Bono starts laughing too.

Springsteen has been a significant figure for U2. He came backstage to see them when they were still playing in clubs, and always expressed confidence they'd reach a big audience. To U2, Springsteen was proof that it was possible for a working-class musician from nowhere to get to the top without compromising his principles or fitting into a rock-star lifestyle. This was good news to four kids from Dublin who were not nearly as fashionable as the sensations pouring out of London at the time.

Later, when U2 began to enjoy success comparable with Springsteen's, Bono had the balls to challenge Bruce to write less about fictional characters and more about himself. This was just after Born in the USA had made Springsteen the biggest rock star in the Milky Way, so most people would have thought Bruce had his methods successfully worked out. But for Bono—who came out of the John Lennon, "Here's

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another little song about me" tradition—Springsteen was ducking some­thing.

Bruce told Bono that he didn't think his life was all that interesting. "I get on a bus, I get off a bus," he said. But his next album, Tunnel of Love, was clearly autobiographical. It was also superb. Bono doesn't have a head big enough to think that he swayed The Boss, but he was proud that his impulse was accurate.

Springsteen says that the reason he was sure from the start that U2 would be big had to do with the different ways rock & roll works in clubs, theaters, arenas, and stadiums. "My own music was sort of suited to a big place 'cause it was big," he says. "I think that's one reason U2 were so successful. Their music was big and echoey. The minute you heard them you could hear them in a big space. They had big emotions, big ideas. Those things tend to translate well into playing to bigger crowds, which can be a fantastic experience. I've had amazing nights in stadiums, but it does alter what you do. In a club it's much easier to focus. The audience is closer and watching whatever you do. You can tune a guitar or tell a story. A theater retains a concert feeling. In an arena you can still retain a good part of that concert feeling, but the size of the thing broadens what you do. It's the arena and it calls for a big gesture of some sort. You have to be able to switch gears and adjust to the context you're in. Some people are only great in a club. Some, like the Who and U2, are great in a stadium."

I tell Adam what Springsteen said and he agrees and goes further:

"U2 were never any good in clubs, in small places," he says in defiance of all those -Boy fans who tell their little brothers: You should have seen them then. "I think the thing that people—A & R men, journalists—who saw us in those places responded to was not what we were, but what we could become."

As Zoo TV tears across America on what is essentially a spring warm-up tour before taking to the football stadiums in the summer, Axl Rose, the mercurial singer of Guns N' Roses, shows up a couple of times. In L.A. he is one of a gaggle of stars backstage and it's impossible lor Bono to get any sense of him. But when he comes to a concert in Texas they get a chance to talk. The women of Principle have no trouble reaching their assessment; they think Axi's a doll.

Surprisingly little cant," is Bono's reaction. "It was easy enough to get a direct line. I can see why people like his music so much. There isn't

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much editing done in his conversation or, obviously, in his work. It's a direct line with his gut. That's what I like about it."

"They're my favorite band right now," Axl says of U2. "I'm finally getting certain songs that I never understood before or couldn't relate to. I've always listened to them, but the only song I really got into was 'With or Without You.' I couldn't relate to their other songs because I was like, 'That's great, but I just don't see that part of the world.' Things were a little too dark for me. Now I can see more of the things he's talking about.

"I bought Achtung Baby and I actually want to do a cover of the third song, 'One.' I want to play it on tour this summer. I think 'One' is one of the greatest songs that has ever been written. I put the song on and just broke down crying. It was such a release. It was really good for me. I was really upset that my ex-wife and I never had a chance because of the damage in our lives. We didn't have a chance and I hadn't fully accepted that. That song helped me see it. I wanted to write Bono a letter just saying, 'Your record's done a lot for me.' "

When I mention this to the different members of U2 I get a series of different reactions. Adam smiles and says not to make too big a deal out of what might be only a passing interest on Axi's part. Edge says he already knew—a limo driver told him that Axl sat in the back of his car and played "One" over and over again.

When I go tell Bono, though, he jumps right into the association. He says that every decade needs a band that will stand up and reflect the spirit of its time without any shields. U2 did that in the 1980s and they are not going to do it anymore—it's too painful. Maybe that's Guns N' Roses' role now. To be out there with all their nerve endings open, reflecting the currents passing through the collective consciousness without any irony or distance.

Bono says U2 is working in a more subtle way now. I ask him, "How can you reflect the age and challenge it?"

"Just faint it," Bono says. "To describe it is to challenge it. Isn't that really what artists are supposed to do? It's not their job to solve the problem. It's their job to describe the problem. And part of the descrip­tion is to realize that this is very attractive. And to admit one's own attraction to it. It was Bertolucci who gave me that clue.

"He was talking about women's fashion magazines and he said that he had never imagined a time as ephemeral as the eighties. And yet he

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found himself thumbing through women's fashion magazines and en­joying the energy of them. And that these images had lost all meaning a lot of the time; it was pure surface—but there was really something in that. That was a landmark for me. Because to deny the energy is bullshit. And that's the classic rock & roll position: to belittle it. To do that is to not realize how big it is. So the job is to describe what's going on, describe the attraction, and be generous enough to not wave your finger at it as it's going by.

"Rock & roll is folk music now. Rock & roll has never been so uninspired, so codified. If rock & roll has to be only one thing, then you might as well say it can only be Little Richard. Which is not to say we might not make a folk album, but that can't be all we can do. Rock & roll is a spirit and that spirit is in Zoo TV."

8. "One" If By Land, U2 If By Sea

the adventures of bono's bomb squad/ adam clayton, secret agent/ U2 eludes the police & Invades england on a raft/ a shipboard romance/ larry's nautical fashion sense

I JUST kicked Bono in the head. He didn't notice. He's asleep at my feet and I accidently banged him with my shoe when Larry Mullen climbed across my lap to try to catch some winks on the seat at my right while the Edge, on my left, leans against the bus window, either dreaming or gazing out into the northern English night. I can't tell for sure.

It's 3 in the morning and we've been traveling for three hours. Edge, Larry, and I are on the backseat of a hired bus. Bono, dozing in the aisle, has his arm draped across his wife, All, who is asleep on the seat in front of ours. Further up the bus I can see Adam Clayton creeping past the unconscious Greenpeace people with another bottle of champagne. Paul McGuinness is awake up there, as is their lawyer, who warns Adam what to say and what not to say to the police if we're arrested. Adam, who has been busted before, says don't worry, he's now working on how not to get arrested. Then he sips his champagne with the daredevil suave of James Bond on a secret mission.

This cramped scene might be kind of cozy if we were not eluding police roadblocks on our way to hook up with a ship to sail down the Irish Sea to row ashore carrying barrels of radioactive waste to dump at the leukemia-producing door of one of what Greenpeace believes is the most dangerous plutonium plants in the world. When I climbed aboard this bus in Manchester at midnight I was asked to accept legal liability if I am arrested, drowned, or riddled with cancer as a result of joining U2 as they circumvent the British court injunction that has been issued to

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