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 night­club 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, lights and cameras are mounted and Bono, with a few great-looking extras around him, is sitting at a table mouthing the song's lyrics over and over while a tape plays. Downstairs the basement party

[56]

rooms are full of gorgeous women and cross-dressed men. Edge is being painted by a makeup woman while tray after tray of catered food is layed out. There are big plates of M&M's and Hershey's Kisses and chocolate chip cookies and Bazooka bubblegum. The bars are open and free drinks are pumped out by barmaids as striking as the models.

Upstairs Bono has to lip-synch "One" for seven hours. Downstairs the rest of the band and their staff and friends and the models and the transvestites party and wait to be called to the set and party some more.

What can one say about a soiree where all the woman are profes­sional beauties and all the men are gay? A happy Adam Clayton ex­plains, "If you can't pull tonight, you're hopeless." Every time the cameraman changes film Bono bounds down the stairs, trying to get into the fun. Then, just as he raises a glass to his lips, his name is shouted and he has to go back and mime under the hot lights some more.

At 10 p.m. Bono leaps into record producer Hal Winner's lap and begins telling tall stories when a series of voices, like echoes through the Grand Canyon, comes down the stairs: "Bono! Bono! Bono!" He sighs and goes back to work. A huge Divine-like drag queen leers at U2's drummer's backside and tells her friend, "I've got to get Larry Mullen's room number!"

At midnight I wander onto the set and Bono engages me in an intense discussion of what he hopes to accomplish with the Zoo TV tour. He talks about embracing irony, the stupid glamor of rock & roll, the mirror balls and limousines—without abandoning the truth at the heart of the music itself. He compares it to Elvis Presley in a jumpsuit singing "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" to a weeping woman in Las Vegas. It might have been hopelessly kitsch, but if the woman believed in the song and Elvis believed in the song, it was not phony. Maybe rock & roll was at its truest in the space between those apparent contradictions.

"Basically," Bono says, "it's waking up to the fact that there's a lot of bullshit in rock & roll, but some of the bullshit is pretty cool. That's important to me, because we thought success was this big bad wolf. It seemed to compromise us, to make us look like charlatans. Getting all this money for things we'd do for free. I thought they'd shut us up finally, because how do you write about some of the stuff that I'm interested in writing about and be in big business? Suddenly I felt gagged. If I wrote a song about the Gulf War, then that would be

 [57]

making money out of the war! I couldn't write a song about faith and doubt anymore because that would turn me into the preacher in this glass cathedral of rock & roll. So I decided the only way was, instead of running away from the contradictions, I should run into them and wrap my arms around them and give 'em a big kiss. Actually write about hypocrisy, because I've never seen a righteous man that looked like one. So I wrote about that, and actually turn myself into, literally, 'a preacher stealing hearts in a traveling show.' Rather than write about the charac­ter, become the character. Rather than write about some sleazy psycho, become one. I didn't realize these sleazy psychos had so much fun!

"I always felt like 'The Fly' was this phone call from hell. You know, with the distorted voice and shit. It's a call from hell—but the guy likes it there! 'Honey, I know it's hot here . . . but I like it!' " We have a good laugh at that one and Bono adds, "Another subject that I'm interested in is rock & roll itself—the medium and the machine. I hope that comes through. One of the greatest contradictions of rock & roll is that it's very personal, private music made on a huge public address system."

At 1:30 in the morning Edge is seated in a chair in the middle of the downstairs room talking intently to a model. One of the drag queens has taken off her huge, heavy, helmetlike wig with ostrich feather and left it on the chair behind Edge. Hal Willner, who has been drinking beer all night and is now slightly out of focus, picks up the wig, weighs it in his hands, and studies the back of Edge's head. Hal creeps up behind the oblivious Edge like Hiawatha and starts maneuvering to drop the great hairpiece onto the guitarist's dome. Suddenly a harpielike voice cuts across the party: "Put down my wig!" Hal looks up to see a fierce, bald drag queen looming toward him. He drops the wig and bolts.

By 3 a.m. it is dawning on Larry, Adam, Edge, the transvestites, and the models that they may never be called to the set. "One" is quickly becoming an all-Bono video. The mood downstairs starts getting a little edgy. Nell seems to have let some of her regulars slip in. Author Jay Mclnerny appears, finds a drink, and tries to engage a young woman by saying, "When I wrote my first novel, Bright Lights, Big City . . "

Paul McGuinness notices a Manhattan society type surreptitiously snapping photos. He corners her and she claims in vague Vogue-speak. that she only has her camera with her because she's coming from a party

[58]

At Anna Wintour's place. . . . McGuinness ain't buying it. He doesn't believe she is really the spaced-out socialite she seems to be—he figures her for an undercover newspaper photographer and tears into her. I reckon the manager is being paranoid, but the next night I see the woman again, shooting pictures of a Sting rain forest benefit for a New York tabloid. Yep, she says—her space-shot society manner replaced by a no-bullshit attitude—McGuinness had her pegged. That's why he's a big-time manager. Everybody at Nell's was pretending to be something they weren't.

It occurs to me that not only did Adam, Larry, and Edge never get into the "One" video, but neither did all the transvestites. I ask Bono why the drag queens had been assembled, filmed standing around eating and drinking, but never used in the final cut. And what was the deal with the first video, with U2 in drag? Was there a subtext to that lyric that I missed?

"Originally," Bono says, "the idea of the video was that these were men whose understanding of women was so low that they dressed up as women to try and figure them out. That was the kind of absurd, Sam Beckett point of view we had. It wasn't related to transvestism. And then we thought, 'Oh, God, this is an AIDS benefit single! After the years it's taken the gay community to finally convince people that AIDS is not a gay issue, here's U2 dressing up as women!' "

Bono explains that filming U2 in drag, "had been based on the idea that if U2 can't do this, we've got to do it! We were in Santa Cruz, on this island off Africa, at carnival time. I've been going to carnivals for a few years. It's an interesting concept because it means carning——flesh, meat-eating before Lent, and the run up to Easter. I'm interested because it's not a denial of the flesh, it's a celebration. We were there, Anton Corbijn was there, everything was getting a bit silly, and we couldn't get out into the carnival looking like us. So rather than just dress up in fancy masks, Anton suggested that we dress up as women. So we went for it, and . . ." Bono starts laughing, "nobody wanted to take their clothes off for about a week! And I have to say, some people have been doing it ever since!"

⇐ Предыдущая14151617181920212223Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: