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Is there actually a lot of spontaneity in the show like that Steve Martin example?
Yeah, well, as you saw with Sinead O'Connor — there was a spontaneous moment. There is a lot, there arc moments that are fortuitous. List year Dana Carvey had a piece called "Massive Head Wound Harry" where a dog ate a bandage off his head the dog was only supposed to lick the bandage but started to unravel it and Carvcy had to struggle to keep his wig on]. Those kinds of things happen, you know.
How do you feel about moments like Elvis Costello changing a song in midsong?
I remember exactly where I was at the time, I was sitting at home base, here, with Dan Aykroyd. Costello had, of course, picked his own two songs to do, so it wasn't as if we'd forced him. And all he did was another song from the same record. I guess when he started to perform, he just decided that he didn't want to do that song. And the only reason we rehearse them is so that we can set shots and lighting so that they look decent. But we never coerce people, we don't say, you must do your hit, or whatever. But I remember Danny and I sitting there and he looked at me and I said, "I think we're being hijacked here." And my attitude was there's nothing I can do about this. You know, he didn't burst into some right- or left-wing advocacy, he didn't sing "kill all the niggers" or "kill all the Jews," he just sang another song from his album. There have been incidents where people have behaved badly on the show. I don't consider his behavior bad.
What do you consider bad — Sinead?
Sinead I thought was sort of the wrong place for it, I thought her behavior was inappropriate. Because it was difficult to do two comedy sketches after it, and also it was dishonest because she didn't tell us she was going to do it, she told us she was going to be holding up a picture of a war refugee child from Bosnia, which she'd done at dress rehearsal. And even that was really stretching it because her album was just a big-band classics album. So we had 42 musicians, strings, all these things which she'd required, which we don't normally do for someone. And suddenly she wanted to sing a Marley tune a cappella. This is an album which features "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" twice. So you keep walking further down the road with her. It's not a hot album. I have a real respect for her as an artist, I think she's a great singer. And then the final moment was, of course, stunning. I know that what she does plays differently in Ireland than it does in America. I know she has what she sees as very valid reasons for doing it, and I have to admire her for doing the exact same thing at the Dylan concert. So no one can question that there's anything cynical about what she did. I find at the end of the day wc treated it as if things were normal. We asked her to come up for the "good nights," we didn't shun her. We were sort of shocked, the way you would be shocked at a houseguest pissing on a flower arrangement in the dining room.
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