(Watching 👉🏻 this is more important than reading 👇🏻)
The star-studded cast were still stepping through their sound checks. The crowd wouldn’t be in Madison Square Garden for hours. They’d come to fete Bob Dylan for the contrived occasion of his “30 years as a recording artist.” At some point someone would have pointed out his voice sounded the clarion call of a generation. They always do. With wry humor, Neil Young called the event a “Bobfest.”
The moment was fraught for Sinéad O’Connor.
Two weeks prior, on Saturday Night Live, the Irish darling of rock and roll had torn up a picture of the Pope. It was a PR disaster. By the following Saturday, the SNL cast got busy washing their hands of it and literally taping the picture back together. Joe Pesci declared he would have slapped her if it had been “his show.”
Pesci, a crudely funny man, was crudely funny enough to release the pressure of O…
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