Bono says that with Larry everyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent—but if he makes up his mind that you're okay he'll not only let you into his house, he'll let you sleep in his bed.

Larry's always been tough. He can laugh heartily telling the story of how as little kids on Christmas Eve he and his sister kept pestering their father, saying, "I think I hear Santa, Dad! I think I hear Santa!" Until their annoyed old man said, "There is no Santa Claus! Now go to sleep!" When his mother told him he could not go off, underage and illegal, to play in bars with U2, he told her flat out that he had to do it, there was nothing to argue about. And off he went.

Larry effectively founded U2 at Mount Temple, their Dublin high

[16]

school when he approached Dave Evans (Edge) about starting a band. Word got out and Paul Hewson (Bono), Adam, and a few other kids came by Larry's family's kitchen to bang on guitars and sing cover tunes. Before long membership was knocked down to the four characters who remain U2 today. Edge was a couple of months older than Larry. Adam and Bono both had more than a year on him. With his blond hair and pretty features, Larry looked younger than the others. He looked like a little kid. But Larry was always as bullheaded as a minotaur. He has joked that he gave up on being leader of the group as soon as he met Bono, but in some indefinable way he has remained the center of U2 from high school to here. It's not even that he's the band's conscience;

It's more that he's the one who knows what each of them is and what each of them might or can never become, and he will never hesitate to say so to any of their faces. Somehow, by defining that, Larry defines what U2 ends up being.

"What's made U2 has always been the relationship," he says. "The relationship has not only been a personal one, it's also been a musical one. It's been an understanding. It's a cliche, but U2's biggest influences have always been each other. We've always played with each other. We've always played against each other musically. When we came to Berlin we were suddenly, musically, on different levels and that affected every­thing. The musical differences affected the personal differences.

"It's a very, very strange world that we live in. I was very young when the band started. I ended up doing it because of tragedy, in some ways. My mother died and I went straight into the band, that was the kick. On the road I was surrounded by people who were older than me and more experienced than I was. I was seventeen. I was a virgin. I had difficulty as any normal teenager would.

"When you're a kid and you're thrown into this, it's very hard. Some people cope with it better than others. I feel that I'm less affected now than maybe some of the other guys are because I have fallen in love with this. I loved it when I was a kid, then when I went on the road it was so difficult I just didn't know what was going on, it was very hard. Then, after a whole lot of different things happening with the band being successful, I made a very clear decision in my own mind that this is really what I want to do and I want to make a serious go of it. I don't just want to be the drummer in U2 anymore. I want to actually contrib­ute on a different basis and do more."

[17]

When Larry says he was kicked into U2 because his mother died (she was killed in a traffic accident around his seventeenth birthday), he is tapping into a secret history of rock & roll. Losing his mother as a kid is a tragedy Larry shares with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Madonna, Sinead O'Connor, and Bono. Throw in Elvis Pres-ley and Johnny Rotten, two singers very close to mothers who died just after they got famous, and you have a pretty good representation of the biggest blips on rock & roll's forty-year seismograph. Bono lost his mother in 1974, when he was fourteen. She collapsed from a stroke at her own father's funeral and died immediately thereafter.

Larry says having that loss in common brought Bono and him together. "There was a connection there," he explains. "He understood a little of what I felt. I was younger than him. I didn't have any brothers. My father was out of whack anyway, so Bono was the link. He said, 'Look, I understand a bit what you're going through. Maybe I can help you.' And he did. Through thick and thin he's always been there for me. Always.

"People think the band is this unit that's always together. We fight and argue all the time! But I have to say that through it all Bono has always been there. And that was where it started, that was the original connection. When I was in deep shit, he made himself available for me, he was around. Even on the road when I was going through a rough time I used to share a room with him. He just used to make sure I was okay." Suddenly Larry smiles and says, "It was a bit like baby-sitting, y'know what I mean?"

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