All the hoopla is ultimately a means to intimacy. By first shooting off

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fireworks and then emerging to stand revealed in the afterglow, U2 closes the space between the stage and the upper reaches of the stadium. And once that distance is overcome, the remaining distance—between Bono's voice and the listener's ear—is easy to cross. Almost all of the appeal ofU2's music comes from its intimacy, its humanness. The band writes songs out of moods and then Bono searches for a way to hang a shape on those moods with his voice and lyrics. He is the first amplifier the music is put through and it is his job to pin down the feeling the music is making without distorting it. No matter how big U2's live sound or flashy the production gets, it never imposes an effect that is not already present in the composition. When U2 blasts on "Bullet the Blue Sky," they are mimicking the human rage at the heart of the song;

when U2 throbs on "With or Without You," they are evoking a heart­beat. Unlike a lot of other stadium bands, they never pull out a crowd-jolting effect—an explosion or screeching guitar solo or extreme dy­namic change—just to make the audience jump. Every effect grows out of the song, which is why once the impediment of physical distance is overcome the audience can feel as close to the music in the stadium as they would in a theater. I suppose it's the live-performance equivalent of the way TV performers such as Walter Cronkite, Ronald Reagan, or Bishop Sheen developed a gift for speaking to millions of people as if each was the only one listening, as if speaker and listener were alone together in a small room.

I brought along a friend of mine tonight, a recording engineer who's been in the music business for twenty years. He's been laughing and shaking his head through the whole show, which he says is the best he's ever seen. U2 are playing here at Giants Stadium for two nights, and then doing a couple more across the river at Yankee Stadium. They will play to more people during this New York stand than they did in their first three years on the road in America.

I am very glad I saw so many U2 shows early in their career, and I have a lot of sentimentality about them. But they have never been better than this.

II. PROMISE IN THE YEAR OF ELECTION

A call from the governor of arkansas/ the same mistake made by henry ii/ the search for bono by the secret service/ two shots of happy/ a setback for irish immigration/ george b. insults b. george/ the blood in the ground cries out for vengeance

on august 28 U2 are the guests on "Rockline," a national radio phone-in show. "Bill from Little Rock" comes on the phone. The band members glance at each other; they were warned that the Democratic presidential nominee might call to engage in a little of his post-Arsenio public hipness. After some initial jousting (Bono: "Should I call you governor?" Clinton: "No, call me Bill." Bono: "And you can call me Betty."), Clinton and U2 hit it off. For Clinton it means another plug on MTV News, for U2 it means one more item in the daily newspapers; both parties toss another pebble of P.R. onto the big hype candy mountain and move on to the next event.

Two weeks later U2 rolls into Chicago at 3 a.m., drunk and in their stage clothes, after a three-hour journey from a stadium concert in Madison, Wisconsin. Checking into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, they are informed that Governor Clinton is also on the premises.

"Well, go bring him here!" Bono demands loudly, joking. "We want him;" Like Henry II asking, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" U2 should be careful what they ask for.

While the band laughs and stumbles off to their rooms to collapse, one of their well-trained roadies snaps to attention and starts off to locate Bill Clinton and deliver him to U2. In the corridor outside the candidate's boudoir. Secret Service agents pounce on U2's poor messen­ger like coyotes on a moose. "It's 3 a.m.," the feds explain while re­straining the roadie. "The governor is sleeping."

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"You don't understand," the messenger protests. "U2 wants to see him now!"

Bono, unaware of the trouble caused by his joke, finds himself in a huge, bilevel suite with spiral staircase and chandelier. Nice bunkhouse, but he's too wired to sleep. His muse goosed by alcohol, he is flooded with fresh inspiration in his life's quest to write a new "My Way" for his pal Frank Sinatra. True, Old Blue Eyes had not seen the genius in Bono's first attempt, "Treat Me Like a Girl," But this, this one is perfect: "Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad." Bono, still in his beetle sunglasses and crushed red velvet suit, stumbles down the corridor to Edge's suite, humming the tune to himself so he won't forget it—"Two shots of happy, one shot of sad, you think I'm a good man, hut haby I'm had. ..." He's got to get this masterpiece down on tape! He finds Edge, Edge finds a guitar and a tape recorder, and they work on the song until dawn.

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