Browsing in the biography section of my local library, I came upon two somewhat bald-faced books published in 2021 by shaved-headed women: Cicely Tyson and Sinéad O'Connor. Both books address marijuana.
Tyson, who rose from youthful poverty to a brilliant career as a model and actress, chose an arresting portrait with a shaved head taken by photographer Lord Snowdon in the early 1970’s for the cover of her memoir, Just As I Am. Raised with a strong influence by her church, Tyson married Miles Davis, whose drug use was beyond her reckoning.
"Whatever he smoked or shot up, he usually reeked of it. I knew the scent of marijuana, but other than that, I couldn't tell the difference between coke or heroin or any other drug," she wrote. "He tried to cover it with cologne (he loved his collection), but I could still smell it. And when I did, I stayed as far away from him as I could, because I knew I wouldn't be having talking to Miles anymore. I'd be having a conversation with the person he became when a substance had taken him over. The drugs. The wandering eye. The outbursts. I dealt with it then by not engaging it. I suppose it was my way of reconciling the Miles I knew, the poor soul bearing a hurt-filled past, with the Miles he became in quelling his pain."
Later Tyson helped him clean up from drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes, but Davis, who she describes as being consistently furious over racism, ultimately succumbed to them. According to Tyson, he altered his autobiography to be critical of her after she refused to reunite with him. She published her book two days before her death at age 96.
O'Connor, who suffered physical and sexual abuse growing up in Ireland, chose a shaved-head hairstyle partly as protection against predation. Growing up in a different time than Tyson, she used marijuana and tried other drugs, which she now denounces.
In the forward to her book Rememberings she claims she can't necessarily remember all the details of her life because she wasn't "present" for them; she blames this in part on weed, writing, "I was actually present before my first album came out. And then I went somewhere else inside myself. And I began to smoke weed. I never finally stopped until mid-2020. So, yeah, I ain't been quite here."
However, the book is quite detailed, so somehow she remembered much of her life. She adds, "Making music is hard to write about. I was present then. In the place deep inside myself that only I know." And she writes about how much of her music was made while she was on weed.
Rememberings contains heartbreaking stories from the singer's youth, including taking her disturbed and abusive mother to Lourdes, hoping for a miracle cure. Born on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception with the middle name Bernadette, O'Connor made God her father figure after her own father abandoned his family. Later, she transferred her idolatry to Bob Dylan, whose song "You've Got to Serve Somebody" pushed her to activism.
Just after the infamous 1992 incident where she tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live to protest child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, she writes that she checked into the Chelsea Hotel in NYC where she was given a tab of LSD by Dee Dee Ramone. She heads to the park, where:
I find myself smiling at strangers. Acid it is like that. Turns you back into a child, so you're open to people the way you were when you were small.... After that night, I don't do acid again until I'm 33.
That time, not feeling the effects of a tab, she scarfs a whole bag full and overdoses.
I didn't know until this night how deep my relationship to music is. Cry-laughing (my favorite feeling in the world) and fascinated by the stars. We go to my house and light the fire. A fire looks like it's made of maggots when you're on acid. It's the weirdest thing. Makes me wonder if everything is secretly made of maggots..... At one point a bunch of flowers on my piano vanishes before my eyes and all I see is the word monster. But as soon as I realize that's just some bullshit in my mind, flowers reappear and start dancing. So I learn to control my mind on acid for better than I could without it.
About other drugs, she writes:
I did ecstasy a few times. Hated it. Crying the next day for anyone's mother. Curled up in a fetal position.
Same with coke. Twice I did it. Hated it. Next day crying like a cartoon, the tears not falling down my face but flying straight, horizontally. Nothing nice about it. Depressed and $20 per hour. Not worth it at all. Took my manners.
Heroin I smoked once. It was disgusting. Never did it again.
She then tried speed in a Dublin "nuthouse"...(I get to call it in that house because I'm a nut)....
In the locked ward where they put you if you're suicidal, there's more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan's dressing room....So yeah I'm on speed in there for one week, probably one of the happiest weeks of my life....It made me want to write. I wish I had some now, in fact. But I vowed never to take it again because I loved it so much.
"Alcohol and me have never been friends," she writes. "I am allergic. I just vomit. I must be the only Irish person in the world who doesn't drink."
I found all these drugs very easy to abandon, for which I am lucky.
It's weed I wasn't sober on. On weed, I was always working. And I loved it. Because I could stay in my own world when the world outside me didn't make sense. Most musicians love weed because it turns up the music inside you and helps you cope with all the hanging in around doing nothing, it being the case that weed makes doing nothing interesting. Hotels, dressing rooms, buses, airports, working two and a half hours of the day, the rest spent rest relentlessly waiting.
Yes, weed I've liked too much.
Of the era when she recorded her CD "Universal Mother," of which she says she is the most proud, along with her remarkable albums "Gospel Oak" and "Faith and Courage," she wrote:
Now, I must admit I've never been so stoned in my life as I was in Amsterdam with Tim Simenon, who produced the tracks "Fire on Babylon," "Famine," and "Thank You for Hearing Me." Jesus, we smoked a lot of weed. I don't know how I managed to stay up on two feet, never mind sing.
In 2005, O'Connor traveled to Jamaica to record "Throw Down Your Arms" with Sly and Robbie (Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare) "and the most incredible band on earth.... We recorded at Tuff Gong, and again, we made great music and smoked so much weed." Touring with the band, she writes, "I also learned an important lesson: never leave your weed in the dressing room when there's a band of Rastas there; it will be gone when you return."
In 2013, she penned an open letter to Miley Cyrus after the young singer said O'Connor's "Nothing Compares to U" video inspired her trashy "Wrecking Ball" one. On her blog, she blamed the late-2011 split with her-then husband on what she described as "a bit of a wild ride" looking for marijuana on her wedding night, as she does not drink. After the street dealer she found handed her a bag of crack instead, her hubby freaked out.
In more recent years she gave up weed (on and off) and entered rehab, dealing with suicidal tendencies after having a hysterectomy. She even did a confessional video and subsequent show with Dr. Phil, thinking he was sent by God to help her. Let's hope the writing of her book will exorcize some of her demons. She reads the audiobook in her own voice.
UPDATE July 2023 - Weeks after I wrote this, the sad news that Sinéad has died at age 56 was announced by her family.
Many have posted the song "Sister Sinead" written by Kris Kristofferson, who comforted her onstage when she was booed at a Bob Dylan anniversary concert just after she'd appeared on SNL.
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