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 Journal­ism, 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 charac­ter. 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 with­out 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 them­selves 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

[54]

together—Carlos Santana, Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, Jimmy Page, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, and Keith Richards. (Beck is standing there but I'm not sure he ever actually plays.) Watching all these legend­ary guitar players interact I recognize, with some surprise, that Edge belongs among them. The sound he heard in his head has now been heard around the world, has been absorbed into rock & roll's vocabu­lary, and will continue to reverberate when he's as old and legendary as the company he's keeping tonight.

One roadie from the instrument rental company standing behind the stage can stand the proximity to greatness no longer. He slips up on the stage, plugs his guitar into a free jack in Edge's amp, and joins in— overloading the amp and blowing it out just as Neil Young points to Edge and calls for a solo. Edge is surprised when he leans in to wail and no sound comes out, but when he finds out what happened he thinks it's great—he figures there's more rock & roll spirit in that brave and sneaky roadie than in all the tuxedos in the house.

Treat Me Like a Girl

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