Whoa, I say, what was the initial reaction of the ultramasculine and nonsense-hating Larry Mullen, Junior, to this idea?

"Two short, clipped words," Bono answers. "The funny thing about Larry was that, okay, he got into the dress and he put on the makeup,

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but he was fitting with it. He wouldn't take off his Doc Martens and when he was sitting he'd put his feet up on the table. But as macho as he tried to be, he still looked like some extra from a skin flick. That was the irony. Whereas Adam was just getting people to do him up in the back and swapping makeup tips with any girl that passed. You know, suddenly he could own up to being interested in their underwear!

"The whole business of being in a rock & roll band is just so ridiculous," Bono says. "I was thinking, it's like having a sex change! Being a rock & roll star is like having a sex change! People treat you like a girl! You know? They stare at you, they follow you down the street, they hustle you. And then they try to fuck you over! It's a hard thing to talk about because it's so absurd, but actually it's valuable. When I'm with women I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to be a babe."

The third "One" video does the trick. Bono looks as cool as Camus sitting in a black-and-white cabaret amid beautiful people while croon­ing soulfully. The clip goes into heavy play on MTV, the song goes into heavy play on American radio, and the single raises lots of dough for AIDS charities. A common interpretation of "One" is that it is sung in the voice of a son who is HIV-positive confronting and reconciling with his conservative father. That is one of the many ways the song can be heard. "One" seems to have an infinite capacity to open up, and U2 shows no inclination to tie it down.

The Arms of America

The zoo tour begins/ the ghosts of martin luther king, jr., and phil ochs sit in/ picking up a belly dancer/ bruce springsteen on the quality of bigness/ axl rose invites himself aboard

On march first the Zoo TV tour begins in Lakeland, Florida, about an hour from Tampa. The Trabants are hung from the ceiling with care, the colossal TV screens are blinking above the stage, and Bono is being shoved into his leather suit. Out in the audience Irish imp B. P. Fallon, a 1960s peace-and-love vet who has been both a rock critic and Led Zeppelin's publicist, is sitting in one of the Trabants dressed in a cape and a wide-brimmed black hat, playing deejay for the anxious audience and blasting out the soul-inspiring sounds of John Lennon, Bob Marley, and other great dead people.

As Bono, flylike in his bug-eyed sunglasses, waits backstage to step onto the makeshift elevator that will raise him up into the spotlight, he has a revelation: he doesn't actually know what he's going to do when he gets out there.

"You know," he says, "for this tour we worked for months before leaving Dublin. We designed the Fly, we got the goggles, assembled our postmodern rock star." He points to each of his limbs as if giving a tour of the temple: "We have our leg of Jim Morrison, our Elvis top, Lou Reed, Gene Vincent—we glue it all together and create it. Make the tapes, make the loops, figure out how to play polyrhythms, spend months at it. We arrive here, people are unpacking cases. I get into the suit. Now what?"

Performers like Prince and Michael Jackson spend months working with mirrors, rehearsing what they're going to do onstage, meeting with choreographers. U2 doesn't think about that. They just figure Bono will do something interesting when he gets out there.

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Good thing he does! The lights dim and President Bush appears on screen to tell the audience "We will, we will rock you!" while Adam, Edge, and Larry slip onto the stage in the darkness. The intro to "Zoo Station" blasts out of the dark as the Vidiwalls fill up with blue snow and static. As the song shakes the room Bono slowly ascends to the upper level of the stage, his silouette in profile against the blue, buzzing screen behind Edge, and twice as big as life in the video reflection of him being projected on the blue, buzzing screen behind Adam. The crowd cheers and stamps and claps and Bono figures he better do something, so he reels back each time the massive beat comes down, stumbling like a drunk, first in place and then along the catwalk across the span of the stage, singing as he goes, "I'm ready, ready for the laughing gas! I'm ready for what's next!" Bono knows what he's doing is working, but he also wonders, "What would happen if I actually thought about this?"

On "The Fly" Bono really plays Elvis '68, rockin' in his leather to a song that, for all its sonic modernity, strikes me as very much like an Elvis Presley song. Partly it's the epigrammatic phrases—can't you hear Elvis preaching, "A man will rise, a man will fall, from the sheer face of love like a fly on a wall"? But it's also that the song's core structure is an old time rock & roll verse going into a gospel chorus. Anyway, none of this may be apparent to the crowd, who are dazzled by the aphorisms and cuss words flipping a mile a minute across all the TV screens: Call your mother, I'd like to teach the world to sing, 'Everyone's a racist except you. As the song climaxes the slogans flash by faster and faster.

For the first forty minutes of the set U2 play only material from Achtung Baby, a risky move that turns out to be right. Rather than treat the unfamiliar new songs as excuses to go get popcorn between the hits, the audience is forced to put all their energy into the new material, and —abetted by the visual fireworks—they go for it.

After ripping through seven of the new songs—and at the very point when the audience might be adjusting to the sensory overload—Bono finds his way out onto the ramp between the main stage and the B stage and sings "Tryin* to Throw Your Arms Around the World" while strolling out through the crowd. It's a little touch of Engelbert intimacy after a sustained blast of Tom Jones aloofness, and the fans' pulses really speed up when Bono plucks an excited young woman from the audience, dances with her, and then shakes up and pops open an exploding bottle

[62]

Of champagne. He shares it with her and then hands her a handicam, a small portable palm-corder, and directs her to shoot him with it. When she presses down the button the Zoo screens fill with her close-up view of Bono singing to her. Edge then wanders down the ramp, leans into Bono's handmike, and the two of them sing together while the guest camerawoman keeps shooting. The voyeur and the subject have traded places.

When that song ends Edge and Bono wander onto the B stage as if they just noticed it there, and to the delight of the crowd signal to Adam and Larry to come out and join them. After the audiovisual barrage that some old-timers might have feared meant the end of the old U2, here are the boys up close and personal, with no special effects, strumming acoustic guitars, banging on congas, and singing old hits like "Angel of Harlem." At the end of the acoustic set Bono and Edge remain on the B stage to play a delicate version of Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" while a Trabant covered with tiny mirrors swings slowly around over their heads, reflecting prisms around the arena, making it look like the whole place has drifted up into space.

When U2 returns to the main stage they light into their greatest hits and crowd pleasers—"Bullet the Blue Sky," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and "Where the Streets Have No Name" as even the cops tap their nightsticks and the hotdog men shake their buns.

Bono returns for the encore dressed in a suit made of mirrors, shades, and a big cowboy hat. He comes out holding a full-length mirror in which he admires himself and then kisses his reflection. He sings "De­sire" as this Mirrorball Man, a proto-American hustler with a southern evangelist's accent and a TV car-salesman's demeanor. This is the character based on the lines in "Desire" about a "preacher stealing hearts in a traveling show for love or money, money, money." After finishing the song (and throwing fake dollars to the audience) the Mirrorball Man picks up a telephone and dials the White House. The audience listens in with delight as a befuddled operator tells him Presi­dent Bush cannot come to the phone at this time.

This finale reminds me of a bizarre and pretty-much forgotten inci­dent from the late sixties, when the talented, tortured protest singer Phil Ochs risked his career and lost. Ochs—held by the leftist folkies as their leader after Dylan "sold out" by going electric—announced he was

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going to play an important show at Carnegie Hall. He came onstage in a gold lame suit like Elvis wore on the cover of his greatest hits album, and proceeded to try to Elvis-ize the protest crowd. The long-suffering folkies were mortified. They went back to Greenwich Village and de­clared that Ochs was insane. They were wrong. Ochs had decided that it did no good to be perceived as a sourpuss and preach to the converted. If you really wanted to reach a mass audience, if you really wanted to be subversive, the best way to do it would be to try to communicate as completely and as generously as Elvis Presley did. Give people the showbiz razzmatazz, but give them something solid to chew on too.

I don't know if U2 have ever even heard of Phil Ochs, but when Bono strolled onstage with the gold and silver lights reflecting off his suit and sang some of the deepest, most personal songs U2 have ever written with his hips twitching and the crowd dancing, I thought, "Geez, maybe Phil was onto something after all.'" The real proof was when, in the middle of "Pride," the Vidiwalls lit up with a film of Martin Luther King giving his "I have been to the mountaintop" speech the night before his assassination. Dr. King was used as an audiovisual sample while U2 riffed under him, and when he finished with "I've seen the promised land.'" the kids went as ape as if he had just sung "Stairway to Heaven."

One night I'm sitting in a bar with Bono when a guy comes up, sticks out his hand, and says, "Bono, I work with Michael Ochs, the brother of Phil Ochs?" He says the folksinger's name with a question mark, unsure if Bono will recognize it. "Don't tell me," I butt in. "He wants Phil's suit back!" Bono does a double take and says, "Good catch, Bill." It turns out he knows all about Phil Ochs' gunfight at Carnegie Hall.

Over the next couple of weeks the Zoo TV tour charges up the eastern seaboard across Florida, Georgia, Carolina, and Virginia, then north to Long Island, Philadelphia, and New England. It's a triumphant show. During rehearsals in Florida one of the crew met a woman fan in the parking lot who identified herself as a belly dancer. As a joke, the crew had her dance onstage and startle Bono during a rehearsal of 'Mysterious Ways." After the first show Bono decided he liked the effect, so now the dancer, named Christina Petro, has been added to the entourage. Each night during "Mysterious Ways" she swirls around just out of reach while Bono strains to touch her.

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Bono's brain is blown one night by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of JFK and mother of Bobby Shriver, a young Democratic power broker and ally of U2's friends Jimmy lovine and Ted Fields. Eunice tells Bono that there have always been angels on U2's stage, but now they are letting in the devils too. She says she likes that; it makes for a fairer fight.

U2 plays a great set at Madison Square Garden on the last day of winter. Backstage big names from the worlds of sports (John McEnroe) music (Peter Gabriel) and movies (Gary Oldman) elbow each other to get close to the band. Bono is crowded in a corner with Bruce Springsteen, who compliments him on managing the hard feat of pulling off an arena show filled with surprise. Bono explains that throughout the concert tonight he was distracted by the thought of one obnoxious Wall Street trader who had accosted him in the hotel bar. The yuppie bragged that he and his pals had bought a string of tickets from scalpers, just the sort of thing U2 has been bending over backward to stop. "All through the show tonight," Bono says, "I kept finding this one jerk coming into my head." He mimed slapping himself. "I kept thinking of him sitting out there smirking."

Springsteen looks at Bono and says, "That's pathetic!" Bono looks hurt and Bruce laughs and says, "It's because we're such egomaniacs! We've got to win over every last person in the place!"

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