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-

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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 inten­tions 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

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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

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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 swim­ming 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 seven­ties, 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 Mon­days 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?

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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 dis­posable 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 to­gether 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.

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