My friend Ellen seemed to know what U2 would be from the moment she first heard them. In 1980 she had just been promoted from

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being a field rep for Warner Brothers Records in Boston to a job in the Manhattan office. I was still living in New England then, but I'd visit her when I was in New York. One day I went in to see Ellen and she said, "You've got to hear this.'" and played me "I Will Follow." Warners was distributing Island Records and Island chief Chris Blackwell had this new band, U2. I thought the single was good, but Ellen thought it was the second coming. She made me promise to come see U2 when they played the Paradise, a club in Boston.

On stage U2 were exciting, still very raw but filled with such energy and belief that the crowd got caught up and were on their feet, dancing and pushing toward the stage to reach out to Bono. My memory is that they did both "I Will Follow" and "Out of Control" twice in the short set, which was actually not uncommon in the punk days. Bands tended to start playing gigs before they had an hour's worth of songs. Later I learned that U2 had lots of tunes that preceded their recording contract, but I guess they wanted to stick to their best stuff for their first American shows.

A lot of people who bought Boy, the first album, when it came out and saw those early gigs like to sit around now claiming that U2 was never that good again and telling the grandchildren, "If you had seen U2 when they were teenagers, as I did, you wouldn't be impressed by all this Zoo TV junk now." It's actually not true. The young U2 were charis­matic as all hell, but they were still relying on passion (and Edge's striking guitar sound) to get them over a shortage of great songs and a lack of musical tightness. When faced with an audience that wasn't interested in suspending their disbelief, the young U2 could sound pretty ordinary. Lately Larry has echoed what Adam said earlier—that the band actually wasn't that good when they first came to America. What people responded to was not what U2 were but the promise of what they could become.

I had promised Ellen Darst after the Paradise show that I would peddle a freelance article about U2 to one of the rock magazines I was then writing for. I had a hard time finding anyone interested. Finally Output magazine on Long Island said all right. The day U2 arrived in Rhode Island, where I lived, looking to do the interview, my pals, a local band called the Shake, were having a big cookout at their house and I didn't want to miss it. So I offered to pick up U2 at the Holiday Inn and bring them along. It was a sweltering, humid Memorial Day and

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when I showed up at the motel to collect them Bono, Larry, and Edge were in the pool. Adam was waiting for me at the front door. "Come on," Adam called to the others, "we're going to a burnout!"

"A cookout," I corrected. "A cookout is a barbecue, a burnout is a drug casualty."

"Ah," Edge said, "and will there be burnouts at the cookout?"

We spent the afternoon eating hot dogs with local bands and their families at the Shake's house, and at one point U2 and I went off to the rehearsal room in the basement and did a long interview in which they told me their story up to that point. Given that the oldest of them, Adam, had just turned twenty-one, it was not a very long story. I was impressed with the fact that they wrote all their songs through jamming in a room together; they seemed determined to keep everything equal between them. Bono was adamant about the fact that bands these days weren't real bands, where it's all for one and one for all. Now it was one or two leaders and hired sidemen. He made a big point of the fact that U2 would always be what they had grown up believing the Beatles and Stones were: a real band. The Shake had a color poster of the early Beatles hanging on the wall and I remember U2 staring at it, fascinated by the fact that on this poster all the Beatles had jet black hair. They were impressed by the possibility that the Beatles had dyed their hair to look more alike. (Actually, I suspect that the poster company did the tints, not Brian Epstein.)

Back upstairs at the party Edge asked me about the Shake and I said they were a real good band who played six nights a week, fifty weeks a year, hoping to get a record deal. He said that wasn't the way to do it. Edge said a single, even a homemade single, with one great song would do more for a band than five years of club dates. "I Will Follow" was the proof.

Over the next two and a half years, from the spring of 1981 to the fall of 1983, U2 played the Northeast so much that you'd have thought they lived in Seekonk. Even when they weren't on tour between Boston and Washington they kept up a strong presence with interviews in the local music papers and airplay on college radio stations. I remember running into Adam at Boston clubs between tours, lapping up America and making sure U2 had its finger on whatever was happening. Ellen Darst was always beside them. Later in 1981 Warners laid her off along with a ton of young executives in reaction to a general plummet in the

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