Postdisco record business. U2 helped Ellen land a job at Island, keeping her close. She told me the Island job would only be temporary if things worked out with the band.

Things did. Paul McGuinness and U2 had used Ellen as their guide to the American music business. As soon as U2 had enough money to do it, they set up a New York office and put Ellen in charge. Ellen hired Keryn Kaplan as her assistant. Keryn, fresh out of college, had been a secretary at Warners who was also laid off in the purge. Not long after that, Paul brought in Anne-Louise Kelly to help organize their office in Dublin, and realized that she was way too smart to waste on typing and filing. Anne-Louise was made Director of Principle Management Dub­lin, the same title Ellen held in New York.

I know Ellen felt strongly that women were treated badly in the U.S. record business and was determined to take advantage of all the smart women who were being ignored or underutilized by the overpaid men in the old boys' club. I have no idea if Anne-Louise felt the same way, but both the New York and Dublin offices of Principle Management were staffed almost entirely by women. They still are. I think it's one of the reasons U2's organization has an entirely different—and much more comradely—atmosphere than does most of the music business. Most management companies—and indeed, the top levels of most record labels—have the spirit of a football club or military campaign. There's a lot of Us vs. Them shouting and a lot of macho posturing—which is always obnoxious when people are engaged in an enterprise that requires no physical courage and little personal risk. People burn out fast in that sort of environment. I'm sure one of the reasons the women at Principle put in long hours for years on end is because it is, most of the time, a friendly and supportive place to work.

Ellen taught me so much about America in the early days," Mc­Guinness says. "If you're on the road with four or five guys and all that macho stuff that goes along with rock & roll, a very effective counterbal­ance is association with a lot of women. It seems like the right way to do things. There's enough maleness in rock & roll without having it in the office as well. There are a lot of women in the music business who are not recognized for what they could do and I think it's just stupid. We're not going to be stupid about that."

Once U2 had their organization functioning they worked like gophers to win new converts to their cause. Bono was unstoppable in his

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pursuit of audiences, jumping into crowds, dancing with fans, leaping onto outstretched arms, and-—as the halls they played got bigger— climbing up into the scaffolding, hanging from wires on the walls, and swinging from the balconies. The band organized a series of courts-martial at which they chewed him out for endangering himself and any kids in the crowd who might try to imitate him. He finally got the message when Edge, Adam, and Larry threatened to break up U2 if he didn't stop making like Tarzan. Bono told me at the time that he was also influenced by a concert review written by Robert Hillburn in the 1.05 Angeles Times in which the critic said that U2's music didn't need such distractions. I think Hillburn has remained Bono's conservative con­science over the years. As Zoo TV expands further and further, all sorts of possibilities for future U2 expansion into interactive video, computer networks, and cable TV are being waved in front of the band. Bono is interested in all that, as well as screenwriting and the offers of movie roles that regularly slip through Principle's transom. But he has men­tioned more than once that Hillburn said to him, "If you put your entire energy into developing your music, you could be one of the all-time great songwriters. Think of what Gershwin left behind, think of Hank Williams. Should you let anything else distract you from that?" That reprimand rattles around Bono's head. He is still wrestling with it.

The first time U2 headlined at an arena in the United States was at the Worcester, Massachusetts, Centrum in the autumn of 1983, six months into the War tour. The Centrum was then a new hall, with a capacity of fifteen thousand and located at a population nexus about fifty minutes from Boston, to the northeast, Hartford to the southwest, and Providence to the southeast. The fans U2 had been winning in three states poured in and sold out the show. It was a big night for the band, a portent of things to come, and some overexcited kids ran onto the stage to try to hug Bono. When security came charging after one girl, Bono motioned them away, wrapped his arms around her, and waltzed with her around the lip of the stage. Then he continued singing while she slumped down and hung onto his leg. Eventually Bono came in from his emoting long enough to realize that she wasn't just hugging him. She had chained herself to his ankle. And she did not have a key. The concert had to continue with Bono attached to the fan until the roadies could get a saw and chop her off. U2's unmediated relationship with their audience was changing.

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I went back into the dressing room right after U2 came offstage that night, congratulated the other guys on selling out the Centrum, and went over to say hi to Bono. He was covered with sweat, had a towel around his neck, and was talking, wide-eyed, in his fullest flights of poetry. After a couple of minutes I realized he didn't know me. It did something to his brain to try to communicate with fifteen thousand people, and his commitment wasn't an act. He couldn't switch it off the moment he left the stage. He was changing from the kid I'd met when "I Will Follow" was new into someone bigger.

A year later, after "Pride" had brought U2 to the next level of success, playing smaller halls was no longer an option. By then I had moved to New York and U2 were playing at Radio City Music Hall. It was too small a venue. The crowd was charging the stage, security guards were fighting the fans, Bono was struggling to regain control like Mick Jagger at Altamont. Bono got into fights with cops who were hitting kids. The show stopped several times while the guards tried to restore order. It was a big mess that almost ended with Bono being arrested and pretty much assured that U2 were done with playing mid-size halls in America.

In the summer of 1986 U2 agreed to headline an American fundraising tour for Amnesty International. They topped a bill that included Sting, just split from the Police, Peter Gabriel, and Lou Reed, one of their early heroes. The final night of the Amnesty tour was a show here at Giants Stadium that would be televised on MTV. Guest stars were coming out of the woodwork and tension was very high, as MTV moved in and took over command. Miles Davis played, Muhammad Alt spoke, Pete Townshend got off the plane in New York and received word his father had just died in London. He turned around and went home. Joni Mitchell, who had been scheduled to play only a couple of songs, was asked to go out unrehearsed and do a whole set to fill in for Townshend. The place was nuts with vanity, panic, threats, and brown-nosing.

The biggest ego-war was over who would close the show. It was U2's tour, always had been, but in these final days Sting's recently deceased band the Police had reunited for a grand prisoner-liberating, con­science-raising farewell. The Police were a bigger name than U2, and the fact that this was their last ever, farewell, goodbye-to-all-that perfor­mance left no doubt in the mind of their manager Miles Copeland

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About who should climax this prime-time spectacle. Tour promoter Bill Graham disagreed. Graham, Copeland, and Amnesty boss Jack Healy went at it about who should open for whom. There has rarely been as much angry energy expended in the service of political prisoners as there was backstage at Giants Stadium that day.

Finally a compromise worthy of Solomon was achieved. U2 went on first and played a commanding set. Bono, his hair grown long, looked like Daniel Webster and held the football stadium in his hand. People who watched it on TV told me it seemed overdone, hammy, and that may be, but in the coliseum it was mesmerizing. I was pretty ecstatic that they'd pulled it off. I ran into Ellen backstage and said, "Ellen! They were the best they've ever been! The Police don't have a chance!" and she ripped my metaphorical ass off and shoved it down my throat. "It is not a competition!" Ellen blasted. "These musicians have nothing but respect and affection for each other and it does them no good at all when people around them try to turn it into a battle of the bands!"

"Yikes!" I explained, shrinking like a cheap shirt in a hot wash. Ellen calmed down and said, sorry, it's been a tough day.

The great compromise was that U2 got off in time for the Police to have a good chunk of prime television time, before MTV's broadcast ended, and at the finale of the Police's (excellent) set they went into "Invisible Sun," their haunting song about the troubles in Northern Ireland. One by one the members of U2 emerged from the wings and took over the Police's instruments. Larry took Stewart Copeland's place behind the drums, Edge took Andy Summers's guitar, Adam took Sting's bass, and Bono stepped up to finish singing the Police's song. It was a graceful gesture, the outgoing Biggest Band in the World publicly handing off the baton to the new one.

Looking back at the Amnesty finale a year later, Sting said, "The last song we played we handed our instruments over to U2. Every band has its day. In '84 we were the biggest band in the world and I figured it was U2's turn next. And I was right. They are the biggest band in the world. A year from now it'll be their turn to hand over their instruments to someone else."

And now, seven years later, we are back at Giants Stadium with U2 onstage. Sting was wrong about one thing; they have held onto their Biggest Band in the World mantle tighter and longer than any group since the Rolling Stones. Amnesty vet Lou Reed's back in the house

 

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tonight too. He strolls out onto the B stage to join Bono on "Satellite of Love," bringing a huge roar from the eighty-five thousand people in attendance. One of the benefits of all this technology is that when U2 move on they can bring Lou Reed with them. They have prepared a video of him singing the song, which will crackle in and out of the big TV screens in duet with Bono for the rest of the tour.

In the same way, they will continue to carry a piece of their opening act, the rap group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, with them after their stint as support band ends. For the year and a half remaining in the tour Hiphoprisy's song "Television, the Drug of the Nation," will be played over the eruption of the Zoo TV screens before U2 take the stage. An update of Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," it is a Zoo perfect anthem, at once a commentary on the mass media culture and a state-of-the-art example of it. Hiphoprisy leader Michael Franti says he's having a good time with U2, especially now that he's been pulled aside and told that the guitarist's name is "Edge." Michael had been calling him "Ed."

There is a moment of poignance amid all the backstage madness. Artist David Wojnarowicz is here with his family, from whom he's been estranged for years. Wojnarowicz's image of buffalo being driven over a cliff was chosen by U2 as the cover of their "One" single, itself a benefit for AIDS research, at Adam's suggestion. Wojnarowicz is dying of AIDS; he will probably not live out the summer. His family apparently saw a story about his collaboration with U2 on television and got in touch. They have come here tonight to make up for a little lost time.

The Zoo TV spectacle loses nothing in being expanded to stadium size; it works better. The sensory explosions early in the concert make the size of the crowd irrelevant—the visual pyrotechnics yank people straight into the show, without the usual sense of straining to see the little figures onstage that sticks a wedge in most stadium concerts. The barrage of visual effects draws the audience into the music. Then when the explosions stop and U2 appear on the B stage with their acoustic guitars, the audience has readjusted its perspective so that it feels as if they are in an intimate situation, and from there on—remarkably—the impediment distance puts between performer and audience seems to be gone. When Bono sings "With or Without You" it feels as if he's performing in a small club.

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