On December 19, 1985, classical pianist Horacio Gutierrez slammed his hand in a car door, so he wasn’t able to perform on that evening’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Being that it was the last night of taping before Christmas break, host Johnny Carson decided to go off the playbook and ask a member of the audience to come on stage and play the piano they had set up for Gutierrez. Because, after all, the people in the audience came to see some piano music.
“How many of you in the audience play the piano? Just applaud. Come on. Don’t be embarrassed now,” Carson asked the nervous audience. Carson chose two people to come on stage and play; the first was Mary Jo Mennella, who had studied piano for 8 years, and in case Menella “lays a bomb,” Carson called up David Tolley, a young recent college graduate from The Ohio State who moved to Los Angeles to be a composer.
David Tolley wasn’t dressed for national TV
Tolley clearly didn’t know he was going to be on TV because he was wearing a grey Nike T-Shirt, tucked into jeans, and flip-flops. He had just come to the taping after spending a day at the beach.
Mennella gave a delightful performance of “Silver Bells,” perfect for the holiday season, and even started to ham it up by leaning back and smiling as she got more comfortable; then it was time for Tolley to take the piano bench.
“Obviously, you know this is not set up because obviously David would not dress this way if he knew he was going to be on a big television show in front of a national audience,” Carson joked. Tolley played an amazing version of “Memories” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, which was incredibly popular at the time. Tolley played with Liberace-esque flair, doing dramatic runs, pointing at the keys, and smiling like the cat that ate the canary.
Tolley says that he was relaxed on stage because he didn’t have time to realize what was happening. “I wasn’t nervous because I didn’t have time to think about what was really happening. Honestly, I would have been terrified if I knew 28 million people were watching every note I played, lol,” Tolley said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything
Here’s the entire performance, with Menella and Tolley’s performances.
The performance gave Tolley instant notoriety
Tolley was so poised and performed so well that people thought it was staged. “In fact, Grant Tinker was CEO of NBC at the time, and I heard he called Johnny up the next day and said ‘Hey, that was an incredible stint planting that pianist in the audience,’” Tolley told Reddit. “Johnny explained to him that they took a last-minute gamble and it worked.”
The performance received such a huge response from the audience that Tolley was invited to perform a second time, two weeks later. This time, he chose to play “Amazing Grace.”
After Tolley’s appearances on The Tonight Show, he performed at The White House for President Reagan. He would go on to have a fantastic career, working as a music professor at Delaware State University, touring Europe with Jon Anderson of Yes, writing 7 musicals, and writing original music for Disneyland Paris. Tolley believes that the moment on The Tonight Show definitely helped his career, but he would have been doing something in music regardless. “As far as what my life would be without that event, very interesting, not really sure,” he told Reddit. “I think I would always being doing music and art though, because I love to create things.”
