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Hangin' with the chairman/ goin' to the prizefights/ ridin' in white limos/ swingin' with the lord mayor/ bikin' in hotel rooms/ feelin' like a sex machine



bono is intrigued by Las Vegas for all the reasons he's told us: he thinks it's the trash dump in which one finds the jewels; it is our society's consumerism and materialism with its mask off; it's the cathedral of the culture. "At least if you pray to a slot machine," I suggest to him, "you get your answer right away." But I think the real reason U2 is drawn to Las Vegas is because Vegas is where they met Frank Sinatra and were inducted into the Post-Rat Pack International Brotherhood of Big Wheels and High Rollers.

In the spring of 1987 The Joshua Tree had just been released and U2 was enjoying the glow of their first number one album, their first number one single, "With or Without You," and they were on the cover of Time magazine. At the moment of all this glory they were in Las Vegas for the first time, they went to their first prizefight and saw the brilliant middleweight Sugar Ray Leonard win with a dancer's grace. Then they were given free tickets to see Sinatra and Don Rickles at what they were told was a $25-thousand-a-table performance. They were, as U2 always was in those days, dressed like Emmett Kelly, but they were treated like royalty. Sinatra was having a good night, crooning out "One for My Baby" and other signature songs, and U2 was lapping it up. Then Frank said he wanted to introduce some special guests in the star-studded audience, a group from Ireland who have the number one record in the country, are on the cover of Time: U2. A spotlight hit the band and they stood, hamming it up and waving to Liz Taylor, Gregory Peck, and all the other stars in the fur-shrouded audience till Sinatra

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busted their bubble by cracking, "And they haven't spent a dime on clothes."

After the show U2 went backstage to say hello to Frank and ended up getting into an intense discussion with him about music, a subject they had the impression no one ever talked to him about. Buddy Rich had just died and Larry asked if it was true that in the big band days the whole group followed the drummer. "The way it should be!" Larry suggested. Rich and Sinatra had been roommates, pals, enemies, and finally kindred souls, and Sinatra jumped at the chance to talk about him, to talk about the interplay between musicians in the days of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

Sinatra's aides kept knocking on the door with the names of other celebrities who were waiting outside for the chance to say hello: "Gene Autry, Frank." "Roger Moore, Frank." Each time Sinatra would tell them to get lost, he was talking to U2. Afterward Frank's handlers seemed amazed that the boss had spent so much time with anybody, let along a rock group. U2 was offered standing invitations to racetracks in New Jersey and other insider entertainments. The joke on the tour after that was, "Since we met Sinatra, no trouble with the unions."

Bono, a big fan anyway, now threw himself into Sinatra's music. He attended a Sinatra concert in Dublin a year or two later and thought it would be presumptuous to try to go backstage—maybe Sinatra would have forgotten him. During the show he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see the Lord Mayor of Dublin festooned in his ceremonial ribbons and amulet crouching in the aisle saying, "Bono! Frank was asking for ya!"

So it is with some anticipated pizzazz that U2 lands in Vegas again, flush from the Clinton victory and the Glide Memorial inspiration and full of power and glory. They ran into R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck at their concert in Alabama and talked him into coming up when they hit Sin City. Buck says that it's great to jump into U2's world, but "I feel kind of like being Hermann Goering's assistant. You're always in a white limo rocketing somewhere real interesting and no one knows why you're there. But I really enjoy it!"

R.E.M. is the band whose position and reputation is closest to U2's. In the mid-eighties Bono got on the phone and talked R.E.M. into opening some European festival dates for U2, after R.E.M. had sworn off opening for anybody in the aftermath of some bad gigs supporting

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Bow Wow Wow. A friendship between the two groups began then, confirmed when Buck and R.E.M bassist Mike Mills were pressed into performing a drunken rendition of "King of the Road" on U2's tour bus.

"We were, like, twelfth on the bill on some of the shows," Buck recalls. "And I seem to remember going on at eleven o'clock in the morning to mass indifference, generally. It's funny because we played really well. I don't think we did a bad show. No one had ever heard of us. We did okay in Dublin, but at some shows I remember just seeing a lot of the backs of peoples' heads and occasionally the soles of their feet while we were playing. It wasn't bad. We were done by two o'clock in the afternoon, then we could go get drunk and watch these other bands. It was the first time we had ever done anything like that. And after we did it we thought, well, it's not really that hard."

R.E.M. and U2 both emerged in the early 1980s, and are now almost the only bands left standing from the dozens of contenders—X, Husker Du, Gang of Four, the Replacements, the Blasters—who at the time seemed equally likely to go as far as R.E.M. and U2 have gone.

"None of the other bands from the era that we came out of, postpunk, lasted at all," Buck says. "I thought maybe there was some sort of built-in obsolescence: that when you don't acknowledge the past at all, there's only so far you can go into the future. A lot of those bands' historical perspective went back to 1975 and there's not much you can really do with that. You use your youthful energy and craziness and then what? Then it's time to learn how to write songs. A lot of those people didn't. I remember the year when U2 started to sell lots of records. All of a sudden it became sort of obvious that that was going to happen because, well, who else was there? It's either going to be Bon Jovi and those bands—which it was obvious a lot of kids weren't listening to —or it's going to be U2 and to a certain degree us. I didn't think we would specifically sell a lot of records, but I could see that there was this big gap and that U2 was definitely going to go in there.

"R.E.M. don't really care that much if we're the biggest band in the world, but I think U2 does want that to a certain degree. I talked to Larry about it and he said so. You make conscious decisions. I don't think any of their decisions have changed musically where they want to go, but I think it changes how you want to present yourself, and some of us just aren't really interested in that kind of stuff. Bill Berry (R.E.M.'s

drummer) said, 'If I wanted to be famous I'd be the singer.' He'd be really happy if he just never had to have his picture taken, never had to do an interview. And I'm pretty much the same way. So our picture's not on the cover of the records and we're not in the videos a huge amount. We don't do the talk show rounds. We don't present awards. We don't go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I'd just as soon not do anything except make the records, play when I want to, and when it comes time to promote the record, do the obligatory three-week meet-and-greet and interview session."


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