Is it any wonder that no one feels very peppy at the airport, waiting

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for the all-day flight out to Tokyo and back into winter? Production coordinator Tim Buckley surveys the ragged-out faces in the departure lounge and announces, "If we took all the broken parts here and put them together we might get one human being!"

Penny-Wise

Sore feelings above the pacific ocean/ tensions in the inner circle/ when adam and paul used to hunt as a pair/ this is not a band like most bands/ adam smith vs. the workers in the vineyard

adam's lost night in Australia brought close to the surface a tension that has been boiling under the surface of U2 all during this two-year tour. It revolves around the sort of argu­ment that outsiders never hear about and that the people closest to the band catch only in glimpses, because it is an argument between the family—Adam, Bono, Edge, Larry, and Paul.

From the start of Paul McGumness's association with U2, the four musicians and the manager agreed to share everything they made equally. "That was something I recommended right at the beginning," McGuinness explains. "It was pretty academic. There wasn't going to be any money for the first four or five years, so why fall out over what was undoubtedly going to be very little money? After the first wave of deals ended and were being renegotiated it seemed natural to them to con­tinue, though by then the alternative was pretty clear. They have simply continued to operate that way ever since."

Now, on the surface such sharing is not so uncommon in the music business. It is not unusual for a manager to get 20 percent, and for the members of a band to divide the rest. As U2 were a four-piece, all five principals ended up with an equal cut. It is unusual that the members of the group also elected to split the songwriting credits and royalties equally—but not unprecedented. The Clash did it that way before U2, and R.E.M. afterward.

Songwriting money, these groups realized, is a big source of the tension that breaks bands apart. There is as much money to be made

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From royalties on songs as there is from record sales, and it comes in a lot quicker. That's why Pete Townshend, who wrote almost all the Who songs, was much richer than his bandmates. That's why Sting had to let Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland get some of their (mediocre) songs on Police albums. That's why Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards formed publishing partnerships; it kept the two strongest members of the band equal and then kept their bandmates' songs at bay.

All money generated by U2—from record royalties to T-shirt sales —was split evenly between the five people. That's how they set it up at the beginning, that's what they stuck to, and it served them well for years.

Bono points out that hard feelings begin in a collective such as U2 because the partners who contribute less get as much as the partners who contribute more. There is no penalty if one member fails to do his share, though the guilt can be corrosive. Larry agrees but raises an equally crucial point: the partners who want to spend all the collective's money dip equally into everybody's wallets. Since in U2 the ones who contribute the most creatively are also the ones most likely to want to do the most expensive tour in rock history and refuse all commercial sponsorship and spend two years of hard work doing something that eats up almost all the profits, the five partners do end up in some sort of balance.

But it is unlike the balance in almost every other business partner­ship. During the difficult making of Acktung Baby, the fact that McGuinness was not a member of the band gave him what was perceived as an unfair advantage: he got an equal share of all the money that the band generated, but while they were in some miserable studio or distant stage generating it he could be off working on outside investments and projects that he did not have to share with U2.

Paul defended himself by pointing out that if anyone wanted to say he did not contribute as much to U2 as Bono did, fine—he would not argue, he would take a smaller percentage than Bono. But in that case let's evaluate how much everyone contributes and talk about constructing a sliding scale, which would put McGuinness somewhere beneath Bono but above Adam.

"Obviously Bono makes the biggest sacrifice," Paul says as the air­plane moves across the South Pacific, "in that the conventional calcula­tion of songwriting is that fifty percent goes to the lyric and fifty

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percent goes to the music. Since Bono writes all the lyrics and certainly a quarter of the music, that would give him under a normal regime 62.5 percent of the publishing income. He doesn't do that. But it is kind of up to him. This is, in a way, the thing that makes U2 work. It's foolish to call something a democratic structure if you've got officers and men. They have successfully avoided that confrontation. Obviously it remains under review."

Paul's management deal with U2 expired around the time the Zoo TV tour was starting, and they agreed to put aside the arguments about changing the five people's equity structure until after the whole two-year marathon was over. Now it's almost done, and these tensions are bub­bling up. Adam's missed gig in Australia reminded all of them that there was still at least one fight ahead. I suggest that missing the show in Australia may have been a blessing in disguise if Adam got a look at the ghost of Christmas future and decided to change his ways.

"Yes," Paul says. "Obviously he's got a problem and it never surfaced quite as spectacularly as that before. I'm really glad it was resolved the way it was. But it's something that we have to think a lot about next year. I don't know what's going to happen." Paul pauses for a moment and then says firmly, "It's not up to him anymore."

I ask if it's fair to say that Bono, Edge, and Larry form a sort of irreducible core, and that Paul and Adam, separately and together, move in and out of that core depending on what else is going on in their lives. Paul says, yes, that's fair to say. I ask, then, if when there are conflicts between Paul and the band, it serves his interests to have Adam pushed away, or if Adam might move closer to the other three if there were a band conflict with Paul.

McGuinness doesn't like where this is going. "I don't see it that way," he says. "I don't see it happening. Adam has, to some extent, removed himself over the last while from a responsibility for the band. But I haven't noticed what you describe.

There's been a very natural process over the years of growing up," Paul says. "We're ten years apart in age, they and I, and at the beginning they really knew very little about the world. Now they are five years older than I was when I started managing them. That enforced contact over that many years does produce a certain amount of irritation. We've all got quite good at staying out of each other's way, though we still genuinely enjoy each other's company." The manager looks at me firmly

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and says, "It is also a business relationship. And there's nothing wrong with that."

It's a business relationship that reflects the deep and sometimes conflicted feelings these five people have for each other. Adam was once the band member closest to Paul, and has, over the last ten years, moved farther and farther away from him. Both of them are way too proud, too tough, and too ancestrally British to ever admit it, but I can't help thinking that Paul may feel a little abandoned by Adam, and Adam— when he gets defensive—resents in Paul the qualities that he has worked hardest to erase in himself.

First, understand how much they shared. Adam was U2's manager until he recruited Paul to take over. Paul and Adam were both English kids in Ireland, sons of R.A.F. pilots, rebels who had rejected the family expectations held out for them but who retained British social graces and a British notion of sophistication. They pretended to be worldly, and eventually they were. In all those things they stood apart from Bono, Edge, and Larry, who were naive, parochial, style-unconscious, and—eventually—charismatic Christians.

Although U2 maintained publicly that the October-era evangelization of Bono, Edge, and Larry caused no great rift with Adam and Paul, of course it did. It scared them to death. To protect themselves Adam and Paul made a deal that the two of them would always back each other in arguments with the three believers. That way neither of them could get pushed out. That pact held from the time of October through War and The Unforgettable Fire. It was only after the Unforgettable Fire tour that Adam went to Paul and said he no longer felt comfortable being Paul's proxy in U2.

By that time, too, the others' Christianity had lost its beetle-eating fanaticism and Adam found himself moving closer to their spiritual beliefs. In the internal war between Adam the hobnobbing businessman and Adam the artist, the artist won.

When they made their pact in 1981, Adam says, "Paul and I still felt that we had a role within the music, whether or not U2 succeeded. In those days we hunted as a pair. Paul and I would do the record company things, we'd do the journalist things, we'd be visible, we'd have a profile, and we'd know what was going on. After the Unforgettable Fire tour 1 realized that my position was actually becoming destructive to the band's position. I felt Paul's wishes for what the band should do were

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Not necessarily the best decisions artistically and that the band needed my support artistically, and by then spiritually as well. Certainly I needed to listen to that voice more, and I felt at that stage I had more in common with the three guys. Whereas up to that point I felt I had a bit more in common with Paul, background-wise and the way I saw things business-wise.

"So that did change and that was tough on all of us. It was certainly tough on me and Paul to separate that way. But we'd started to move in different worlds. His world was much more grown-up schmoozing, much more dinner parties and lunches. I couldn't do those things and contribute to the band, 'cause so much of those things are about telling stories against the band, really. They're about stories people in bands shouldn't say about each other. Maybe managers can say, 'Well, of course, the reason Bono wrote that lyric was such and such . . .' That's not something I could do by then. I had to protect the mystery of the band, and I couldn't do that as Paul's sidekick.

"I don't feel Paul protects Bono's persona. He's too willing to expose Bono as a nice guy and oversimplify him. You don't see that happen with Prince. Paul likes to believe it's all done with mirrors and wires. He doesn't like to acknowledge the hard work. Instead of saying, 'That was hard, Bono had to put himself through hoops to get it,' he'll say, 'Oh, Bono just wanted to look cool.' By saying that, he takes away from Bono. It implies he needs this stuff to look cool."

Then, unknowingly echoing Paul saying "It's not up to him [Adam] anymore," Adam says, "We still, amongst ourselves, have to readdress Paul's situation."

Maybe all business is ultimately personal. When Paul points a finger at Adam now, it's not just a maneuver to keep the band from aligning against him. There's a lot of emotional history behind it. This is not a crafty businessman trying to play four boys against each other; these are five smart men who know the game and each other very well. Though he's less likely to expound on it than, say, Bono, Paul McGuinness got into this world as much from emotion and personal belief as the band did, and he still responds to suggestions that push him away from the band in a very personal way. Of course, he may mask his emotional response in an argument that sounds like cold business strategy. In his ability to intellectually rationalize a gut reaction he is like Bono. And of

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