Hard To Say If Sinead O’Connor Ever Found What She Was Looking For
I never met the late Sinead O’Connor, who died Wednesday at the too-young age of 56. Like millions of others I thought she had a terrific voice and you had to admire how she considered speaking out more important than a traditionally successful career.
At the same time, she said she felt her career became more successful, or more consistent with what she really wanted, after she ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 — as a protest against child abuse in the Catholic Church — and declared, “Fight the real enemy.”
She went through four marriages, converted to Islam and told Oprah, among others, that she suffered from mental illness, which she would eventually explain was really post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) triggered by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother and others as a child.
Against that backdrop, you hoped for O’Connor what you hoped for anyone who faced traumatic challenges: that amidst all that, there were moments of contentment and peace.
The closest I got to seeing any clues came on Oct. 16, 1992, the day O’Connor appeared at the Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square Garden.
The Twitter-length history of that occasion is that O’Connor was booed off the stage, presumably because of the Pope picture incident 13 days earlier.
I was in the Garden that night and I always had a slightly different, somewhat more complicated view of how it went down.
First, though, it’s worth recounting a bit of an interview O’Connor gave that morning to New York radio station WHTZ hosts Ross Brittain and Gary Bryan.
She started by saying “Dylan is god,” which she had said before, and that her favorite Dylan albums were the likes of Infidels and Slow Train Coming, which came later in his career and were more overtly spiritual.
“When I met him,” she said, “I almost cried.”
She brushed past questions about her status as a pop star, which had been secured two years earlier when her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” became a №1 hit. She “abhors the pursuit of money,” she said, because “what makes us happy is self-knowledge.”
Asked about Prince, with whom she had an edgy relationship after she recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” without involving him, she said, “Prince never wrote a song for me.”
Asked about Madonna, who had recently suggested the Pope picture riff was ill-conceived, she said, “I love her as an artist, and I respect her.”
Most of the lengthy interview, though, was not about music, but about religion (“The New Testament is a forgery”), the Catholic Church (“The power of the Catholic Church comes from fear — children must be abused for them to have power”) and the oppression of Ireland (“St. Patrick was a murder and a liar”).
Gary Bryan, looking back on the interview a few hours later, said O’Connor seemed nervous and shy. “Her hands at one point were shaking,” he said. He also called her honest and forthright, “not, like so many people, afraid to speak up for what she believes.”
“Because I’m passionate doesn’t mean I’m not a happy person,” O’Connor said during the interview. “One of the best ways to heal is humor.”
There wasn’t much of that on display a few hours later when she took the stage at the Garden to sing the Dylan song she had rehearsed at soundcheck, “I Believe In You.”
After Kris Kristofferson introduced her, she took the stage with what, to my ears, was a round of applause amid the general rumbling of expectation that had been rising from the crowd all night as each new star appeared.
O’Connor — not alone — apparently heard something else. She looked like she was about to sing, then paused and stepped back from the microphone. The crowd noise shifted a little to murmuring at that point, and she continued to stand stock still. The band started to play, twice, and she waved them to stop.
It was only at that point, to my ears, that the crowd turned a little impatient, like “okay, start singing.” I heard nothing to suggest there was any mass sentiment for her to do anything else, like leave.
It was now also hard not to catch a parallel with what happened years earlier when Dylan himself faced scattered but audible audience pushback for switching from acoustic to electric.
Dylan’s response then was to tell his band to “play loud,” after which he tore into songs that 55 years still explode like freight trains blasting out of a tunnel.
O’Connor took a different tack, absorbing what she heard as hostility for more than a minute and then belting out a truncated a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War,” which would become the evening’s only non-Dylan composition.
What exactly was she thinking? Who knows? Our only clue is that when Kristofferson came out to whisper “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” she quickly replied, “I’m not down,” which would seem to suggest she didn’t think Kristofferson understood any more than the voices she was hearing in the crowd.
Then she walked off-stage, embracing Kristofferson on the way and leaving the crowd — again to my ears — mostly wondering what just happened. Then the show went on.
Some time later O’Connor said she thought Dylan should have come out and told the crowd to let her sing. Some artists might have done that, though anyone who thought that would be Dylan’s style wasn’t paying attention.
My sense was that she could have sung. No one was shouting her down. She just, whatever the reason, chose not to.
I’m quite sure that this one day or moment, however striking, didn’t define Sinead O’Connor’s life. But it was an interesting snapshot that probably should be accompanied by something else she said to Bryan and Brittain that morning.
“I hope in 30–40 years,” she said, “to be living on a farm with my grandchildren.”
