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 melo­dies, words, guitar hooks, and fill in any missing sections in the compo­sitions. 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 rhyth­mic 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 refer­ences 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, play­ing 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 resis­tance. 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 terri­tory. 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 sec­tions 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 record­ing—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 pro­posed 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 grab­bing 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.

Dogtown

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