Back, is crushed when Buck tells him that the seat he gave up was next to Sugar Ray.

The musicians jump into their white limo and are deposited at the ringside of another great African American athlete—James Brown. Catching a late night J. B. show in Vegas would be a gas anyway, but James announces he has a special guest in the audience he wants to bring up to join him on "Sex Machine." Bono prepares his hair and Brown announces, "Magic Johnson!" The place goes nuts as Magic, the super­human basketball player who recently quit the game when he learned he was HIV-positive, climbs up and joins James in singing, "Get up! I feel like a sex machine!"

Bono thinks it's an awkward choice of song for a man battling the AIDS virus after what he has described as a life of promiscuity. "Be a sex machine," Bono says, "but for Christ's sake use a condom."

When all the star-search stuff is over, when the rockers have gone back and met Magic and James and put Stallone and Willis out of their heads and said good night to stories about Jack Nicholson and Frank Sinatra, Buck talks about how new this shoulder-rubbing between rock musicians and mainstream stars really is.

"I think partly the nature of rock & roll celebrity has changed over the last ten years," he says. "If you look at any of those old Stones' films, where they check into a Holiday Inn in 1972, they're the biggest band in the world and no one knows who they are. That doesn't happen anymore. Everyone is on videos. Rock & roll people like us were brought up to practice in a basement, and no one cared what we looked like; it was just not a celebrity thing. Then when you got really huge, kids knew who you were.

"There's this idea that rock & roll is rebellious music and you're not doing what society says. But nowadays the first time you have a hit record you're shaking hands with guys in offices and people want to get you a different haircut. They're offering to have a guy make you suits so that you can get that Armani look. It must be mind-blowing.

"R.E.M. didn't even sell a million records until we'd been together for nine years. So at that point you couldn't really show me anything that I hadn't seen before. And U2 was the same. They were more successful out of the box than we were; I guess by about 1985 they were really huge. But still, I bet nobody over twenty-five recognized them on the streets. And it's not that way anymore. You can literally have one

[108]

video and be world famous. People in foreign countries know what you look like. Rock & roll celebrity is now much closer to what traditional showbiz used to be, where they'd write about your personal habits. The Stones used to only get written about in the mainstream press when they got arrested. Now I read the gossip columns when I'm in New York or L.A. and it will say who's eating where with who. That's a whole new thing."

Buck figures what separates the artists from the posers is the willing­ness to keep changing what you do that made you successful. Another thing U2 and R.E.M. have in common is that both bands created instantly identifiable sounds that were widely imitated by other bands— and then abandoned those sounds and moved on to new areas.

"There are people who are in it for a career and there are people who are in it to try and find out something about themselves," Buck says. "The only way you can find out about your life and how to live your life is to try a lot of different things and fail at some of them. Probably LJ2's only failure was Rattle and Hum. I'm sure it sold ten million records, but I don't think it did exactly what they wanted it to do. And yet that's good. It opened the door for them to do something else."

Buck was impressed by Zoo TV on several levels: "Certainly over the years they've been known as being a sincere group, in capital letters. It was nice that they could just take that and throw it away and start over. And just technologically the show is pretty amazing. As a musician I was thinking, 'God this would be so hard. You have to work with all these cues and all this stuff going on!' I mean, if I want to go backstage during a song and pick my nose I can; there's all kinds of dark places. This was almost like a Broadway play, it was so rigid. I really thought it was a great show. Probably the best show I've ever been to in a large arena."

The others fly out of Las Vegas to California, but Larry continues on— as he has journeyed through much of America—on his motorcycle with his biker buddy, security man David Guyer. After a ride from Florida to New Orleans Larry won his wings, a Harley-Davidson patch. David says that in the motorcycle world there's no shortage of celebrities who know more about looking cool than actually riding. He names one rock star who bought a big expensive bike and made a great show of rolling into the parking lot of a hip nightclub. Unfortunately he had not learned how to stop it and crashed.

[109]

Along the desert highway between Vegas and California, Larry and David pull into a motel for the night. Larry isn't sure why David insists to the clerk that their rooms be on the ground floor. Once they've got their keys David leads Larry back outside and tells him to get on his bike, they're not leaving these Harleys out here. David rides his motor­cycle into his motel room and Larry feels obliged to do the same. "I love the smell of gasoline in the morning," Larry says.

Harps Over Hollywood

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