I’m sorry to hear about the band. Of course you nailed the situation–the profits just don’t justify those salaries.
I loved being a regular viewer of at least the monologues–my cable system used to have a feature called Start Over that let me see both the NBC and CBS show starts. When they took that away (the jerks) I never got into the habit of looking for the one I’d missed elsewhere. Then I got into a medical situation that meant I had to be up quite early for appointments, and couldn’t switch back and forth between staying up late some nights and getting to sleep early other nights.
Such are the vicissitudes of age. And to look at the situation writ large, the aging of the US population might have something to do, along with Internet and Cutting the Cable trends, with the lowered profitability of late-night talk.
Fred was supposed to be the bandleader, the guy Seth bantered with, like Jon Baptiste. He was a pro drummer before SNL and Seth was big friends with him. But then he got his own deals and disappeared for months at a time, so they switched to rotating drummers.
I agree that his segments all bombed and was glad that he left.