The ideas, opinions, descriptions, and conclusions in this book are all mine. Although U2 spent endless hours listening to my theories, answering my questions, and explaining their work and their workings, there are lots of things in here that some or all the members of U2 will disagree with. That's okay. I'll stand behind it all. I am as pigheaded as any of them.

Those aristocrats who fall on the floor writhing and swallowing their tongues when writers put rock & roll into the same boat as high art, poetry, philosophy, and other university subjects should get out now. You won't like it here. But if you want to understand U2, you have to understand how they draw from the highbrow stuff as well as the dumb things down in rock & roll's designated station.

And it might save a fistfight or two if I spell this out: when I talk about U2's relationship with Bill Clinton or Salman Rushdie or Wim Wenders or other cultural bigshots, it is not to suggest that U2 influenced those people; it is to show how those people influenced U2.

All right, that should shake off the whiners. Let's go.

I. BREZHNEV'S BED

buzzing the reichstag/ bono faces eviction without his pants/ how U2 got into this mess/ the hats vs. the haircuts/ "one"/ channel surfing through the new world order

bono wakes up in Brezhnev's bed. He can't remember where he is. When he opens his eyes the daylight shocks his dilated brain. He tries to organize his thoughts. He is in Brezhnev's bed, in East Berlin, in the communist diplomatic guest house rented to him for a good price because the communist diplomats have fled the country. In fact, the country has fled after them. He may have gone to bed in a Soviet satellite state, but he's waking in a reunited Germany. The Cold War is over! The Wall has fallen' It's safe for Bono to go back to sleep.

He thought he heard somebody downstairs, but he must have been dreaming. He is here alone. Bono pulls himself upright, his latitude out of whack from last night's celebrating. U2 arrived in Berlin yesterday, to seek inspiration and renewal at the celebration of the end of the world they grew up in. The Berlin Wall was raised as the four members of U2 were being born. Seeing it come down shook their assumptions about the way things were and would always be. Bono told the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen that this was the great moment to leap into. Now was the time to go to Berlin and begin making music for the new world! They arrived on the last flight into East Germany before East Germany ceased to exist. They had the whole sky to themselves. The British pilot was so giddy with historical moment that he announced they would buzz Berlin, fly down the Strasse des Juni where the revelers were gathering, and swing over the broken wall on which the free people of eastern Europe were dancing. "On your left you see the Brandenburg Gate," the pilot announced with pip-pip and tally-ho delight as he

[2]

swung his airship around. Why not? They were the only plane in the sky, the final flight to East Berlin before East Berlin was sucked into history.

As soon as they got their feet on the ground, U2 rushed to join the festivities. They leaped into the first parade they saw and waited for the contact high of liberation to intoxicate them. It was a long wait. These marchers were grim, dragging themselves along wearing dour faces and holding placards. Bono tried to muster some good Irish parading gusto, to no avail. He whispered to Adam, "These Germans really don't know how to party." Maybe, U2 thought, we've misjudged the sentiment here. Maybe the proper reaction to the end of a half-century of oppression is not celebration for what is newly won but grief for all that can never be regained. U2 looked at each other and looked at the bitter marchers and tried to fit in as they tramped along to the Wall. It was only when they got there and saw the joy everyone else was exhibiting compared with the morbidity of their company that U2 realized they were marching in an antiunification demonstration. They had hooked up with a phalanx of angry old communists, gathering one last time to show solidarity with the workers of the world and protest the fall of their Evil Empire.

"Oh, this will make a great headline," Bono said. "U2 arrives in

west berlin TO PROTEST THE PULLING DOWN OF THE wall."

In the West U2 wandered familiar streets filled with people walking as if through their dreams. The citizens of the East-not just East Germany but the newly freed Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia- were still anxious, afraid that this was only a brief opening, a momentary aberration, and that if they did not find refuge quickly they would be dragged back when the communists regained their senses. For almost thirty years West Berlin had been held up to the East as a sort of capitalist Disneyland, shining with unattainable promise just over the barbed wire and gun towers. It was not just a symbol of freedom, it was the closest thing the oppressed peoples had to Oz. Their belief in its magic was not stifled by their own leaders warning them to pay no attention to that world behind the iron curtain. But in the year since people from the East began moving West, first as a trickle through Hungary and Czechoslovakia and then in a flood right through the falling Wall, the free people of West Germany have become a little less tickled with the family reunion. As Easterners looked to share in the prosperity of the west, the Westerners began to fear being saddled with

[3]

the poverty of the East. Great to see you, Cousin, seems to be the prevailing sentiment. When are you leaving?

Now that U2 could walk back and forth from the East to the West, they realized that the sense of West Berlin as illuminated was not an illusion. The lights were literally brighter. The streetlamps of the East were dull, dirty yellow. The streetlights of the West were golden and white, and of higher wattage. The West had better generators. Bono was especially struck by the glow of ultraviolet lights in the windows of Eastern buildings so crowded together that little sunlight got through. Bono had associated the purple glow of UV lighting with nightclubs and raves, but to the East Germans it represented an attempt to grow flowers in the shadows.

By the sides of the streets in the West were the abandoned, burned-out carcasses of Trabants, the comically cheap automobiles manufac-tured in East Germany. Refugees had driven the Trabants as far as they'd go, and then left them where they died to continue their migra-tions on foot. Big trucks full of East German currency were rolling up to West Berlin banks to exchange bales of useless money for deutsche marks to pay the soldiers of the disintegrating communist army. The spirit of Berlin felt less rapturous, more mundane, than U2 had thought it would. They passed the one subway terminal where heavily patrolled trains had been allowed to move from East to West, and where East Germans trying to sneak aboard had been killed. They took note of its name: Zoo Station.

At 7 in the morning exhaustion dropped on their history-happy heads and U2 were led to the accommodations Dennis Sheehan, their road manager, had arranged. For Bono it was this private house where Soviet officials had lodged, and the special comfort of Brezhnev's bed.

So this morning Bono, full of emotion and alcohol, should be sleep-ing like Lenin but something has awakened him. He crawls out of bed hoping for a glass of water and, in his hungover state, wanders down into the basement. While standing there, naked from the waist down, dressed only in a dirty T-shirt, he thinks he hears low voices and the rattling of doorknobs. Someone is trying to get into the house. He creeps up the stairs and sees that the intruders are inside already! Bono is suddenly aware, like Adam in the Garden, that he has no pants on and his cock is hanging out. As the intruders enter the hallway where Bono is crouching he tries to cover his nuts with one hand while with the

[4]

other waving and in his hoarse voice declaring, "This is my house! You do not belong here!"

Bono is unprepared for the response he gets from the ringleader, an elderly German man, who shouts back, "This is not your house! This is my house! You get out!" Bono, bent over with his balls in his hand, surveys the gang of home invaders, a middle-aged to elderly family of six filing in cautiously behind the firm father, who seems prepared to jump on Bono and wrestle him to the floor. Bono is disoriented. He feels like a kid caught trespassing by his elders, not a wealthy international figure whose accommodations have been intruded upon. "This is my house!" the old man repeats. And as Bono stumbles to try to find his German and sort our the confusion, it becomes apparent that the old walrus is not misdirected. This is their house. They were visiting the western side of town in 1961 when the Wall went up. Now they arc home, and they want their house back.

And so it comes to pass that Bono and the rest of U2 end up checking into a particularly ugly East Berlin hotel (no rooms in the West!) while bellhops disconnect the KGB security cameras and unscrew the bedposts to check for Stasi bugs. There are prostitutes in the lobby trying to organize some currency exchanges. Bono knows well the un-spoken meaning of the doleful looks he gets from Adam, Edge, and Larry. He's been getting them since they started their schoolboy band fourteen years ago. The looks say, "Another of your great ideas, Bono, another inspiration."

It is the autumn of 1990 and U2 has spent the year out of the public eye. Playing an emotional concert at home in Dublin on the last night of the 1980s, Bono told the audience, "We won't see you for a while, we have to go away and dream it all up again." It was widely speculated in the press that this meant U2 was breaking up. In fact it just meant that the band knew that the musical line they had been following had run out of track. On tour in Australia in the autumn of '89 Larry had told Bono that if this is what it meant for U2 to be superstars, he didn't like it. They were turning into the world's most expensive jukebox. They became so bored playing U2's greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward-and it didn't seem to make any difference.

It sure didn't help that the critics had turned against U2 with neck-snapping speed. Their album U2 Rattle and Hum-conceived as a throw-

[5]

away, bargain-priced grab bag of live tracks and rootsy originals to accompany their live concert film-had been savaged in the press as a pretentious attempt to place U2 in the company of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, В. В. King, Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, and all the other musical seraphim the album celebrated. U2 claimed the record was meant to show that even they, the biggest band in the world, were still fans. That explanation struck critics as conceited too. U2 walked into the sucker punch with their chins stuck out and their hands in their pants. On an album dizzy with roots references, hero worship, and collaborations with rock legends, Bono was thoughtless enough to sing, "I don't believe in the sixties, in the golden age of pop/You glorify the past when the future dries up."

U2 jokes circulated in the music industry. "How many members of U2 does it take to change a lightbulb?" "Just one: Bono holds the lightbulb and the world revolves around him."

What stung more than the misunderstanding of their musical inten-tions was that so much of the criticism was personal. Since they began, U2 had sung about what was in their hearts and on their minds. In their music and in their public pronouncements, as in their personal lives, they were quick to share what they had just heard, just read, just figured out. They were by nature truth-tellers, and Bono was by nature a big mouth. The great thing about such openness was that fans who paid close attention to U2 really did know them, had a genuine connection to them. But in the last couple of years that was less than comforting, as it also meant that those who ridiculed the band were not just mocking the music, they were mocking the four people.

The more sensitive U2 became about being misunderstood, the more they tried to control how they presented themselves. I suggested to the Edge that maybe the band brought some of the accusations of self-seriousness on their own heads by maintaining such rigid control of their image. The film Rattle and Hum had been tightly supervised by U2, so if they came off as humorless and self-important, it was considered not the fault of the director, but of U2. In the same way, they were very selective about who got to interview them, and almost all the photos of the band available to the press were Anton Corbijn's moody, U2-controlled shots of stoic men standing stone-faced in deserts or snow.

I'm all for propaganda!" Edge grinned. "It is a fine line and you're going to get it wrong sometimes. I think we're aware that maybe that is

[6]

part of why we ended up being the caricature. A little bit. Rattle and Hum, the movie, was an example of that. We were criticized by some people for not revealing more. We actually made quite a conscious decision not to reveal more, because we didn't feel comfortable with it. It is a balance, because you have to give up so much more when you reveal all. It's like you no longer have a private life. But at the same time, if you don't reveal all, people don't really get the full picture. So it's a compromise. With Rattle and. Hum we just didn't want to reveal ourselves. My attitude was, 'What? Do you think we're crazy? Cameras in the dressing room? What do you think we are-stupid!'

"I love what we do, because we control it. Because we've set it up where we're comfortable with it. That's why we could do it. If it was done in a way where our private lives were an open book, I don't think I could be in the band. I didn't get into the band to become a celebrity. I got into the band because I wanted to play music and write songs and tour and do all that stuff. Some people might object to that but I say, 'Well, fuck you!' " He laughed. "It's my life and this is the way it works for me."

Lately Bono likes to quote Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask and he will tell you the truth." One of U2's assignments in Germany is to figure out if it's possible, ten years into their public lives, to construct masks that will allow them to say exactly what they are thinking in their songs while providing some sort of protection for their personal lives. They have realized, with the forehead-slapping regret of late bloomers, that the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin figured all this stuff out before they got famous; by adopting public personas they could establish some space between their on-duty and off-duty lives. U2 spent their first ten years keeping nothing for themselves. They won't screw that up again.

The band assembles at the Hansa recording studio not far from the Berlin Wall. The place was once a Nazi ballroom. In the mid-seventies it was the site of some groundbreaking work by David Bowie, who in collaboration with producer Brian Eno made a trilogy of albums. Low, Heroes, and Lodger, that stretched the conventions of rock & roll into the corners of European experimental music. U2 heard about the glory of those days when Eno was co-producing the U2 albums The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. On Heroes, Bowie found a grand metaphor in

[7]

Berlin's division. Bono cooked up the notion that by coming to Hansa now, U2 could tap into the spirit of reunification. It was a nice idea, but if ideas like that worked, English professors would be successful writers. Instead U2 discovers when they get into Hansa that the studio has deteriorated since Eno and Bowie left there twelve years before. There is constant talk of the area being condemned and the building knocked down, so no one has kept Hansa humming. The two producers, Dan Lanois and Flood, will have to import their own recording equipment.

But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that the four members of U2 cannot agree on the value of the new material that Bono and Edge play for Larry and Adam, or on the sense of the new direction in which Bono and Edge want to steer the band. Edge has been swim-ming in experimental music, noise rock, electronics, and alternative guitar sounds. He comes in lecturing his bandmates about Insekt, Nitzer Ebb, Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, and Front 242-stuff that sounds like walkie-talkies in washing machines.

Larry, the no-nonsense drummer, says he doesn't know any of those people. Well, Edge asks, what have you been listening to? Led Zeppelin, says Larry. Jimi Hendrix. Trying to figure out how other bands in U2's position did it and catching up on music he ignored during the postpunk era when U2 grew up.

Bono tries siding with Edge, talking about getting out of the seven-ties, raving about how the rappers have used high tech to make a core connection back to their souls, and saying that U2 should check out dance rhythms as the Manchester bands Stone Roses and Happy Mon-days do. That is too much for Adam, who spends more time in clubs and discos than the other three combined and who thinks Bono trying to be hip just shows how out of it he really is. Manchester is over. Adam's attitude is as it has always been: can we cut the bullshit and get to the music? But this time there doesn't seem to be any music to get to. This time it seems less like a band than a debating society.

A division is quickly established between the Hats, Edge and Bono, and the Haircuts, Larry and Adam. Lanois, who became almost a fifth number of U2 on Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree, is clearly leaning toward the Haircut position, which only makes Bono and Edge more defensive. Lanois's attitude is: You can only be what you are and we know what U2 is. Why try to pretend to be something else?

[8]

It has never been this hard for U2 before. The band members begin to consider that they really have reached the end of the line together, that Rattle and Hum was the start of a downhill slide they'd be best off halting before it goes any further. They have some demos they cut at a small Dublin studio in the late summer, but Larry and Adam don't think those songs are particularly good. Their attitude is: We tried our best to make something out of these in Dublin, now we've tried in Berlin; let's admit it's not happening. Bono keeps trying to make something out of a track called "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" that the others would as soon toss in the toilet. They have the outlines for songs called "Acrobat," "Real Thing," "Love Is Blindness" and "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World." Bono and Edge won't give up on one chorus-"It's alright, it's alright, it's alright/She moves in mysterious ways," even though Edge keeps changing all the music around it to try to find something worth making a song from.

Bono's attitude is that he and Edge may not have come back to the band as sharp as they should have, "but we are both a lot sharper than Larry and Adam!" Bono's wide-eyed raps about junk culture and dis-posable music are met with disinterest from Adam and impatience from Larry, who finally says, "What the fuck гае you talking about?" Larry says there's a simple problem here: "You haven't written any songs' Where are the songs?"

That really goes up Bono's ass sideways. When Bono and Edge started abandoning the U2 tradition of all four of them writing to-gether and brought in songs on their own, Larry was the first one to bitch that he and Adam weren't getting enough input, were being forced into a predetermined structure. But now that Bono's laying the burden on the four of them again, Larry wants the songs written for him. There's a fight brewing.

Bono and Larry represent the two poles of U2-Bono is the most open to new ideas, fads, impulses, innovation, and rationalization. Larry is the most conservative, steady, and grounded. When one of Bono's ideas leaves the realm of reality, it is Larry who calls time-out. In the past they both appreciated that balance, and everyone could laugh about their contrary traits. Now, though, it feels different. It feels less like two sides of one coin than two entirely separate currencies.

Larry accuses Bono of not knowing who he is, which Bono throws back at him, saying Larry always knows who Larry is because Larry

[9]

Clever changes. "You haven't changed your haircut in ten years!" Bono says, "Yes, I sometimes fail, but at least I'm willing to experiment." Bono accuses Larry of not knowing how to improvise.

(Much later, Bono says, "I'm actually in awe of Larry for knowing exactly who he is. I don't know if I'm this or that or what. But why can't I be all of them?" Another time he says, "If I knew who I was I wouldn't be an artist, I wouldn't be in a band, I wouldn't be here screaming for a living.")

Adam's attitude is that he and Larry aren't the ones who didn't do their homework. The rhythm section put in their time on the Dublin demos. Then Bono and Edge were supposed to go off and write melo-dies, words, guitar hooks, and fill in any missing sections in the compo-sitions. Adam thinks Bono's rhetoric is partly a disguise for his not having taken care of the fundamentals. "I'd really love to make a rhyth-mic record," Adam says. "I'm a bass player! Why wouldn't I? I don't know much about industrial music, but as long as there's a song I'll be rhythmic, and if you want to change the sounds to be industrial, fine. There's a point in the process where Larry and I have done everything we can do and we leave it to Bono and Edge to finish the songs. But those things we did in Dublin haven't really advanced."

That's not how Bono sees it. He broods that by bringing up refer-ences to dance culture-not just to current trends but even to the Rolling Stones' "Miss You" and "Emotional Rescue"-he is putting the Creative obligation back on the rhythm section. "Adam knows," Bono says, "that I'm putting the weight back on him."

Bono says that on this album he wants to explore the subject of sex and fidelity. "Rhythm is the sex of music," he says. "If U2 is to explore erotic themes, we have to have sexuality in the music as well as the words. The flat rhythms of white rock & roll have had their day. Rhythm is now part of the language." At the tensest moments Bono even asks Edge if he thinks Adam is deliberately dragging his ass on the bass parts in order to sabotage this new musical direction.

In the middle of one of Bono's criticisms one especially touchy afternoon Adam takes off his bass, holds it out to Bono, and says, "You tell me what to play and I'll play it. You want to play it yourself? Go ahead."

Thus the Hansa sessions crawl along, with Berlin getting darker and colder. Everyone's freezing all the time and it seems to never stop

[10]

raining. They eat most nights in a gray, oppressive gruel hall. With nothing else to do short of disbanding, U2 keep plodding along, trying to figure out a way to take their music into the nineties and feeling like they're getting nowhere. Edge is getting frustrated with Lanois, who he thinks just doesn't get it. Larry defends Lanois.

Edge comes in one afternoon and there's Lanois in the studio, play-ing guitar and singing, desperately trying to make a new song called "Down All the Days" sound like the old Joshua Tree U2. "He's really panicking," Edge says. "I had no idea Danny was so confused by what we were doing."

Edge starts thinking that maybe the rumors that U2 was going to disband after the New Year's show were prophetic. "Maybe this is what we should do," he admits. "Maybe we should break up and see what happens."

It seems like every time U2 starts to get going musically something goes wrong, someone makes a mistake. When that happens Bono-not known for keeping his feelings to himself-howls his frustration. This really gets on his partners' nerves. Finally they get together and impose a band ruling: the hyped-up Bono is permanently forbidden to drink coffee.

U2 needs some objective ears. Brian Eno, producer with Lanois of their two best albums and the historic Mensa of Hansa, is drafted to come in for a few days and listen to what they've done. It turns out to be a great relief. Eno-thin, pale, and ascetic-has the patience of a university professor taking over a class of unruly freshmen. He is able to mediate between Edge's ambitions and his old partner Lanois's resis-tance. He goes to the board and shows how, by adding oddball vocal effects and a few jarring sounds, it's possible to bring some of the more conventional material U2 has been fiddling with into fresh sonic terri-tory. Eno assures the frustrated band that they're doing better than they think, and that Edge's desire to get into new acoustic areas is not incompatible with Danny and Larry's desire to hold on to solid song structures.

"Eno is the person both Bono and Edge really connect with," Adam says. "Intellectually they can bounce ideas off him. Eno isn't loyal to any philosophy for very long. It's no problem for Eno to say, 'Okay, if that's the type of thing you want to do, here's how we do it.' Where Danny has been saying, 'Okay, that's what you want to do, but I'm this kind of

[11]

record producer and you're that kind of band, so let's make what you're trying to do happen through what you've always done before.' So Eno's important. What Eno won't do is take responsibility. He won't let you off the hook. And that's fine."

Eno's input gives U2 encouragement to keep working, but it does not settle their stomachs. One night they are struggling with a track called "Ultra Violet" and it's going nowhere. Edge figures the song needs another section and goes to the piano in the big room to come up with a middle eight. After playing for a while he has two possible parts and isn't sure which one would be better for the song. He comes back into the control booth, picks up an acoustic guitar, and plays both of them for Lanois and Bono to see which they prefer. They say that those both sound pretty good-what would it be like if you put them together?

Edge goes back out into the studio and starts playing the two sec-tions together, one into the other. Larry and Adam fall in behind him on the drums and bass. Bono feels the muse knocking on his head as surely as in one of those old Elvis movies where the king jumps up in the middle of a clambake and starts rocking. Bono goes out to the microphone and begins improvising words and a melody: "We're one, but we're not the same-we get to carry each other, carry each other."

U2 plays the new song for about ten minutes. "Is it getting better," Bono sings, "or do you feel the same? Is it any easier on you now that you've got someone to blame?" Edge feels that it's suddenly all jelling- the band is clicking and all four of them know. They come into the booth and listen to a playback with a relief close to joy. By the next morning they have recorded "One," as strong a song as U2 has ever written. It came to them all together and it came easily, as a gift.

"Phew," Edge jokes, "the roof for the house in the west of Ireland is looking good! I'll be able to change the car this year after all!"

There's still an enormous amount of work to do, but at least U2 knows they can still bring good music out of each other. "I suppose in the back of your mind everyone thinks that maybe one day we're going to write together and we just won't have anything to say," Edge explains. "Literally, there will be nothing more to add. You all hope that everyone knows when that time has come and you don't go on and do some completely awful album that everyone recognizes to be a disaster."

He thinks "One" represents the turning point away from that ugly proposition. U2 agrees they should get out of Berlin and pick up this

[12]

thread again at home, in Dublin. They decide they will move out of Germany in January of '91. Larry feels, though, that there's an issue even bigger than the music to resolve before U2 goes forward. The band grew out of friendship between the four of them, he says, and if it's a choice between continuing the friendships or continuing the band, U2 has to go.

So during a Christmas break in Dublin the four members of U2 engage in heart-to-heart talks about what they expect from each other, as partners and as friends. Listening to the Hansa tapes again after a break, they sound a lot better than they did in Germany. There's plenty of good material there to work with and they decide that they can again trust each other enough to go through it together.

"There is a love between the members of this band that is deeper than whatever comes between us," Larry says after the armistice. "After almost fifteen years, which would be time for a divorce in almost any relationship, we looked at each other and said, 'Lay down your arms.' "

They have to go back to Berlin in January to finish some bits before setting up in Dublin. While they are packing up, war breaks out in the Middle East. It's been building up the whole time U2 has been record-ing-Iraq invaded Kuwait last summer and the United States began assembling an alliance to threaten them into withdrawal. It was the first test of President George Bush's New World Order, an international scheme in which the East-West, communist-capitalist schism was to be replaced by a pyramid of interconnected nations (with, needless to say, America on top). A current bestseller refers to this moment, the pro-posed dawning of a post-bipolar world, as "The End of History." The British techno-pop band Jesus Jones even has a big hit this week called "Right Here, Right Now," about the same subject: "Right here, right now-watching the world wake up from history."

Right here, right now, it's looking like the end of Saddam Hussein's history anyhow. Bush got the Europeans to agree to impose a deadline on Iraq, after which if they didn't pull out of Kuwait they'd be attacked. Then he convinced the Soviets to come in, the Japanese, most of the other Arab states, and even China. While waiting for Saddam to back down, the rest of the world slapped Iraq with an embargo and diplomatic sanctions.

That Saddam, Iraq's dictator, is an obvious nut with eyes on grab-bing other oil-producing neighbors was a big incentive to the Middle

[13]

Eastern states to join with the U.S. (and Israel!) in this crusade. Iraq had previously invaded Iran, so there was no hope of help coming for Saddam from the Islamic fundamentalists. Feeling a bit overextended, the Iraqi ruler even tried lobbing a few missiles at Tel Aviv, hoping to unite the Arabs in a holy war against the Jews. The Arabs didn't bite.

The countdown to the U.N. deadline has been dominating the news for a couple of weeks, but still, it's a shock to hear that the war has begun and U.S. missiles are blowing up downtown Baghdad. Bono sits at the TV transfixed, amazed that CNN is broadcasting the war live twenty-four hours a day, and that he-like millions of TV viewers- finds himself watching war as if it were a football match. He turns on a movie, switches to the war for a while, over to MTV, back to the war:

Whoa, look at those missiles! That was a big one!

Edge is struck by the fact that the young pilots returning from bombing raids and the soldiers directing the missiles from launchpads far from Baghdad often compare what they're doing to playing video games at home. It is all computer controlled, they never see any blood or destruction-children who grew up using toys to pretend they were at war end up at war pretending they're using toys. They fly off on missions with the Clash's "Rock the Casbah" blaring. Edge and Bono are watching TV together when a young American pilot is interviewed on CNN. When asked what the bombing looks like from the plane, he says, "It's so realistic." Bono and Edge look at each other, amazed.

Bono thinks that something fundamental has changed, not just in the world's political structure, but in the way media has permeated the public consciousness. In the last decade cable TV has spread through what used to be called the free world. There is no more line between news, entertainment, and home shopping. Bono says that when U2 tour behind this album, they have to figure out a way to represent this new reality.

2. Dogtown

the toughest guy in the band/ why rich people have no friends/ the wives will kill us/ U2 in nighttown/ adam exposes himself/ springtime for bono

everything is easier in Dublin in the spring of '91. Everything musical anyway. One of the side effects of starting up the U2 machine again is the havoc it causes in the home lives of the members. Adam, a swinging bachelor, has nothing to keep him from commiting to a long stretch on the road. Larry has a longtime girlfriend named Ann Acheson, but they have no children and she has her own life and work.

It's different for Bono and Edge, who have both been married for years and have young children. Edge has three daughters. Bono has a two-year-old girl and a second on the way. Their wives have the right to say that after putting their marriages aside for months or even years at a time in order for U2 to conquer the world, they might have expected, now that all the band's goals had been reached, to settle into a more normal family life. Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan all quit touring after hitting the top and devoted themselves to making records and living with their wives and children. U2 is now talking about releasing the new album in the autumn of '91, touring America and Europe in the spring of '92, going back to America in the summer and fall of '92 if the demand is there, and then, if things go really well, touring Europe again in '93. As the band returns to Dublin with their unfinished album, they are looking at a work schedule that will cause them to put their domestic lives on hold for the next three years.

There are boxes within boxes in the U2 organization, and what goes on between the band members and their families is in the smallest box of all. I don't know what finally sets it off and it's surely nobody's

[15]

business, but around Easter Edge moves out of his home and away from his wife, Aislinn. He settles into Adam's guest house and work on the album continues.

"I could tell stories of times each of the others has been there for me," Edge says at dinner one night. "I mean, there have been periods when Adam and I didn't particularly get along, over the years. Yet when I left Aislinn I moved into Adam's." Edge, who is rarely inarticulate or sentimental, has a little trouble getting the next words out: "I suppose that the other three are the closest friends I have."

That friendship can be tough for any outsider to penetrate. And no one's tougher to tie down about it than the hardheaded Larry Mullen.

"People say, 'Why don't you do interviews? What do you think about this? What do you think about that?'" Larry sighs. "My job in the band is to play drums, to get up on stage and hold the band together. That's what I do. At the end of the day that's all that's important. Everything else is irrelevant."

Many people on this planet say they hate horseshit, but no one hates horseshit as much as Larry Mullen, Jr., does. The possibility that he might somehow add to the rising stew of crap that threatens to sub-merge our civilization in hype and nonsense appalls him so much that he slaps on a scowl and shuts his mouth at the first inkling of glad-handing, backslapping, false sincerity, sucking up, ass-kissing, air-kiss-ing, overpraise, fair-weather friendship, freeloading, hyperbole, ligging, flattery, posturing, complement chewing, ego-stroking, bootlicking, cheek-smooching, groveling, pratspeak, toadying, leg-lifting, fame-grub-bing, schnoring, idol worship, starfucking, or brown-nosing. Boy, did he pick the wrong business!

Bono says that with Larry everyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent-but if he makes up his mind that you're okay he'll not only let you into his house, he'll let you sleep in his bed.

Larry's always been tough. He can laugh heartily telling the story of how as little kids on Christmas Eve he and his sister kept pestering their father, saying, "I think I hear Santa, Dad! I think I hear Santa!" Until their annoyed old man said, "There is no Santa Claus! Now go to sleep!" When his mother told him he could not go off, underage and illegal, to play in bars with U2, he told her flat out that he had to do it, there was nothing to argue about. And off he went.

Larry effectively founded U2 at Mount Temple, their Dublin high

[16]

school when he approached Dave Evans (Edge) about starting a band. Word got out and Paul Hewson (Bono), Adam, and a few other kids came by Larry's family's kitchen to bang on guitars and sing cover tunes. Before long membership was knocked down to the four characters who remain U2 today. Edge was a couple of months older than Larry. Adam and Bono both had more than a year on him. With his blond hair and pretty features, Larry looked younger than the others. He looked like a little kid. But Larry was always as bullheaded as a minotaur. He has joked that he gave up on being leader of the group as soon as he met Bono, but in some indefinable way he has remained the center of U2 from high school to here. It's not even that he's the band's conscience;

it's more that he's the one who knows what each of them is and what each of them might or can never become, and he will never hesitate to say so to any of their faces. Somehow, by defining that, Larry defines what U2 ends up being.

"What's made U2 has always been the relationship," he says. "The relationship has not only been a personal one, it's also been a musical one. It's been an understanding. It's a cliche, but U2's biggest influences have always been each other. We've always played with each other. We've always played against each other musically. When we came to Berlin we were suddenly, musically, on different levels and that affected every-thing. The musical differences affected the personal differences.

"It's a very, very strange world that we live in. I was very young when the band started. I ended up doing it because of tragedy, in some ways. My mother died and I went straight into the band, that was the kick. On the road I was surrounded by people who were older than me and more experienced than I was. I was seventeen. I was a virgin. I had difficulty as any normal teenager would.

"When you're a kid and you're thrown into this, it's very hard. Some people cope with it better than others. I feel that I'm less affected now than maybe some of the other guys are because I have fallen in love with this. I loved it when I was a kid, then when I went on the road it was so difficult I just didn't know what was going on, it was very hard. Then, after a whole lot of different things happening with the band being successful, I made a very clear decision in my own mind that this is really what I want to do and I want to make a serious go of it. I don't just want to be the drummer in U2 anymore. I want to actually contrib-ute on a different basis and do more."

[17]

When Larry says he was kicked into U2 because his mother died (she was killed in a traffic accident around his seventeenth birthday), he is tapping into a secret history of rock & roll. Losing his mother as a kid is a tragedy Larry shares with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Sinead O'Connor, and Bono. Throw in Elvis Pres-ley and Johnny Rotten, two singers very close to mothers who died just after they got famous, and you have a pretty good representation of the biggest blips on rock & roll's forty-year seismograph. Bono lost his mother in 1974, when he was fourteen. She collapsed from a stroke at her own father's funeral and died immediately thereafter.

Larry says having that loss in common brought Bono and him together. "There was a connection there," he explains. "He understood a little of what I felt. I was younger than him. I didn't have any brothers. My father was out of whack anyway, so Bono was the link. He said, 'Look, I understand a bit what you're going through. Maybe I can help you.' And he did. Through thick and thin he's always been there for me. Always.

"People think the band is this unit that's always together. We fight and argue all the time! But I have to say that through it all Bono has always been there. And that was where it started, that was the original connection. When I was in deep shit, he made himself available for me, he was around. Even on the road when I was going through a rough time I used to share a room with him. He just used to make sure I was okay." Suddenly Larry smiles and says, "It was a bit like baby-sitting, y'know what I mean?"

I ask Larry how his life was affected by becoming wealthy.

"It was only after Joshua Tree that we started to make money," he says. That's a surprise-Joshua Tree, which came out in 1987 and sold 14 million copies, was U2's fifth album. The world figured they were rich long before that. "After Joshua Tree we invested a lot of money into Rattle and Hum. So we saw a lot of money but never made any. It was put back into the movie. I remember walking away with about twenty thousand dollars. That was the money that was there when I arrived home from the Joshua Tree tour. There was more later on. I remember going down to Waterford. I had been saving for years and years to buy myself a Harley. That was the first real material thing I ever bought. The money came in very, very slowly. It wasn't immediate at all. It wasn't like we did the Joshua Tree tour and then someone gave me five million dollars and said,

[18]

"There you are, son, go with it.' It wasn't like that at all, it was a very slow thing."

What was the reaction of friends and family when they assumed, perhaps before it was true, "Oh, Larry's a millionaire now"? Does everybody wait for you to pick up the check at dinner?

"To a limited degree," he says. "It's only recently that it's become a major issue, 'cause there is publicity about it, a lot of people talk about it. What disturbs me most is that people figure, 'Hey, look, a hundred quid to me is two weeks wages. It's nothing to you!' I find that incredi-bly offensive. That's jumping to conclusions. It's just taking advantage. That's the biggest thing that's affected the way I feel about some people. I find there are two very distinctly different reactions. There's those people who say, 'I don't give a damn what you do, I buy my round, you buy your round. We're friends. I expect nothing from you.' And there's the other ones. It's hard because the people you grow up with are generally people who don't have any money. They work in banks or they're electricians and they don't make as much. I think they should be responsible for themselves and not take advantage. I think it's lack of respect for themselves. I certainly don't respect them."

I ask why Larry told Bono, during the last tour, that he didn't like what U2 had become.

"It had become very serious, very hard work. And just no fun. It was nothing to do with music. It was to do with getting up and going to work. Because we take care of a lot of our own business, we spend a lot of time in meetings. We've always done that. On the stage it was good, but it was very intense and was very hard work. You were grimacing because you were stressed. I remember coming off that tour and feeling, 'If this is what it is, I really don't want to do it anymore, I can't do this anymore.'

"It was just stressful on a musical level. I suppose we had realized that we weren't as capable of plugging into other people's worlds-like В. В. King's-as we'd hoped. And I certainly found it was nothing to do with where I was coming from. I'm glad to have had the experience, but that's it. I come from a different world."

Well, I say, the stretch in Berlin wasn't exactly a load of laughs.

"No," Larry says. "It was suddenly trying to unplug that different world of Rattle and Hum and plug into another one. That's very hard to do. When we plugged into Rattle and Hum we'd lost touch with where it

[19]

was we had come from-which is trying to find new ways. Some people were quicker at finding the route than others, and it caused immense strain within the band. Because for the first time in the band there was no consensus musically. Whereas in the past, although everyone might not agree, there was some sort of understanding of what was going on. This time there was no understanding. No one knew what the fuck anyone else was talking about. That was the basis of all those prob-lems."

All of what the band has been going through gets thrown into Bono's lyrics. It is only in the final weeks before the album is due to be delivered to the record company that most of it comes together. "We tend to spend 90 percent of the time on 30 percent of the material," Adam explains, "and the rest happens incredibly quickly,"

U2 bring in their old producer Steve Lillywhite, as well as Eno, Flood, and Lanois, and get everyone mixing. Different producers mix the same songs and then present them to the band, who pick one (or worse, pick aspects of each and ask one of the exhausted producers to combine them). What emerges is a weird juxtaposition of frantic sound (influenced by techno, hip-hop, and other urban pop trends, but grounded in solid song structures) and introspective lyrics about the tension between domestic life and the lure of the outside world's adven-tures. The music, the sound itself, is so full of life and electricity that it's easy to understand what's seducing the lyricist away from his respon-sibilities at home; the music conveys how much fun there is to be had out there in the world of discos, boom boxes, rock concerts, and raves. The words may reveal the guilt and concern going through the singer's head, but the music demonstrates the fun and exuberance racing through his bloodstream.

The first song-"Zoo Station"-blasts open with a barrage of elec-tronic sounds and distortion. Bono's voice is processed so heavily, it barely sounds human. If you strain you can make out what he's saying:

"I'm ready, ready for what's next."

The music conjures up an environment like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus at 11 p.m. on a July Saturday. It's full of pushing and shoving, hip-hop samples, loud arguments, bursting images, and scream-ing guitars. Some of Bono's lyrics sound like they were read off the T-shirts in an all-night souvenir shop ("Don't let the bastards grind you down," "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"), like they are

[20]

being recited by a man in that late-night state of sensory overload where you babble phrases you just overheard.

The central character that emerges on this expedition through urban perdition is a man messing up his secure home life by charging out into the night's temptations. The album is full of romantic and spiritual anguish, of the bargains made between couples and the recriminations they throw at each other when those deals are breached. In this context, when Bono sings, "We're one, but we're not the same," it sounds less like a comfort than an excuse.

One good side effect of Bono's bad habit of leaving all his lyrics in flux until the last minute is that by the time he puts the final vocals on an album there is usually a narrative coherence to the whole thing. Your old English teacher might tell you that this results in a novelistic cohesiveness. Certain members of U2 who have nothing left of their finger-nails might call it the result of a long intellectual constipation finally ended by a verbal diarrhea. I myself would like to point out that in this case it results in an album-long metaphor of the moon as a dark woman who seduces the singer away from his virtuous love, the sun. In the middle of Side Two the singer, lying in the gutter in a vain attempt to throw his arms around the world, looks up and sees the sun rising. He asks, "How far are you gonna go before you lose your way back home?" Then he starts crawling home, exhausted, elated, ashamed, satisfied, and nursing a bloody nose.

That would be an easy place for the album to end, and in the Andy Capp world of most rock & roll, that's usually where we fade out. U2 doesn't let their listeners off the hook so easily. The darkness of the doubts they've raised cannot be exorcised by a night on the town. The last three songs face the big issue of how couples begin to reconcile the suffering they force on each other. In "Ultra Violet" the singer pleads with his love to light his way home, only to find that "the day is as dark as the night is long." The couple crawl into bed together, unable to sleep. He marvels at his own hypocrisy: "I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that." They decide that if they can't sleep maybe they can speak their dreams out loud and (Bono's quoting Delmore Schwartz here) "begin responsibilities." The album fades out with the conclusion that "Love Is Blindness," the inability to distinguish day from night.

This is U2 in Nighttown, an X ray of four men who spent their

[21]

teens and twenties being focused, serious, and pious and who, as they hit thirty, want to see what they missed. There was a song recorded in Berlin that didn't make the final sequence, in which Bono sang of wanting to "see and touch and taste as much as a man can before he repents." The Nighttown James Joyce created in Ulysses was a nocturnal urban world that promised knowledge in exchange for innocence. Ulysses was, among other things, a parody of Homer's Odyssey, with the hero battling the demons of his soul rather than mythical monsters on his long journey home to his wife. This trip U2 is intent on undertaking is just beginning. There's no way of telling how far it will bring them, or whether they'll all make it back.

"I don't think I've ever come home from a tour the same person I left," Bono says. "So there is always a moment where the people you come home to wonder if you're going to get on with them. Or if they even want you in the house. I'm an intinerant at heart. When I was fourteen my mother died. I lived with my father, and it was a house but it wasn't really a home after that. I always ended up sleeping on the floor of other people's places. And so, wherever I am I'm happy enough. I probably wouldn't come home at all if it weren't for the fact I had family." Bono thinks about that for a bit and says, "I think the real problems start when you come back, not when you go out."

The new album will be U2's first since the multinational record company Polygram, itself a division of the multinational electronics company Philips, bought Island Records, the label to which U2 is signed. Polygram paid something like $300 million dollars to get Is-land, which really means-given that Island has no other living super-stars-they paid it to get U2. Polygram is planning a massive push behind their first album by their superstar band and they need some information to get the ball rolling for the autumn campaign-like, Does the album have a name?

U2 consider the title Cruise Down Main Street, a reference to the cruise missiles that winged with such precision through downtown Baghdad, and to the Rolling Stones' classic Exile on Main Street. They talk about titling the record Fear of Women-but reject that as sure to make the Pretentious Police reach for their revolvers. They are determined not to call attention to the seriousness of the lyrics, to keep the media's eye on the flashy surface. It is all part of erecting the mask Bono talked about,

[22]

the false face that will keep U2 from the embarrassment of standing around with their dicks hanging out. Which brings up a good idea! How about this for a cover: a big photograph of Adam standing there naked. The band calls in photographer Anton Corbijn and Adam proudly hangs out his manhood for the camera. Adam thinks that if they use this as the sleeve they should call the record Man--the logical sequel to their first album, Boy. Edge thinks it might be funnier to go with the nude shot and call the album Adam, in tribute to both their bassist and the first mortal (who was also the first man to get kicked out of his home and into the cruel world).

There is some brow mopping at Polygram when they hear rumors about a nude album jacket. Eventually U2, unable to decide which of Anton's many possible cover concepts to use, decides to go with them all: create a big montage with everything from the Adam willie shot to portraits of the four band members squeezed into one of those little Trabants. Anton is sort of distressed at the idea, but it's not his album. As for the name, they settle on something that no critic can take seriously: Achtung Baby. It is a reference-used frequently in Berlin by U2 soundman Joe O'Herlihy-to The Producers, the Mel Brooks movie about a pair of sleazy theater swindlers who try to create the biggest Broadway flop of all time by staging a musical called Springtime/or Hitler.

U2 figures that no critic will accuse them of pomposity with a title like that! Although this critic thinks that given the album's theme of faith and faithlessness Acbtung Baby suggests what Elvis Costello called "emotional fascism"-the dictatorship of fidelity.

"It's a bit of a con to call it something as flip as Achtung Baby" Bono admits. "Because underneath that thin layer of trash it's blood and guts. It's a very heavy, loaded record. It's a dense record." He grins. "I told somebody I thought it was a dense record and word got around that we were making a dance record.

"I think that the real rebels of the nineties are probably not musicians but comedians. Stand-up comics. Because they have people laughing while they're telling them where they're at. If people see you coming with a placard these days they just get out of your way. U2 has got to be careful. And smart."

By the way, in The Producers the crooked accountant who stages Spring-time for Hitler is named Leo Bloom. Maybe U2 has hit on the insight

3. Achtung Bono

rock and recommodification/ why keep going/ ghosts in the machines/ when def leppard shamed U2 and other lessons learned from car stereo systems/ can we order now?

Now that U2's civil war is over, the album is complete, and the bandmembers have embraced each other with the quiver-ing chins of an old couple renewing their wedding vows, Bono feels comfortable spinning out his take on where U2 has to go and why getting up to the starting gate was so tough.

"It's hard for people," Bono says over lunch one afternoon in a restaurant where a Muzak version of "Over the Rainbow" adds a special poignance to his talk of his ambitions for U2's second public decade. "If you realize that this friction makes you smarter, quicker, and tougher, then it's surely wise to stick with it. But if you want an easy life, if you're happy with your lot, if you see success as your goal, it's over. I've had this out with various members of the band, as you know, and, I'll be honest, with All." Ali is Bono's wife, Alison Stewart Hewson. "We thought, okay, maybe it'll take ten years to get to this place, but when we got there we could stop this kind of madness. But I don't think it's mad. I think that that's the fun of it. I think there's nothing sadder than people who feel that they've arrived. I think it might have just taken a couple more minutes for some of the other people to realize the same thing.

"When you're thirty you're just starting your creative life if you're a painter or a writer. Some don't start till they're forty, or probably shouldn't. It's just that in rock & roll terms, in the way that it used to be, a lot of people were burnt out. They were shooting stars, and of course they burned bright and they burned fast, but with a lot of great artists it's the opposite; they just got better and better. That's what I

[25]

want U2 to be. I feel like we've just had a taste of it and that the success, in a way, is a distraction. That's not false modesty, it's genuinely know-ing that this work was extraordinary because of what it hinted at more than what it was."

Bono says that after all the Rattle and Hum success (the album, reviled though it might have been, sold 7.5 million copies) and backlash, after Larry's complaint that U2 onstage was turning into a jukebox, after accepting that maybe embracing American roots music was a dead end for U2, Bono came home after that good-bye concert in Dublin at the end of 1989 feeling sapped and rotten.

"I had a terrible time at Christmas," he admits. "A very convenient end-of-decade depression. Y'know, I don't buy the idea that U2 reinvented itself in that moment, because I've always felt that all through our life was a process of re-creation and killing off the old and bringing on the new. It's just that this was a more spectacular murder.

"I looked back and said, 'Okay, it was wonderful and a lot of good work was done,' but I felt very unhappy. I said, 'If this is it, this is not enough.' I think that everyone else would have come to that conclusion, but it might have taken a few average albums and I don't think that was on. So there were a few simple tasks to be faced. Like: rhythm was now part of the language of even white rock & roll. There was no way back from it. How does a three-piece be polyrhythmic? You have to have another thing. On Unforgettable Fire Brian's contribution was to find little tape loops for us to play off. So that's how this technology thing came together. These are practical problems. So that you can focus on the personality of Adam's bass playing, rather than just the pure timekeep-ing of it. And you can have the sort of hammer aspect to Larry's kick-drum and still have the delicacy of a conga part. But it was very hard, and learning to adapt to that new technology created tension. It's a bit like trying to help somebody across the road who's saying, 'Hey, what are you doing? I like it here.!' But they wouldn't really. It's just that they're not ready to cross the road yet."

U2 has now embraced sequencers that play prerecorded instrumental parts both to fatten up their sound and to allow the musicians to play embellishments and counterpoint while a machine takes care of basics. At one time U2 would have thought of that as cheating. Now they see it as a liberation. The values that inspired Rattle and Hum-"Let's learn

[26]

about roots and how the old songwriters did it"-have been put in deep storage.

"U2 are the world's worst wedding band." Bono shrugs. "We are. Why don't we just own up to it and stop fucking about? For instance, we were always jealous of the fact that we never knew anyone else's songs. That started a lot of В sides where we did cover versions and tried to get into the structure of songwriting vicariously and then apply it. This is a band that's one of the biggest acts in the world, and we know fuck-all in terms of what most musicians would consider to be important. 'Cause all of these bands, including this new crop, have all played in bar bands, they're all well versed in rock & roll structure- which is also why they're all so well versed in rock & roll cliches.

"Imitation and creation are opposites. The imitative spirit is very different from the creative spirit, which is not to say that we all don't beg, steal, and borrow from everybody, but if the synthesis of it all is not an original spirit, it's unimportant.

"Compare white rock to the state of African American culture. The black position is so much more modern, so much more plugged-in, so much more postmodern even. They're begging, stealing, and borrowing, but creating new things, using the technology that's available. The springboard for rock & roll was the technology of the electric guitar, the fuzz box, and printed circuits. I think it's fascinating that in Compton and in the Bronx, there are sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who are part of the next century plugging into all this technology to create new sounds, while middle-class kids from Ivy League colleges are listening to music that is Neanderthal. Not Neanderthal in that it's raw and primi-tive screaming, but that the form and fashion of it is."

When Bono gets on a roll like this there's no shutting him up. But it's worth paving attention, 'cause after Achtung Baby is released U2 is going to put all this theory into practice or flame out in the attempt. And by then he may not want to spell it all out.

"I have a theory about technology, if you can stand it," Bono says, digging in. "It's long, but it's interesting. Sitting on Sunset Strip outside the recording studio, working on the Rattle and Hum soundtrack in 1988, on Friday nights, we used to watch the parade. It was an extraordinary-sight to see these cars that were fitted out as music systems. You've seen that parade of Mexican hopping trucks, and there's a sound." Bono cups his hands over his mouth and imitates the heavy, distorted backbeat of

[27]

hip-hop blasting through a beefed-up car stereo system, over which he then sings a bluesy wail.

"I thought, 'I know this music!'" He sings the bluesy wail again, this time bending the notes just a little more off the Western standard than blues notes already bend. Now Bono's hip-hop singing sounds Arabic.

"I thought, wow, this sound reminds me so much of when I was traveling in Africa, recording the kind of atonal call-and-response music that you find in North Africa. And it dawned on me that a journey had happened in black music that is so extraordinary. You take from Africa people two hundred, three hundred years ago by force to cotton planta-tions. You take away from them their own music, forbid the talking drums. It was often Irish slave drivers keeping them away from their native musical forms, as the Irish were the lowest rung on the white ladder. Through the Irish and Scottish slave drivers they picked up the three chords of Celtic folk music and a new format arrived: the blues, and eventually gospel.

"It all starts to get mixed up. The technology keeps it changing. The printed circuit has arrived, the electic amplification, and rock & roll is this new hybrid, which eventually goes back to Europe and hits big there with the Beatles and the Stones, and then goes back to America where Hendrix takes it further. Then it goes back into Europe, and you have in Germany a group called Kraftwerk working with pure synthesized sounds, completely electronic sounds, where you remove any original signal from a musical instrument. This is kind of interesting, this starts to influence back across America, and you have people like George Clinton and Stevie Wonder getting into electronic sounds and synthe-sizers. This goes back across to England, there is an invention, the sampling device, the Fairlight and Synclavier. Sampling goes back across, this dance going on between two continents continues with technology playing the music. And with this new sampling device you are able to grab and recombine bits from old records and from that a new format arrives-hip-hop.

"What's completely mind-boggling to me is that after three hundred years, the music gets back to its core through technology. You have kids in the Bronx scratching records, creating a call and response, using this technology to get back to their center. What does that say? That is so big. It's an idea that has ramifications to me beyond music.

"I suppose as an Irish person who has worked so hard to sort of

[28]

musically try and reinvent what it is to be Irish, that is great for me. Because people listen to U2 and say, 'Well what you are doing is Irish, yet by the look of it, it's not.' It's a spirit.

"That was one of the things that to me exploded the idea of authentic-ity, which is, of course, the catchphrase of all these rock groups: 'This is real, because we are in control of it.' 'Disco sucks.' That's wrong. I started to see Kraftwerk as some sort of soul group. And all the ideas of authenticity, which we had played with in Rattle and Hum-'Let's write acoustic songs, let's try it like other people did, and let's be fans, and discover it.' We discovered wonderful things, learned wonderful things, wrote a few songs I ought to proud of. But that was like going down a road and then finding out, 'No.' "

Bono pauses to let the dowsing pole of my understanding touch the bottom of the deep pool of his insight. Before I can say, "Let's order," he's digging another well.

"Parallel to that," he says, "I realized that technology can facilitate freedom. In fact, what I think people don't understand about the music business is that people do not buy stereos to play their records; people buy records to play their stereos' Think about it from the consumers' point of view; the purchase of the hardware is much more expensive than the purchase of the software. If you are living in the real world, which I certainly was when I was sixteen, and you buy one of these motherfuckers, you want to buy the record that plays it well. That's why the Beatles again run parallel to technology. Sgt. Pepper was a stereo album. When the success of Sgt. Pepper is written about, that's just not mentioned. But this was hardware companies putting out this new device for listening to music, and here was a way you could show off the thing. This can be followed through to Pink Floyd, as it further developed, and on into CD and the success of Dire Straits."

I have to admit that Bono's onto something. In the early seventies teenagers went wild for stereo headphones, and bought albums that were mixed to swing back and forth, from right to left. Recently, new bands such as Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails have taken advantage of the wide dynamic range of CDs to make albums that jump from very soft to very loud in a way that vinyl records never could.

"And if you want to know why white people are listening to rap music," Bono says, "apart from the sort of white-guy-being-attracted-to-the-things-you're-afraid-of social thing, it's a lot to do with the

[29]

hardware systems, the car systems, club systems. The bottom end has to be tight, so you can turn it up. Suddenly records that sounded great on a stereo or even on the radio-that FM rock sound-suddenly don't sound so great compared to these guys. You know, you put on a Public Enemy record, and it sounds like the end of the world!"

Bono first thought about this-and felt U2 was lacking-when he and Adam were hitchhiking in Tennessee during their Rattle and Hum pilgrimage to Graceland and Sun Studios. A kid picked them up and had on his car stereo an album by the pop-metal group Def Leppard, produced by South African soundmaster Mutt Lange. Bono was knocked out by how powerful the Def Leppard music-which had never meant anything to him before-sounded on a cranked-up, bot-tom-heavy car system. The driver got wildly goosed when he recognized his passengers, yanked off the Def Lep and stuck on a U2 tape. It didn't sound half as exciting.

"Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' to me is one of the first industrial records," Bono says, knowing that he's picking a fight. "I haven't fully realized the implications of that. I think we've got to make records that sonically make more use of the technology. That's some-thing we have yet to do."

"All that's great," I say, waving frantically for the waiter before Bono leaves port again, "but it doesn't do the band much good if half the guys don't want to go that way."

"Yeah, but great ideas are great persuaders," Bono says. "If you're arguing a lot, it's not a clear enough idea. A great idea is clear to everybody. And the problem with what happened in Achtung Baby was that the ideas, the concepts, were good, but the songs early on weren't good enough to convince everybody. The reward wasn't in sight. And Danny, of course, was pulling his hair out. Brian knew what we were doing and understood the great fun we could have deconstructing-" Bono catches himself and smiles. "It was hard not to use art terms. And art terms, just because they're art terms, annoy some people. It's a hard thing to talk to a guy who is trying to get a drum sound together about recommodification or this idea that you have to 'take this sound and turn it on its head like one of those Christmas bubbles and see what happens.'

It's like playing the set backwards! Let's play U2 backwards and see what happens. So it was a very hard time. I'd say if the songs had come quicker-but the reason the songs didn't come quicker is that people

4. Tech & Trabants

setting up the stage/ a journey into the eastern bloc/ U2 makes their own clothes/ the woman's perspective: tying his testicles and tugging/ shaking down philips

THE FIRST single from Achtung Baby will be "The Fly," a track chosen because it sounds nothing like U2. The band figures that after not having a new U2 single for a couple of years, radio will play whatever they give them-so why not give them some-thing weird. When they go in to do a video for the track, Bono looks like a human fly in a black leather suit and big, bubble-eyed sunglasses. He decides that he should dress like this for the tour. The fly shades are almost a mask-he goes into character as soon as he puts them on. The black leather suit conjures up a pantheon of rock legends-from Jim Morrison to Iggy Pop-but is most clearly the suit Elvis Presley wore in his 1968 TV comeback special. Like Elvis, Bono dyes his brown hair black to turn himself into the personification of a rockin' cat.

Bono's ideas for staging the concerts are ambitious enough to make grown accountants weep. He wants giant TV screens across the stage, broadcasting not just U2 but commercials, CNN, whatever's in the air. He still has the televised juxtapositions of the Gulf War flipping through his head. Stage designer Willie Williams sees a chance to really go to Designer Valhalla. He wants to erect the illusion of a whole futuristic city, with the big TVs flashing and towers shooting up toward the sky. Bono will be the Fly crawling up the face of this Blade Runner landscape. Larry and Adam, it is agreed, should look like cops or soldiers-the future-shock troops. Edge has a different job. He's the guitarist, so he has to look flashy. The white shirts and black jeans he used to wear onstage have no place in future world. Fintan Fitzgerald, U2's wardrobe man, starts working out ways to tart up Edge like a

[32]

guitar hero from the Hendrix era, with oversize knucklebuster rings, pants covered with elaborate studded patterns, and a wool stevedore's cap instead of the hats and do-rags that usually cover his receding hairline. An evil-looking thin mustache and goatee complete Edge's transformation to psychedelic thug.

The band and the inner circle of Principle, their management com-pany, have started referring to the proposed show as "Zoo TV." It's an outgrowth of the song "Zoo Station" and in U2's imagination a visual extension of the "Morning Zoo" radio programs popular in America on which, between spinning records, wiseass disc jockeys make rude jokes, take phone calls, and play tapes of celebrities embarrassing themselves.

U2 has never accepted corporate sponsorship-the dubious institu-tion whereby a big advertiser picks up a lot of the money for a tour in exchange for being allowed to run ads (even on the tickets) that say, "Jovan presents the Rolling Stones" or "Budweiser presents the Who." Like R.E.M., Springsteen, and some other high-class rockers, U2 has always figured that-like selling songs to be used in commercials- sponsorship takes a bite out of the music's integrity and degrades the relationship between the artist and the audience. It's like inviting some-one over to your home and then trying to sell them Tupperware.

But in the spirit of irony and contradiction-kissing that they want to cook up for this tour, U2 plays with the idea of covering the whole stage with logos like the billboards on a crowded highway. Willie Wil-liams draws sketches for a stage design splattered with the logos of Burger King, Shell, Sony, Heinz, Singer, Betty Crocker, Fruit of the Loom, and a dozen other corporations, with three house-size TVs in the middle. One shows Bono singing, one shows a man selling beer, and the third is a close-up of Edge's guitar with a potato chip slogan nudging into it. Willie labels this design "Motorway Madness." It raises a big question: if they decorate the stage with all these corporate emblems anyway, why not let the corporations pay for them? Why not just sell the whole stage to advertisers, taking their money and mocking them at the same time? U2 plays with the notion for a while and then decides that if they ironically put up the logos, and then ironically take the money, it's not ironic anymore. At that point they have sold out, and no semantic somersaults can justify it. So they scrap "Motorway Mad-ness."

Willie has another notion that he floats to Bono and Edge separately

[33]

before springing it on all the Principles. He thinks it would be hilarious to buy a bunch ofTrabants, those cheap little East German cars that U2 saw abandoned along roadsides after reunification, and hang them from the ceiling as spotlights. Anton Corbijn has been drawn to the Trabants in his album cover photos. Willie says, as the band chuckles, that they could hollow out the cars, put huge spotlights inside, and make it look like the Trabants' headlights are illuminating the stage.

U2 gives Willie the go-ahead. Manager Paul McGuinness volunteers to lead an expedition into darkest Deutschland where he will buy up Trabants like a carpetbagger grabbing cut-rate southern cattle after the Civil War. "As an image of what went wrong with Communism, the Trabant is useful," McGuinness explains. "Because it is a car that makes its driver look pathetic. It's a demeaning thing to be in. It also smells like shit and it's very uncomfortable."

The drive across Germany is less jolly than McGuinness and his Zoo crew had hoped. The Soviet occupation troops who had been stationed in East Germany before reunification have no home to go back to. The Germans want them out, but the Russians are asking them to stay away -there is no housing for them, food is already scarce, and their govern-ment is on the verge of collapse. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers are selling their weapons and uniforms for whatever money they can get. The further east McGuinness and company drive, the bleaker it becomes. At one stop along the motorway they see a Russian officer in his long coat, high boots, and epaulets buying cigarettes and a bottle of booze, then slowly going back outside, sitting on the bumper of his car, and passing the bottle back and forth with his driver.

When they reach the Trabant factory in Chemnitz, on what was until recently Karl-Marx-Stadt, the place is almost deserted. No one wants to buy these cheap, partly wooden toy boxes when there is a chance of getting a Volkswagen or an Audi. The car factory had been the center of the local economy since the 1920s, when it was the Auto Union (later Audi) factory. Production switched to Trabants at the dawn of the Cold War. Now it's gone, and the people who used to work there are hungry.

"Thirty thousand people just lost their jobs," McGuinness says after nosing the situation. "No one here thinks the Trabant is funny."

McGuinness takes the factory tour. With the Trabants discontinued, the mill is now serving as a warehouse for postal vans awaiting delivery to the mail-deprived East. Asked how he feels about U2's plan to make

[34]

his automobile famous in the West, the grief-stricken factory manager says, "We feel fine about it, but it is too late."

When McGuinness gets back to Dublin, U2 owns enough Trabants to swing from the rafters, shine on the stage, and drive around the dressing rooms. They bring in Catherine Owens, an artist and old friend from the days when her all-girl punk band the Boy Scoutz used to share bills with the teenage U2, to paint designs on the little cars. One of Owens's designs is what she calls "The Fertility Car," a Trabant covered with blown-up personal ads from dating columns and a sketch of a woman giving birth while holding two pieces of string tied to her husband's testicles, "so he can share the pain."

Owens pushes her opinions to the front because, she feels, U2 has men making all the creative decisions and is slipping into completely male-centered designs. "Let's get some curves in here," she says when looking at a stage design of sharp angles and boxes, while the members of U2 go: "Huh?"

Adam, who knows more about art (and, some would say, women) than the other three, pushes Owens's ideas forward and empowers her to go out and recruit visual artists to contribute to the video barrage that will be needed to fill up all those TV screens. Owens scours Europe and the U.S. (she lives in New York and is tied in with lots of artists there) for the right people. Among those whose work she brings back are video artist Mark Pellington, David Wojnarowicz-an acclaimed and touchy New York photo/conceptual artist who is dying of AIDS, and the Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN are a satirical group from Rhode Island who use computer tricks to sample images as well as sounds. One of their proudest accomplishments is a film of President Bush, looped and edited so that the President seems to be chanting the lyrics to Queen's "We Will Rock You" while pounding his podium. In the USA 1992 will be an election year, and after his quick thrashing of Iraq in the Gulf War, Bush is considered unbeatable. U2 decide that this Bush bit will open their concerts.

While Bono is running around recommodifying his imagination and cleaning out the band's bank accounts, Adam, Edge, and Larry start tour rehearsals without him. They have a lot of grunt work to do for which Bono is not needed-learning to play with the sequencers and programs that will provide sonic beds under their own instruments, working out live arrangements and endings for the new songs. It gives

[35]

the singer a chance to cool down and gives the other three a break from Bono and a chance to reconnect as musicians. It is an important time for Adam, Edge, and Larry; it moves them back into position as one unit after the Bono & Edge/Larry & Adam split in the early days of the album. As with any group of equals, there are various ways in which the factions within U2 configure. When Bono finds the other three aligned against him, he tends to bring in McGuinness to back him up. For a period in the eighties when Edge, Larry, and Bono first embraced charismatic Christianity, it was Adam and McGuinness vs. the three Born Agains. As in any family, the alliances shift all the time. It is important before heading out on the road together that Edge, Adam, and Larry close ranks. Then as Bono joins rehearsals he gets drawn back into a united band.

The four band members and McGuinness share all business decisions equally, and the four band members without McGuinness make all creative decisions-not just regarding the music but concerning staging, photos, album jackets, and so on. Bono maintains that this got started at the dawn of U2 because being a struggling band in Dublin, where there was no music business, they knew no other way.

"We don't necessarily like to do everything ourselves," Bono says. "We call it 'making our own clothes.' But because of the circumstances, we had to. Paul McGuinness is just so uninterested in the details of a band's aesthetic life. It was hard to find advice. So we had to become video makers to make good videos. We had to become art directors. We made the albums, we made the album covers, we made the videos, we made the stage set. We used local Dublin people because we didn't know anybody else, and we collaborated with them and grew together.

"Paul got us to do everything for ourselves and I don't quite know why. He got out of the way, which takes a lot of guts. His instinct was to trust ours. And this developed this whole Gang of Four thing where you become the corporation. A gang of four musically, a corporation of five with Paul, seven with Ellen (Darst, who runs U2's U.S. operation) and Anne-Louise (Kelly, who runs Principle Dublin), eight with Ossie (Kilkenny, U2's financial advisor).

"Brian Eno said, 'Almost as extraordinary as what you're doing as artists is this organization-or organism-that seems to be evolving around you.' We had this idea that you could be creative in business, that you didn't have to divide it up into art and commerce. We'd meet

[36]

these record company people on tour in the U.S., and to most punk bands coming out of the U.K., these were the enemy. And I didn't think they were the enemy. I thought they were workers who had gotten into music for probably all the right reasons, and weren't as lucky as we were, weren't able to fulfill their ambition to be musicians and were now working the music. Maybe they lost their love and I felt that part of our thing was to reignite that.

"So a lot of people got inspired and they rallied around us, creating a network, and that protected us, created this kind of cushion. Then you start to see organization in a creative light. You start to say, 'Well, these are important decisions, this artwork, and these things.' And you realize that, in fact, to be a group is the art."

As the release of Achtung Baby and rehearsals for the Zoo TV tour impend, U2 ideas are expanding faster than their bank accounts. They have drawn up a plan to build a giant doll of an Achtung Baby with a working penis that will pee on the audience. McGuinness suggests it's an expensive indulgence. Edge starts thinking, then, that maybe what they should do is create fake photos of, say, the giant baby on top of Tower Records and try to convince the press that it really happened:

fake media events! That, too, gets nixed.

Plans for the staging are settling into something more stark and spooky than the Jetsons city of the initial designs. Now the band is talking about black scaffolding, like oil wells or TV towers, shooting into the air with video screens flashing across and throughout. There will be a second tier, above the band, to which Bono can ascend. There will be two wings at the front corners of the stage onto which Bono and Edge can venture. Larry's main question at each new proposition is, "What's it going to cost?"

Bono's imagination is not encumbered by such fiscal concerns. He has an inspiration: how about a small second stage stuck way out in the middle of the audience and connected to the main stage by a ramp? Then, after hitting the crowd with all this high-tech hoopla, the band can stroll out to the B stage and busk with acoustic guitars. Kind of like in Elvis's '68 comeback special when, after tearing up the joint with rock & roll, he went out and sat surrounded by the audience and strummed the old songs with his band. The designers aren't sure how to make that work, but they say they'll try it. They eventually come up with a design for a long ramp departing from Edge's side of the stage

[37]

and ending in a small platform. It is like a big fist at the end of a long, thin arm.

Larry's question hangs in the air. What is it going to cost? One element essential to the whole enterprise is the purchase of a Vidiwall, a giant television screen. The bad news is, it costs four to five million dollars. The good news is, the Vidiwall is built by Philips, the company that owns Polygram, the company that just bought Island, the record label to which U2 is signed! McGuinness has been wanting the band to meet Alain Levy, the head of Polygram. The band hatch a plan to invite Levy over and really butter him up. They will invite him to dinner at Adam's house and to spend the night at Bono's-and they'll hit him with the notion that it would be great for everyone if Philips gave U2 the Zoo video gear for free-as a demonstration of corporate synergy. Here's the hardware from Philips, the album from Polygram, and the music from U2.

At dinner Levy, a Frenchman, seems neither unpleasant nor overly chummy. What he clearly is is smart. Bono figures if they try to play games with the guy they'll just insult him. After all, Philips/Polygram just paid $300 million for Island, essentially to get U2. They must like the band. So during dinner Bono leans over and asks: How about you asking Philips to give us the video screens? Levy looks at Bono coldly and says, "You don't even wait for dessert to ask me this?"

Bono is taken aback. Levy continues coolly: "I'm not stupid. I know why you asked me here. I'll look into it. We'll see."

To U2's disappointment (and resentment) Philips rejects Levy's pro-posal. U2 will have to fork out the money for their Vidiscreens like anybody else. Apparently the research scientists at the electronics com-pany care less about U2 than they would about a longer-burning lightbulb. Levy gets Polygram to kick in a half million bucks or so in tour support, as a gesture of goodwill.

By the time U2 starts getting a fix on just how expensive their plans are going to be to execute, Larry's not the only one swallowing hard. Mounting Zoo TV could easily cost $50 million. They agree to take it one step at a time. The album is coming out in time for Christmas of 1991. In the spring they will do a tour of indoor arenas in the USA and Europe. If the album is not well received or if the shows don't sell out as quickly as they expect them to, that may be all they do. Perhaps next summer they could do some sort of TV concert as a finale. McGum-

[38]

ness suggests they could even broadcast such a show from the Trabant factory.

If Achtung Baby is a hit and the ticket demand is big enough, they will return to America to play football stadiums in the second half of the summer. But with the cost of this show, the potential profit margin is only 4 to 5 percent. If U2 commits to playing outdoors and then America has a cold, rainy summer, they could end up wiping out their savings in indulging their creative impulses.

Bono is nonetheless delighted by all the possibilities the new gear- and the new idea of U2-offers. When the big TV monitors arrive they are desposited in the Factory, the building where U2 rehearses and Bono walks between them explaining how it will all work like a kid contemplating the train set he's getting for Christmas.

He asks if I'm familiar with the headline-type aphorisms of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. I am. They are New York artists known for bold-lettered proclamations. Bono points out that the song "The Fly" is full of new truisms ("A liar won't believe anyone else") and when they play that song live he wants the screens to flash all sorts of epigrams, messages, and buzz words, from Call your mother to Guilt is not of Cod. to Pussy.

"I really enjoy addressing the subject of rock & roll itself," Bono says, referring to the over-the-top staging, as well as his own new Fly persona. "Ask yourself, what would Dali or Picasso have done if they had video at their disposal. If they had samplers or sequencers or drum machines or electric guitars, photography, cinematography!"

I'm having a little trouble imagining it, actually. This seems like a really good way for even a wealthy band to go broke. Another line from "The Fly" is "Ambition bites the nails of success."

5. A Trip Through Edges Wires

Achtunc baby is released just before Christmas of 1991 to good reviews and strong sales. Shortly after it hits number one on the Billboard charts, the Soviet Union collapses. Coincidence? Let history judge.

Arriving in Dublin in January, I am greeted at my hotel by a note from Bono: "Welcome to Nighttown." When I head down to the Factory, Zoo TV tour rehearsals have passed the point of anxiety and are approaching frenzy.

The Factory occupies an old stone mill near the Dublin docks. To get in you ring a buzzer in a black door in a stone wall, climb an indoor fire escape, pass through a security door and desk, go through swinging doors, and proceed down a very long corridor. As you walk down the hall the music gets louder and louder. Sort of like Get Smart. Then you turn a corner, open another door, and there's U2 blasting through "The Fly." Bono's listening to the band, swaying in place at the soundboard and making suggestions to engineer Joe O'Herlihy. Larry and Adam are creating a fat, funky bottom. The Edge is stretching out, filling in all the sonic colors of the album version of the song while singing the high countervocal that Bono overdubbed on the record.

"We've been trying to work out how to get all the Achtung Baby sounds live," Bono explains when the song finishes. "Basically, we can do it if Edge plays something different with every one of his appendages.

U2's American tour begins on March I, 1992. At this point- January 14-Bono reckons they are one week behind schedule with one

[40]

week left to go here in Dublin before they pack up all the gear and move to the States. Bono says that the material they have worked on has been so good that he's not worried about running late. Edge, however, is. He now understands how much can go wrong on a tour this big. "In the past"-he smiles-"I didn't know. I thought it was easy."

The band picks up their instruments again and begins "Mysterious Ways." Over the opening groove Bono chants, "Who loves you? Who loves you? Who loves you?" (He calls it the Kojak Mix.) Edge estab-lishes a thick post-wah-wah guitar groove that suggests what might have happened if the Isley Brothers had joined the Manchester rave scene.

At 7:30 rehearsal breaks up and Edge, Bono, and Adam head to Kitty O'Shea's, a nearby pub. That it is my birthday is all the excuse these Irishmen need to begin a night-long beer and blarney session. U2 recounts the usual tall stories: meeting Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, being summoned backstage at Madison Square Garden by Michael Jackson, the compelling but at times unsettling brilliance of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. These boys have been keeping fast company and, I think, measuring themselves against the icons they encounter.

When we get on the subject of Zoo TV and all its proposed monkey business, I ask Bono to enlighten me about how the multimedia silliness reflects, for example, the Gulf War.

"It's Guernica.'" Bono responds.

Let me clean out my ears, Bono, I thought you said, "It's Guernica."

"The response has to contain the energy of the thing it is describ-ing," Bono says. "To capture the madness of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso imbued his work with that madness, and with the surreal."

Blame it on the rotgut, but this starts making a lot of sense to me. I suppose, I suggest, that from "The Rape of the Sabine Women" on, every attempt to use beauty as a vehicle to describe brutality ends up glorifying the brutality, and more generations sign up for the next war.

"That's right." Bono nods. "That's exactly right."

So the way to represent war is as Picasso does in "Guernica," with distorted screaming horses and cubist knives, or as Zoo TV does, with a media barrage that mixes films of cruise missiles and nuclear bombs with rapid-fire video snatches of TV commercials and campy rock & roll singers in leather suits-a live and onstage re-creation of the couch-potato view of the Gulf War. Sounds great in theory; let's see how it works in the civic center!

[41]

Edge has to leave Ireland before dawn so he can fly to New York to induct the Yardbirds-Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck among them-into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Edge appreciates both the honor and the irony of a guitarist who has done more than anyone to dismantle the old myth of the guitar hero inducting the three men most responsible for creating it. At the pub, what started out as one or two drinks turns into one or two barrels and Tuesday has given way to Wednesday by the time Edge goes home to catch a couple of hours

sleep.

I am flying with Edge so I get up to leave, too, but Bono and Adam remind me, "It's your birthday," and convince me to stay for another round. Adam was supposed to be coming with us, but there's trouble with U.S. immigration over an Irish marijuana bust a couple of years ago, so the bassist will be sitting out this trip. Which means I'm the only one still in the pub who can't sleep late tomorrow.

After the bar has closed and the other patrons leave, Bono goes looking for a guitar so he can sing me a country song he's written called "Slow Dancing." It's a beautiful tune about longing and faithlessness- typical Nashville and U2 subjects. He sent it to Willie Nelson but never got a reply.

Walking home through a dark tunnel, Bono insists we throw our arms over each other's shoulders and sing the theme from The Monkees. He's still upset because he was shot down in his bid to get U2 to adopt the names of the Monkees as hotel pseudonyms for this tour. Bono wanted to be Davy Jones, the short, maracas-shaking singer. Edge was to be Mike Nesmith, the serious, wool-hatted guitarist. He thought Adam might object to being the troublemaking blond bimbo Peter Tork, but Adam said no problem. The whole idea sank when Larry refused to be Mickey Dolenz.

Edge's version of the story is slightly different; he told me it wasn't Larry who shot down the plan; it was the fact that the Monkees names are more famous than the names of the members of U2. "We'd still have fans ringing the rooms," Edge protested, "but it'll be somebody else's fans!"

Bono should have learned this lesson by now. During the Joshua Tree tour he registered in hotels as "Tony Orlando" until one night when he ended up in the same hotel with the real Tony Orlando and chaos ensued. He then switched to a name no one else was likely to have:

[42]

"Harry Bullocks." He had to give that up when All refused to be Mrs. Harry Bullocks. He should learn a lesson from Adam ("Maxwell House") or Larry ("Mr. T. Bag").

Many such stupid things sound funny when you've been up all night drinking. It's even something of a knee-slapper when Bono throws himself so completely into The Monkees theme while parading through the auto tunnel that he doesn't see the car headlights bearing down on him until I yank him out of the way. (Imagine if I had not. People would be asking me Bono's last words and I'd have to say, " 'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees and people say we monkey around.' ")

All this hilarity seems a lot less funny forty-five minutes after I fall asleep, when the alarm goes off and I have to stagger to the airport to meet Edge. When the sun comes up we are on a plane from Ireland to England, where we will make a connection for a flight to New York.

As I stare at the greasy sausages staring back at me I calculate that this day-which thanks to changes in time zones will include twenty-nine hours-is looking far too long to be any good. A car picks us up at Heathrow to drive us from one terminal to another, where we sit in a smoky departure lounge for an hour and try to get some work done. The ambitious conceit is that Edge and I will cover the entire history of U2 between here and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"Achtung Baby is definitely a reaction to the myth of U2," Edge begins as he has his second cup of coffee. "We really never had any control over that myth. You could say we helped it along a bit, but the actual myth itself is a creation of the media and people's imagination. Like all myths. There is very little resemblence to the actual personalities of the band or the intentions of the band, and Achtung Baby balances things out a bit."

"But the myth has a basis in the personalities," I protest. (Hey, at this point I'd protest "Hello.") "For example, the cartoon image of Bono may be a caricature-but like all caricatures it bears some exaggerated resemblence to the real person."

"It's a caricature of one facet of his character. It's Bono as seen through the songs. But the character of Bono is totally different to that. Maybe over our career our ability to create music that shows the full range of the personalities of Bono and the other members of the band was very poor. But that's the truth-that guy is totally different to the way most people think of him. He's far funnier, takes himself far less seriously than most people think. He's wild, he's not reserved. None of

the cliches that spring to mind when you think of people's perception of

him.

"This is not Just a problem for Bono, this is a problem for the whole band. Everyone has this sort of caricature impression of what we are like. We just decided that we were going to find out how we could allow the other aspects of ourselves to come through. We're exploring whole new avenues of music and it's great fun. I mean, we can do it as well, that's what's brilliant about it. That's the good news for us. It's actually something we can do! I suppose we just weren't that interested early on."

I ask Edge if, because U2 was serious and focused at a very young age, the band is now going through at thirty what most young men go through at twenty.

"I think there's a bit of that, yeah. This is actually quite an important point. Throughout our career we've been struggling and fighting for survival: to get out of Ireland in the first place, to get a deal, to just make it happen. And I think we've finally got to a stage where we realized we could relax a bit. It's still not easy, but it doesn't have to be quite so much do or die."

"Do you think that Bono was talking to you in some of the Adstung Baby lyrics?"

"I think that what was going on in my life had an influence on Bono and therefore on the lyrics to some of the songs," Edge says evenly. "That's for sure. A lot of people have read into the lyrics that it's the story of my marriage breaking down. I'm not denying that that has had an influence, but I think there's a lot of stories in there and it's not just my story."

I suggest to Edge that it would have been easy to end the album with "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World," letting the listener off the hook with an all-is-forgiven finale. But U2 makes us go back inside the house with him and face the consequences of his betrayals.

"Yeah, it's not a very comforting ending, is it?" Edge says, and then he considers it and adds, "But that's okay, I think. I suppose that's what we've learned. Things aren't all okay out there. But that's the way it is." Our flight is called halfway through our second breakfast and we make our way to the boarding gate, past young Londoners who do double takes and then yell, " 'Ey, Edge.' 'Ow 'bout an autograp'?" Once we sink into the nice, comfortable seats of the first-class bubble that sits

[44]

like a tumor atop the plane, we turn back the clock to the birth of U2 and begin our excavation in earnest.

"I suppose it really starts with picking up the electric guitar, age fifteen, and playing a lot of cover versions," Edge says. "Knowing a few Rory Gallagher licks or whatever. Then suddenly you're in this band and there's all this fantastic music coming at you that challenges every-thing that you believed about what the electric guitar was for. Suddenly the question is, 'What are you saying with it?' Not 'Can you play this lick?' or 'What's your speed like?' It's, 'What are you saying with your instrument? What is being communicated in this song?' Suddenly gui-tars were not things to be waved in front of the audience but now were something you used to reach out to the crowd. If you were in the fourth row of the Jam concert at the Top Hat Ballroom in Dunleary in 1980, when Paul Weller hit that Rickenbacker twelve-string, it meant some-thing and it said something that everyone in that building knew. There were other bands, other guitar players. They all sounded different, but they all had that thing in common which was that there was something behind what they did, which was communicating.

"I had to totally reexamine the way I played. It was such a challenging thing to hold up your style against this and say, 'Well, what are you saying? What is this song about? What does that note mean? Why that note?' So much of this bad white-blues barroom stuff that was around at the time was just guitar players running up and down the freeboard. It was just a kind of big wank. There was nothing to it, it was gymnastics. I started trying to find out what this thing around my neck could do in the context of this band. Songs were coming through and 'Well, that sort of works' and integrating the echo box, which was a means of further coloring the sound, controlling the tone of the guitar. I was not going for purity, I was going for the opposite. I was trying to fuck up the sound as much as possible, go for something that was definitely messed with, definitely tampered with, had a character that was not just the regular guitar sound.

"Then I suppose I started to see a style coming through. I started to see how notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don't just throw them around. I find the ones that do the best job and that's what I use. I suppose I'm a minimalist instinctively. I don't like to be inefficient if I can get away with it. Like on the end of 'With or Without You.' My instinct was to

[45]

go with something very simple. Everyone else said, 'Nah, you can't do that.' I won the argument and I still think it's sort of brave, because the end of 'With or Without You' could have been so much bigger, so much more of a climax, but there's this power to it which I think is even more potent because it's held back.

"I suppose ultimately I'm interested in music. I'm a musician. I'm not a gunslinger. That's the difference between what I do and what a lot of guitar heroes do."

Ten or twelve years into this, I remind Edge, he can look out at a lot of guitarists he's influenced.

"Yeah." He shrugs. "Unfortunately when something is distilled down to a simple style, those who copy the style basically are copying some-thing very flat. You take what I do, bring it down to a little, short formula and try and apply it in another context, another guitar player, another song-it's going to sound terrible. I think that's probably what's happened to Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. So many of their strong ideas have been taken up by other guitar players in other bands and the result is some pretty awful music. Heavy metal for one."

The first U2 albums were dominated by Edge's heavy use of an echo effect on his guitar. It fattened the band's sound, covering up the fact that neither the guitarist nor bassist in this band were playing very much. It also gave the early U2 songs a feeling of reverberating size and -not least-laid a coat of common personality over the material. U2 had a sound.

Edge says it started with Bono: "We had a song we were working on called 'A Day Without Me' and Bono kept saying, 'I hear this echo thing, like the chord repeating.' So I said, I'd better get an echo unit for this single. I got one down to rehearsal and played around with it with limited success. I didn't really like it; I thought it muddied up the sound. Then I bought my own unit, a Memory Man Deluxe made by Electro-Harmonix. I mean, Electro-Harmonix made the cheapest and trashiest guitar things, but they always had great personality. This Memory Man had this certain sound and I really loved it. I just played with it for weeks and weeks, integrating it into some of the songs we'd already written. Out of using it, a whole other set of songs started to come out."

[46]

Was there any moment when Bono said, "Oh, no, I've created a monster! Turn that echo off!"?

"When the War album was coming together we all-but particularly Bono-felt that we should try to get away from that echoey thing," Edge says. "It was a very conscious attempt at doing something more abrasive, less ethereal, more hard-edged. Less of that distant thing. I realized that the echo could become too much of a gimmick. There are a couple of tricks you can do with a guitar and echo that sound impressive, but I could see they were blind alleys. I've always left it and gone back to it. I don't like to use effects in an obvious way. You get sick of the same textures. Variety becomes important."

Between the first album, which established U2 as a hot underground band, and War, which began moving them into the mainstream, MTV, and headlining arenas, came the troubled second album, October. Re-corded quickly, with Bono improvising words after his lyric notebooks were stolen, the album reflected the moment when U2 almost split up over Bono, Edge, and Larry's embrace of charismatic Christianity, much to the chagrin of Adam and McGumness.

"I think October suffered as an album because of the lack of time we had to prepare it, but it actually is a pretty good record," Edge says. "There's some real spontaneity, some real freshness, because we didn't have time to have it any other way. I like 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' 'Tomorrow.' 'October' was a song that could have gone places but we didn't have time to do any more with it, so we said, 'Well, let's just put it out as it is.'

"October is a very European record because just prior to writing those songs and recording the album we spent all our time touring around Europe. We'd never been to Germany, Holland, Belgium, France. We would drive through these bleak German landscapes in winter. Those tones and colors definitely came through in the songs that we wrote.

"It was a real eye-opener. Boy was written and recorded in the context of Dublin. Four guys get together, decide to be a band, write some songs because they get inspired by this huge new sort of music happen-ing across the water. There's all these albums filtering back: the Jam, Patti Smith's Horses was a very big album for us, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. It was an incredibly exciting time. But here we are in Dublin, trying to make sense of the stuff we're hearing from out there, trying to make sense of our own life in the context of Dublin.

[47]

Then we end up in the middle of Europe in a Transit van, driving down the corridor between East and West Germany, going to Berlin. It just gave us a totally different perspective. In a weird way it was a more Irish perspective, because suddenly our Irishness became more tangible to us, much more obvious, maybe even more important.

"October was a struggle from beginning to end. It was an incredibly hard record to make for us because we had major problems with time. And I had been through this thing of not knowing if I should be in the band or not. It was really difficult to pull all the things together and still maintain the focus to actually finish a record in the time that we had. You could hear the desperation and confusion in some of the lyrics. 'Gloria' is really a lyric about not being able to express what's going on, not being able to put it down, not knowing where we are. Having thrown ourselves into this thing we were trying to make some sense of it. 'Why are we in this?' It was a very difficult time."

"You and Larry and Bono were having doubts about whether it was okay for you as Christians to devote your lives to a rock band."

"It was reconciling two things that seemed for us at that moment to be mutually exclusive," Edge says. "We never did resolve the contradic-tions. That's the truth. And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now."

Even at the time of October U2 resisted going public with their Christianity. I remember writing an article about U2 at the very mo-ment when the future of the band was in doubt-a struggle everyone around them was trying hard to conceal from the outside world. I knew about U2's faith, but when I got McGuinness on the phone and asked him to go on the record about it he backpedaled like a man about to bicycle over a cliff.

I was still very nervous about the Christian label," Edge says. "I have no trouble with Christ, but I have trouble with a lot of Christians. That was the problem. We wanted to give ourselves the chance to be viewed without that thing hanging over us. I don't think we're worried about it now. Also, at that stage we were going through our most out-there phase, spiritually. It was incredibly intense. We were just so involved with it. It was a time in our lives where we really concentrated on it more than on almost anything. Except Adam, who just wasn't inter-ested."

Adam's distance from the rest of the band at that time was easy to

[48]

spot. The guy most interested in the fun of being a rock & roller found himself in the ridiculous position of having finally seen his band get a record deal, tour internationally, and start to build a great reputation- when the other three guys began to talk about rejecting all that. Adam was not happy. A friend of mine who had just been forced out of a big band was staying at my house when I brought October home. He looked at the cover photo, pointed to Adam, and said, "That guy's going to get sacked. Look at how the other three are forming a circle and he's outside it."

I tell this to Edge and he's surprised. "Well, he was wrong, but he was also right," Edge says of my friend's analysis. "We never considered firing Adam. That would have been completely ridiculous. But I think Adam did feel kind of isolated, marginalized during that period. It wasn't our intention to do that, but I suppose it is inevitable he felt a little like the odd guy."

Even after Bono and Larry decided it was okay to go on with U2, there were a couple of weeks in 1981 when word spread that Edge had quit. I remember complete radio silence descending over the U2 camp, at the end of which I got a call from Ellen Darst saying the fire was out, Edge was still in.

"I didn't actually leave the band," Edge says, "but there was a two-week period where I put everything on hold and I said, 'Look, I can't continue in my conscience in this band at the moment. So hold every-thing. I want to go away and think about this. I just need a couple of weeks to reassess where I'm headed here and whether I can really com-mit to this band or whether at this point I just have to back out.' Because we were getting a lot of people in our ear saying, 'This is impossible, you guys are Christians, you can't be in a band. It's a contradiction and you have to go one way or the other.' They said a lot of worse things than that as well. So I just wanted to find out. I was sick of people not really knowing and me not knowing whether this was right for me. So I took two weeks. Within a day or two I just knew that all this stuff was bullshit. We were the band. Okay, it's a contradiction for some, but it's a contradiction that I'm able to live with. I just decided that I was going to live with it. I wasn't going to try to explain it because I can't. So I went forward from that point on, and it was great in a way because it did get rid of all that shit. It was like, 'That's gone. Right,

[49]

This band is going forward, there is no doubt in anyone's mind.' So we carried on.

"I remember walking down the beach and breaking the news to Bono. 'Listen, mate, I really need to find out about this. I can't go on unless I really find out.' He kind of looked at me and I thought he was really going to freak out, but he actually just said, 'Okay, fine. If you're not up for it, that's it. We're going to break up the band. There's no point going on.' I think he felt exactly like I did, just wanted to know which way to go. Then, once the decision was made, that would be it, there would be no more doubt, no more second guessing. There would be no more taking other people's advice. This was our chosen path."

You were twenty then. You're thirty now. Do you feel that the old pieties no longer work as well for you?

"I suppose we've changed our attitudes a lot since then," Edge says. "The central faith and spirit of the band is the same. But I have less and less time for legalism now. I just see that you live a life of faith. It's nothing to do necessarily with what clothes you wear or whether you drink or smoke or who you're seeing or not seeing."

The stewardess comes around with our third breakfast. As we fly west and the clock keeps running backward it never gets any later. I ask Edge about U2's fourth album, the first with Eno and Lanois. "Most of your albums capture a moment," I tell him. "The Unforgettable Fire is the only one that stands completely outside of time."

"It's interesting that you say that," Edge says, buttering up a bun and me at the same time. "We've had discussions about that very point. There is a quality to great work which is timeless. You've got to balance being relevant and commenting on something that's happening today with trying to attain that timelessness. Unforgettable Fire is probably less fixed to any time, more a work that will mean the same in ten years as it meant when it was released.

"On Unforgettable Fire probably more than our other records the music has such a strong voice that Bono's vocals are almost like another musical element. We got criticized that it was a sort of cop-out, that we weren't writing songs anymore, that this was ill-disciplined work. I could see where the reviews were coming from, based on probably a weekend listening to it, but I knew there was far more to it than just that. It was not U2 going arty, there was actually something there that was really valuable and enduring. I still listen to that record."

[50]

We take a break from the trip down memory lane while Edge writes the speech he will make tonight inducting the Yardbirds into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He scribbles away, reading me bits as I grunt approval. We get into a long argument about the correct pronunciation of Chris Dreja's name. After that we try to watch the in-flight movie, Regarding Henry, with Harrison Ford as a mean, materialistic guy who turns sweet and understanding after getting shot in the head. If my own head was clearer I might construct a horrible metaphor here for some aspect of U2, so consider yourself lucky that Edge gives up on the movie and we start talking again. I ask him if the sheer size of the operation U2 is assembling for this tour is intimidating.

"Yeah, a bit," Edge says. "But what's actually more intimidating is the expectations. I don't really worry about mistakes. I've never had a problem with mistakes. There's a certain thing that happens to us onstage, a certain spark, a certain electricity. It's impossible to describe but it's sort of like that is the show, you know? That's what the band's always had. 'Chemistry' only describes one aspect of it. We haven't played for a while and we're assuming that spirit, that spark will still be there. I don't know whether it will. I remember shows when it wasn't there. It scared the shit out of me. It was like, 'Oh . . . this thing can go away!' That was an eye-opener. I suppose if I have any dark fears it's that that thing will have gone."

Did you think it was gone in Berlin at the start of the Achtung Baby sessions?

"There were some pretty difficult moments." Edge sighs. "It really tested everyone very severely. To get over that hump and get on with that record and finish it was not easy. We rode out that storm and I think it's a great record. I'm delighted with it. Actually I think U2 has got a lot of great records left. I think we're good for another ten years at least. I think we're getting better on almost every level, and the commit-ment is still there."

I ask what he thinks was missing at Hansa.

"To put it in a word, the magic just wasn't there. Whether it was the playing, the material, the arrangements, the direction of the material, the studio, the flute sound, who knows why? It just wasn't happening."

Perhaps to avoid blaming other members of the band, Edge tended to focus his early frustrations in Berlin on Dan Lanois. Larry warned me to be careful of buying that line, saying Danny was no more at sea than

[51]

any of them. Lanois was unknown when Eno brought him along for Unforgettable Fire, but he has since developed a distinctive style, earthy and ethereal, that he has brought to two terrific albums of his own songs, as well as productions for Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan, and the Neville Brothers. Edge suggests that Lanois has to be careful that that seductive sound does not become a cliche.

"In Achtung Baby Danny knew he was not going back to the swamp," Edge says. "He knew this was going to be something different. I don't think he fully appreciated how different it was going to be and how difficult it was going to be for him to adjust. There were a couple of weeks where it was, 'Does Danny get this?' But Brian came in and Danny and Brian work off each other very well, because Brian is so clear, so opinionated, and so dead-ahead. Danny is, by comparison, instinctive. He feeds off Brian's theoretical side, but he's got all this music coming out of every pore. So Danny was kind of tuning in on what Brian was feeling and thinking, based on what we were saying and playing. Danny really started to get it then, and that was good."

In America a man accused of murdering a young TV actress named Rebecca Schaeffer claimed that he was inspired by listening to the U2 song "Exit," which takes a trip through the head of a violent man losing control. Bono has said that it sounds like a clever lawyer trying to create a novel defense, but it's something U2 doesn't like drawing attention to. When I mention it to Edge he gets cranky.

"Well, what do you want me to say?" he asks. "I think it is very heavy. It gets back to self-censorship. Should any artist hold back from putting out something because he's afraid of what somebody else might do as a result of his work? I would hate to see censorship come in, whether from the government or, from my point of view, personal."

"Exit" was from The Joshua Tree, U2's exploration of America, and their most popular album. I ask Edge what the band was trying to capture.

"I think that record was a great stepping-stone for Bono as a lyricist. He was going for something. Points of reference were the New Journal-ism, The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, the bleak American desert landscape as a metaphor. There's a definite cinematic location, a landscape of words and images and themes that made up The Joshua Tree. It's a subtle balance, a blend of the songs and lyrics."

The album's emotional high point was "Bullet the Blue Sky," a song

[52]

that had been started in Dublin before Bono and Ali went on a trip to Central America in 1986. Bono had the very novelistic notion that if he was going to write about the United States, he had to see the worst side of the American dream, the imperialism that was manifesting itself in undeclared war in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He came back to Ireland with lyrics about what he'd experienced and a challenge for Edge: to "Put El Salvador through your amplifier."

Edge played like a bombing raid on that track, liberated by the subject matter to indulge in some of the heavy guitar rock muscle he usually avoids. Some of the success of his soloing was accidental-he didn't know the tape was rolling and did not have his headphones on, he was just playing with weird guitar noises when he looked up and saw Bono and Lanois looking through the studio glass giving him high signs and going, "Yeah! Yeah!"

I ask Edge what goes through his head when he plays "Bullet" onstage.

"Whoa." He smiles. " 'Hope I don't fuck up!' It's obviously an incredibly dark song. We used to call that part of the set 'The Heart of Darkness.' From 'Bullet' to 'Exit' was all very, very intense. Sometimes Bono would come offstage in the break and would not have left charac-ter. The darkness would still be there with him. Sometimes it was hard for him to shake it off and get into playing the next songs. That darkness has a certain kind of adrenaline."

Speaking of that, the British reviewer Mat Snow wrote in Q magazine that "Until the End of the World," on the new album, which seems to be a dialogue between a macho guy and the women he's just kissed off, is actually Judas speaking to Jesus.

"Yeah," Edge says. "There's an Irish poet named Brendan Kennelly who's written a book of poems about Judas. One of the lines is, 'If you want to serve the age, betray it.' That really set my head reeling. He's fascinated with the whole moral concept of 'Where would we be with-out Judas?' I do think there is some truth that in highlighting what is rather than what we would ideally like to be, you're on the one hand betraying a sort of unwritten rule, but you're also serving."

Bono actually wrote an enthusiastic review of Kennelly's Book of Judas for the Irish Sunday Press, enthusing, "This is poetry as base as heavy metal, as high as the Holy Spirit flies, comic and tragic, from litany to rant, roaring at times, soaring at other times. Like David in the psalms,

[53]

like Robert Johnson in the blues, the poet scratches out Screwtape Letters to a God who may or may not have abandoned him and of course to anyone else who is listening." In the same paper Kennelly reviewed Achtung Baby with the enthusiasm of a practiced logroller but no evidence he'd played it more than once.

The plane is descending into JFK airport. I can see my bed from here! But it is not to welcome me anytime soon. Edge is whisked through a special VIP customs gate and we are shown to a waiting limousine. What makes Edge cool, though, is not that sort of Imelda Marcos treatment; what makes him cool is that he isn't carrying any other clothes. He will wear the mismatched jeans and desert coat he put on in the dark at home in Dublin onto a stage in New York, make a speech before the most powerful people in the music biz and many legends of rock, play guitar in an all-star jam session, and then probably socialize until morning and get on a plane back to Dublin, where the U2 rehearsals will continue.

On the way to the banquet, I bend Edge's captive ear with my theory about the difference between the sort of power trios Beck, Clapton, and Page formed after the Yardbirds, and U2. "The Jeff Beck Group, Cream, and Led Zeppelin grew out of the Hendrix model-a guitar hero blasting hot solos while the bassist and drummer played support," I say. "U2 seems to have more in common with the Who model, where all three pieces are equal and the guitar is the glue."

"I've always had a slight problem with the whole idea of guitar heroes and gunslinger guitar players," Edge says. "I was never really attracted to that. I think Townshend is different from the other players that you mentioned because he's primarily a songwriter. He understands the importance of guitar playing within the discipline of songwriting, as opposed to guitar playing that just justifies itself. I can appreciate, I suppose, guitar players who just get up there and improvise over bass and drums, but it's not something that interests me that much."

Edge nonetheless makes a generous speech inducting the Yardbirds into the Hall of Fame, and suggesting diplomatically that the shadow they cast was so long that players such as himself had to devote them-selves to finding something left to do outside of it.

At midnight Eastern time (5 a.m. back in Dublin) he is on a stage at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, playing "All Along the Watchtower" and other guitar blowouts with an all-star band that includes-lined up

6. Treat Me Like a Girl

a swinging models and transvestites party/ preachers who live in glass cathedrals/ a phone call from hell/ pickup lines of the great authors/ adam's interest in ladies' underwear

later in the winter all of U2 lands in New York and tramps around Times Square looking urban for the video camera of their old documenter, director Phil Joanou. After U2 Rattle and Hum elevated him to the big time, Joanou directed the Hitchcockian Final Analysis with Richard Gere and the Scorsesean State of Grace with Sean Penn and Gary Oldman. He has agreed to slip down from that high cinematic perch to rescue "One," the Achtung Baby track most likely to give U2 a number one single, from its first two videos. The first "One" video featured U2 in drag; not the sort of thing the band imagined MTV would care to dish up to middle America. The second "One" video was a slow-motion film of a buffalo running over a cliff-a nice metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, perhaps, but not sizzling promotion. Tonight's assignment is to make a "One" promo the TV audience can love. After traipsing around Manhattan for a while, the band, the director, and his crew decamp to Nell's, a Manhattan night-club that was chic in the eighties, when money flowed like champagne in New York and cocaine was laid out like loose floozies. Nell's has been cleared for the night so that Joanou can execute his vision of "One." For anyone not employed to be here this would be a dull enterprise if not for (a) the lavish banquet, (b) the generous bar, and, most of all, (c) the extras: gorgeous young female models and garish transvestites from the New York demimonde.

Upstairs