Banned means a formal,
documented ban. Possible
shadowban means never invited back after an incident, with no
record of a formal ban. The word
“possible” carries the speculation, so the entries below stick to
what the sources say happened. Whether an act came back, as musical
guest or host, is checked against the site’s episode list, and a
later cameo is not a return, although an entry says so when there
was one.
No act here is labelled Banned. In NBC’s 2025 documentary
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, Lorne Michaels
said, “I’ll read it sometimes in the Post, ‘So and so’s banned
for life,’” and
denied that the show had ever banned an act:
“We’ve never banned anyone. We’re way too crass and opportunistic.
If something’s hot, we’re going to go for it and have it on.” This
site has found no record of a formal ban that says otherwise.
Each account of what happened links to its source: news coverage from
the time, a book adapted in the press, or an interview with someone
who was there. Whether an act came back comes from the site’s own
episode records and links to how this site counts. A story that
could not be sourced is not here.
The punk band was on the Halloween show because of John
Belushi. He had asked Fear to write a song for his film
Neighbors, and when the film’s producers refused to use it,
he arranged for the band to be booked
on Saturday Night Live, Kory Grow writes in
Rolling Stone. Punks including Belushi, Ian MacKaye of Minor
Threat, and Harley Flanagan and John Joseph of the Cro-Mags moshed
and stormed the stage as the band played “Let’s Have a War.”
Singer Lee Ving told Rolling Stone in 2015 that Belushi
had invited friends from Washington, D.C., and they
“arrived with 35, 45 people.”
“The real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” he
said. As the song ended, one of the kids grabbed the microphone and
screamed an obscenity, and, Ving said, the main NBC man, watching
at home, called in to say “Go to stock footage. Cut, cut, cut.”
“They swore that night they’d never rebroadcast our footage,” Ving
said. “As a result, I have become one of the esteemed members of
the permanently banned.” The show’s producers have since allowed the
footage to air in truncated form, Grow writes.
Bob Mehr tells the story in Trouble Boys, his history of
the band, in an excerpt published by Rolling Stone. The
Minneapolis band
got the slot at the last minute
when the Pointer Sisters had to cancel. Their soundman smuggled
alcohol into the studio, and when host Harry Dean Stanton looked in,
they offered him a drink.
“He slammed the door behind him and proceeded to gulp,” Paul
Westerberg recalled. During “Bastards of Young,” Westerberg
shouted an obscenity at guitarist Bob Stinson,
just off mic, and it went out live.
Lorne Michaels then
confronted co-manager Russ Rieger in the hall,
Mehr writes: “Your band will never perform on television again!” That night Bob
Stinson wrecked his hotel room, and when the $1,100 bill reached
Michaels, Mehr writes, he
threatened to ban not just the band but any Warner Bros. act.
The damages were paid, the label apologized, and Michaels was
soothed. “He was willing to let it go because of Mo,” said the
label’s Steven Baker, meaning Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin. The
band did not appear on American television for another three
years, Mehr writes.
Bob Mehr, “Inside the Replacements’ Disastrous ‘Saturday Night Live’ Debut,”
Rolling Stone, February 12, 2016,
adapted from Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements (Da Capo Press)
O’Connor had been musical guest once before, in September 1990,
a few months after she
pulled out of Andrew Dice Clay’s episode.
On October 3, 1992, singing Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella, she
tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II
and urged viewers to “fight the real enemy.” The act was
done without NBC’s prior knowledge or approval,
the Los Angeles Times reported, and Roman Catholic
organizations and hundreds of viewers protested. Two weeks later
she was, in the paper’s words, “in effect, booed off the stage” at
a televised Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden.
Daniel Glass, a record executive who had promoted her first album at
Chrysalis and was working with her again in 1992, was in the studio. “Everybody
froze at SNL,” he
told The Guardian
in 2023. “No one stopped it, no one knew what to do.” Of what came
after, he said: “She was totally cancelled.”
Daniel Glass, as told to Laura Snapes, “‘No one knew what to do’: when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up the pope’s photo on TV – the inside story,”
The Guardian, July 27, 2023
Tyler Jenke, “Lorne Michaels Claims ‘SNL’ Has ‘Never Banned’ Any Musical Guests,”
Billboard, January 28, 2025
DJ Muggs lit a joint on stage during the group’s second song.
Rapper Sen Dog told the Village Voice in 2014 that the show
had given them a green room and said,
“Do whatever you want in here, just don’t light up out of here,”
and that it was not just the show telling Muggs not to: “It was
everyone: our record label, our management, our friends.” Before the
second song, he said, they agreed not to light anything, and he was
surprised when Muggs did. Asked whether the show had reached out
since, he said: “No sir, not at all.”
The group has long described itself as banned. “I kind of like the
fact that we’re banned,” Sen Dog said in 2022, and B-Real said he
did not “mind the ban aspect of it.” But an SNL insider
told TheWrap
they did not believe there was a ban on any act, Cypress Hill
included.
The host that night was Steve Forbes, who had recently run for the
Republican presidential nomination. Guitarist Tom Morello told the
story in NBC’s 2025 music documentary, as
Loudwire reported.
At rehearsal the band hung upside-down American flags on their amps
and were asked not to, because of Forbes. On the night their roadies
put the flags back up, and the show’s crew wrestled them off “with
seven seconds to go before we go live.” The band played “Bulls on
Parade.”
Then, Morello said, the show told them it was running long and their
second number, “Bullet in the Head,” was cut. Bassist Tim Commerford
tore up one of the flags, knotted it into a ball and threw it into
Forbes’s dressing room, where Forbes’s family was; it came apart and
hurt no one. The Secret Service locked the band in their room, and
they were escorted out of the building. They were not in the
goodnights at the end of the show. “I still went to the after
party,” Morello said.