When we get on the subject of Zoo TV and all its proposed monkey business, I ask Bono to enlighten me about how the multimedia silliness reflects, for example, the Gulf War.

"It's Guernica.'" Bono responds.

Let me clean out my ears, Bono, I thought you said, "It's Guernica."

"The response has to contain the energy of the thing it is describ­ing," Bono says. "To capture the madness of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso imbued his work with that madness, and with the surreal."

Blame it on the rotgut, but this starts making a lot of sense to me. I suppose, I suggest, that from "The Rape of the Sabine Women" on, every attempt to use beauty as a vehicle to describe brutality ends up glorifying the brutality, and more generations sign up for the next war.

"That's right." Bono nods. "That's exactly right."

So the way to represent war is as Picasso does in "Guernica," with distorted screaming horses and cubist knives, or as Zoo TV does, with a media barrage that mixes films of cruise missiles and nuclear bombs with rapid-fire video snatches of TV commercials and campy rock & roll singers in leather suits—a live and onstage re-creation of the couch-potato view of the Gulf War. Sounds great in theory; let's see how it works in the civic center!

 [41]

Edge has to leave Ireland before dawn so he can fly to New York to induct the Yardbirds—Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck among them—into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Edge appreciates both the honor and the irony of a guitarist who has done more than anyone to dismantle the old myth of the guitar hero inducting the three men most responsible for creating it. At the pub, what started out as one or two drinks turns into one or two barrels and Tuesday has given way to Wednesday by the time Edge goes home to catch a couple of hours

Sleep.

I am flying with Edge so I get up to leave, too, but Bono and Adam remind me, "It's your birthday," and convince me to stay for another round. Adam was supposed to be coming with us, but there's trouble with U.S. immigration over an Irish marijuana bust a couple of years ago, so the bassist will be sitting out this trip. Which means I'm the only one still in the pub who can't sleep late tomorrow.

After the bar has closed and the other patrons leave, Bono goes looking for a guitar so he can sing me a country song he's written called "Slow Dancing." It's a beautiful tune about longing and faithlessness— typical Nashville and U2 subjects. He sent it to Willie Nelson but never got a reply.

Walking home through a dark tunnel, Bono insists we throw our arms over each other's shoulders and sing the theme from The Monkees. He's still upset because he was shot down in his bid to get U2 to adopt the names of the Monkees as hotel pseudonyms for this tour. Bono wanted to be Davy Jones, the short, maracas-shaking singer. Edge was to be Mike Nesmith, the serious, wool-hatted guitarist. He thought Adam might object to being the troublemaking blond bimbo Peter Tork, but Adam said no problem. The whole idea sank when Larry refused to be Mickey Dolenz.

Edge's version of the story is slightly different; he told me it wasn't Larry who shot down the plan; it was the fact that the Monkees names are more famous than the names of the members of U2. "We'd still have fans ringing the rooms," Edge protested, "but it'll be somebody else's fans!"

Bono should have learned this lesson by now. During the Joshua Tree tour he registered in hotels as "Tony Orlando" until one night when he ended up in the same hotel with the real Tony Orlando and chaos ensued. He then switched to a name no one else was likely to have:

[42]

"Harry Bullocks." He had to give that up when All refused to be Mrs. Harry Bullocks. He should learn a lesson from Adam ("Maxwell House") or Larry ("Mr. T. Bag").

Many such stupid things sound funny when you've been up all night drinking. It's even something of a knee-slapper when Bono throws himself so completely into The Monkees theme while parading through the auto tunnel that he doesn't see the car headlights bearing down on him until I yank him out of the way. (Imagine if I had not. People would be asking me Bono's last words and I'd have to say, " 'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees and people say we monkey around.' ")

All this hilarity seems a lot less funny forty-five minutes after I fall asleep, when the alarm goes off and I have to stagger to the airport to meet Edge. When the sun comes up we are on a plane from Ireland to England, where we will make a connection for a flight to New York.

As I stare at the greasy sausages staring back at me I calculate that this day—which thanks to changes in time zones will include twenty-nine hours—is looking far too long to be any good. A car picks us up at Heathrow to drive us from one terminal to another, where we sit in a smoky departure lounge for an hour and try to get some work done. The ambitious conceit is that Edge and I will cover the entire history of U2 between here and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"Achtung Baby is definitely a reaction to the myth of U2," Edge begins as he has his second cup of coffee. "We really never had any control over that myth. You could say we helped it along a bit, but the actual myth itself is a creation of the media and people's imagination. Like all myths. There is very little resemblence to the actual personalities of the band or the intentions of the band, and Achtung Baby balances things out a bit."

"But the myth has a basis in the personalities," I protest. (Hey, at this point I'd protest "Hello.") "For example, the cartoon image of Bono may be a caricature—but like all caricatures it bears some exaggerated resemblence to the real person."

"It's a caricature of one facet of his character. It's Bono as seen through the songs. But the character of Bono is totally different to that. Maybe over our career our ability to create music that shows the full range of the personalities of Bono and the other members of the band was very poor. But that's the truth—that guy is totally different to the way most people think of him. He's far funnier, takes himself far less seriously than most people think. He's wild, he's not reserved. None of

 

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