeared on the show from '86 through '94 who were actually appearing on the strength of (and promoting) an actual Top 40 hit were Sting, Suzanne Vega, and Simple Minds. That's it. (Some of A&M's biggest artists at the time, i.e. Janet Jackson, UB40, etc., did eventually make it onto the show, but not until after their stints with A&M were over.)
Go figure. Weird, huh? For all the countless big names A&M has had on its roster over the years and all the hit singles it racked up from the mid-'70s through the mid-'90s, it seems rather shocking that they could be so under-represented on the show, but they were.

But in Oteri's first year on the show - the show's 21st season, by which time they were historically averaging less than one A&M musical guest a year - they had not one but four then-A&M-roster acts (Blues Traveler, Gin Blossoms, Sting, and Soundgarden) all appear as musical guests, so that had to be awfully funny to come back into contact with so many people so soon who remembered her from the A&M offices!