Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология
Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии


Willie has another notion that he floats to Bono and Edge separately



[33]

Before springing it on all the Principles. He thinks it would be hilarious to buy a bunch ofTrabants, those cheap little East German cars that U2 saw abandoned along roadsides after reunification, and hang them from the ceiling as spotlights. Anton Corbijn has been drawn to the Trabants in his album cover photos. Willie says, as the band chuckles, that they could hollow out the cars, put huge spotlights inside, and make it look like the Trabants' headlights are illuminating the stage.

U2 gives Willie the go-ahead. Manager Paul McGuinness volunteers to lead an expedition into darkest Deutschland where he will buy up Trabants like a carpetbagger grabbing cut-rate southern cattle after the Civil War. "As an image of what went wrong with Communism, the Trabant is useful," McGuinness explains. "Because it is a car that makes its driver look pathetic. It's a demeaning thing to be in. It also smells like shit and it's very uncomfortable."

The drive across Germany is less jolly than McGuinness and his Zoo crew had hoped. The Soviet occupation troops who had been stationed in East Germany before reunification have no home to go back to. The Germans want them out, but the Russians are asking them to stay away —there is no housing for them, food is already scarce, and their govern­ment is on the verge of collapse. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers are selling their weapons and uniforms for whatever money they can get. The further east McGuinness and company drive, the bleaker it becomes. At one stop along the motorway they see a Russian officer in his long coat, high boots, and epaulets buying cigarettes and a bottle of booze, then slowly going back outside, sitting on the bumper of his car, and passing the bottle back and forth with his driver.

When they reach the Trabant factory in Chemnitz, on what was until recently Karl-Marx-Stadt, the place is almost deserted. No one wants to buy these cheap, partly wooden toy boxes when there is a chance of getting a Volkswagen or an Audi. The car factory had been the center of the local economy since the 1920s, when it was the Auto Union (later Audi) factory. Production switched to Trabants at the dawn of the Cold War. Now it's gone, and the people who used to work there are hungry.

"Thirty thousand people just lost their jobs," McGuinness says after nosing the situation. "No one here thinks the Trabant is funny."

McGuinness takes the factory tour. With the Trabants discontinued, the mill is now serving as a warehouse for postal vans awaiting delivery to the mail-deprived East. Asked how he feels about U2's plan to make

[34]

his automobile famous in the West, the grief-stricken factory manager says, "We feel fine about it, but it is too late."

When McGuinness gets back to Dublin, U2 owns enough Trabants to swing from the rafters, shine on the stage, and drive around the dressing rooms. They bring in Catherine Owens, an artist and old friend from the days when her all-girl punk band the Boy Scoutz used to share bills with the teenage U2, to paint designs on the little cars. One of Owens's designs is what she calls "The Fertility Car," a Trabant covered with blown-up personal ads from dating columns and a sketch of a woman giving birth while holding two pieces of string tied to her husband's testicles, "so he can share the pain."

Owens pushes her opinions to the front because, she feels, U2 has men making all the creative decisions and is slipping into completely male-centered designs. "Let's get some curves in here," she says when looking at a stage design of sharp angles and boxes, while the members of U2 go: "Huh?"

Adam, who knows more about art (and, some would say, women) than the other three, pushes Owens's ideas forward and empowers her to go out and recruit visual artists to contribute to the video barrage that will be needed to fill up all those TV screens. Owens scours Europe and the U.S. (she lives in New York and is tied in with lots of artists there) for the right people. Among those whose work she brings back are video artist Mark Pellington, David Wojnarowicz—an acclaimed and touchy New York photo/conceptual artist who is dying of AIDS, and the Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN are a satirical group from Rhode Island who use computer tricks to sample images as well as sounds. One of their proudest accomplishments is a film of President Bush, looped and edited so that the President seems to be chanting the lyrics to Queen's "We Will Rock You" while pounding his podium. In the USA 1992 will be an election year, and after his quick thrashing of Iraq in the Gulf War, Bush is considered unbeatable. U2 decide that this Bush bit will open their concerts.

While Bono is running around recommodifying his imagination and cleaning out the band's bank accounts, Adam, Edge, and Larry start tour rehearsals without him. They have a lot of grunt work to do for which Bono is not needed—learning to play with the sequencers and programs that will provide sonic beds under their own instruments, working out live arrangements and endings for the new songs. It gives

[35]

the singer a chance to cool down and gives the other three a break from Bono and a chance to reconnect as musicians. It is an important time for Adam, Edge, and Larry; it moves them back into position as one unit after the Bono & Edge/Larry & Adam split in the early days of the album. As with any group of equals, there are various ways in which the factions within U2 configure. When Bono finds the other three aligned against him, he tends to bring in McGuinness to back him up. For a period in the eighties when Edge, Larry, and Bono first embraced charismatic Christianity, it was Adam and McGuinness vs. the three Born Agains. As in any family, the alliances shift all the time. It is important before heading out on the road together that Edge, Adam, and Larry close ranks. Then as Bono joins rehearsals he gets drawn back into a united band.

The four band members and McGuinness share all business decisions equally, and the four band members without McGuinness make all creative decisions—not just regarding the music but concerning staging, photos, album jackets, and so on. Bono maintains that this got started at the dawn of U2 because being a struggling band in Dublin, where there was no music business, they knew no other way.

"We don't necessarily like to do everything ourselves," Bono says. "We call it 'making our own clothes.' But because of the circumstances, we had to. Paul McGuinness is just so uninterested in the details of a band's aesthetic life. It was hard to find advice. So we had to become video makers to make good videos. We had to become art directors. We made the albums, we made the album covers, we made the videos, we made the stage set. We used local Dublin people because we didn't know anybody else, and we collaborated with them and grew together.

"Paul got us to do everything for ourselves and I don't quite know why. He got out of the way, which takes a lot of guts. His instinct was to trust ours. And this developed this whole Gang of Four thing where you become the corporation. A gang of four musically, a corporation of five with Paul, seven with Ellen (Darst, who runs U2's U.S. operation) and Anne-Louise (Kelly, who runs Principle Dublin), eight with Ossie (Kilkenny, U2's financial advisor).

"Brian Eno said, 'Almost as extraordinary as what you're doing as artists is this organization—or organism—that seems to be evolving around you.' We had this idea that you could be creative in business, that you didn't have to divide it up into art and commerce. We'd meet

[36]

These record company people on tour in the U.S., and to most punk bands coming out of the U.K., these were the enemy. And I didn't think they were the enemy. I thought they were workers who had gotten into music for probably all the right reasons, and weren't as lucky as we were, weren't able to fulfill their ambition to be musicians and were now working the music. Maybe they lost their love and I felt that part of our thing was to reignite that.

"So a lot of people got inspired and they rallied around us, creating a network, and that protected us, created this kind of cushion. Then you start to see organization in a creative light. You start to say, 'Well, these are important decisions, this artwork, and these things.' And you realize that, in fact, to be a group is the art."

As the release of Achtung Baby and rehearsals for the Zoo TV tour impend, U2 ideas are expanding faster than their bank accounts. They have drawn up a plan to build a giant doll of an Achtung Baby with a working penis that will pee on the audience. McGuinness suggests it's an expensive indulgence. Edge starts thinking, then, that maybe what they should do is create fake photos of, say, the giant baby on top of Tower Records and try to convince the press that it really happened:

fake media events! That, too, gets nixed.

Plans for the staging are settling into something more stark and spooky than the Jetsons city of the initial designs. Now the band is talking about black scaffolding, like oil wells or TV towers, shooting into the air with video screens flashing across and throughout. There will be a second tier, above the band, to which Bono can ascend. There will be two wings at the front corners of the stage onto which Bono and Edge can venture. Larry's main question at each new proposition is, "What's it going to cost?"

Bono's imagination is not encumbered by such fiscal concerns. He has an inspiration: how about a small second stage stuck way out in the middle of the audience and connected to the main stage by a ramp? Then, after hitting the crowd with all this high-tech hoopla, the band can stroll out to the B stage and busk with acoustic guitars. Kind of like in Elvis's '68 comeback special when, after tearing up the joint with rock & roll, he went out and sat surrounded by the audience and strummed the old songs with his band. The designers aren't sure how to make that work, but they say they'll try it. They eventually come up with a design for a long ramp departing from Edge's side of the stage

 [37]


Поделиться:



Последнее изменение этой страницы: 2019-03-21; Просмотров: 280; Нарушение авторского права страницы


lektsia.com 2007 - 2024 год. Все материалы представленные на сайте исключительно с целью ознакомления читателями и не преследуют коммерческих целей или нарушение авторских прав! (0.018 с.)
Главная | Случайная страница | Обратная связь