Welcome to Hollywood, boyo.

The Conquest of Mexico

bono and edge perplexed by the channel changer/ larry resents his bikes & babes image/ the hidden kingdom/ the power brokers appear/ love among the latins/ every limo a getaway car

there is nothing as ugly as an 8 a.m. walkup call. U2 worked on their TV special until 4 and then slouched back to the hotel. Now, five hours later, the frazzled musicians are grum­bling into their coffee cups in the Sunset Marquis breakfast room, their eyes swollen shut and their chins nicked from shaving in their sleep. They nibble at muffins and drink only decaf so they can sleep on the plane to Mexico City. Adam, his blond mohawk beginning to grow out on the sides, is wearing a bright red suit "in honor of Mexico." Dennis Sheehan has gone on ahead to LAX to make ready the airport. A limo waits outside. They stare at the walls and mutter and nod off and shake their heads and sit back up and mutter more.

Finally Bono organizes his thoughts enough to demand to know why they have been made to sit here waiting to depart.

"Dennis said we had to leave by nine or we'd miss the gig," Larry says bitterly. "Now look! It's nine-thirty."

They all snort and nod. "And he wonders why we don't believe him," Bono says. They all grunt and agree.

Suddenly Edge opens one of his eyes. "Where is Dennis?" he asks. "He's gone to the airport." Larry shrugs.

There's an old New England expression that applies here: Dawn breaks on Marblehead. The four members of U2 look at each other stupidly. Finally Bono speaks: "Are we waiting for a phone call that will never come?" They stare at one another. Finally Bono gets up and goes over to the limo driver. The driver has been waiting for U2 while U2, used to

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Being transported like very expensive pandas, have been waiting for someone to move them. They are now in danger of missing the only flight that can get them to Mexico City in time for their concert tonight. They jump up and hurry to the car.

I think there should be music playing and I think it should go, (baDump) Here we come, walkin' down the street . . .

In the car Bono struggles to get the TV to switch channels, but it stays stuck on one of those half-hour self-help commercials. Finally, in exasperation, Bono says, "Edge, you're the scientist, can you get this to work?" Edge leans over and tries to change the station. Each time he does, it clicks back to the self-help ad. This is very strange. Edge gets down and fiddles the switches with the furrow-browed dedication of Louis Pasteur at his Bunsen burner, oblivious as Bono to the fact that Larry is sitting with a remote control by his leg, clicking the channel back each time Edge tries to change it.

At last they give up and accept the infotainment. "Too bad you can't get cable in a car," Larry says. Then the drummer asks if anyone else has ever seen the Fishing Channel. "Lots of talk about rods and hooks and the one that got away."

Bono says, "I prefer the 'Rides bikes, likes boats, and lives with girlfriend for twelve years channel.' "

Larry groans and rolls his eyes. Edge asks what they're talking about. Larry explains that Bono's recapping the thumbnail description of him in the new Vogue cover story on U2. Once again a journalist who was given access to the whole band went home and wrote a story that was chock-full of Bono, had a few wise parables from the Edge, and devoted to Adam and Larry roughly the same number of words that go on the back of a bubblegum card. Bono says euphemistically, "She painted Larry in bold strokes."

Adam smiles and says to the sullen Mullen, "At least you're not the one she called, 'handsome in an ugly way.' "

At the airport Dennis Sheehan greets U2 in front of a squadron of the sort of saluting, waving, pointing security agents not seen since Ferdinand Marcos hitched his wagon to a star. U2 is rushed through the metal detectors, up a private elevator, into the first-class lounge, and from there into the sort of superexclusive private white waiting rooms known only to superstars and tortured spies. There they are reunited

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with their manager (who in these circumstances is referred to only as "M").

It's not a long wait—that plane to Mexico is all boarded and ready to fly. The woman in charge of shipping celebrities through LAX comes in to escort the band to the first-class cabin. She tells Bono that she went to Florida to see the first show, she stood on her chair through the Los Angeles concert, "I guess you could say I'm a fan." In the elevator Bono realizes he's left his fly shades behind. The woman whips out a walkie-talkie and gets her security squad combing the holding room, the bathroom, the lounge to find them. Now, bear in mind that Bono loses everything. In the last hour Edge grabbed the book that Bono left in the car, and just now McGuinness found the same book left on the table upstairs. So when Bono says of losing his glasses, "This is unbelievable!" his bandmates correct him.

"No, Bono," Larry says, "it's not unbelievable."

Adam claims, "It's not uncommon."

Edge adds, "It's not unusual."

Larry points out, "It's not surprising at all."

U2 is loaded into first class and Bono sits in the plane on the runway, lamenting his lost fly shades. There is a buzzing between the pilot and the cabin crew and then the airplane door opens and the U2-loving airport lady rushes aboard, Bono's goggles held high. He kisses her hand and she says, "I told you about St. Anthony!"

On the flight McGuinness explains that this is not only U2's first-ever gig in Mexico, it's their first show in any Third World country. The local promoter is an American tied to the entertainment giant MCA/Winterland who is trying to open Mexico City to regular rock concerts. He lobbied Paul hard to do these shows. U2 was turned down for an outdoor stadium—the Mexican authorities were scared of that. Instead they'll play two nights in an indoor arena.

There's a lot of sleeping on the journey. When my watch says it's almost landing time I assume something's wrong: there are no suburbs or outskirts, no life at all in the barren expanse below us. I figure we must be at least an hour away. Then we pass over an abrupt eruption of high mountains, skirt through the clouds, and holy smoke, there is in the basin of the mountains an apparently endless crater filled with the biggest urban area I have ever seen. And we fly over it and fly over it and fly over it; it seems to have no end. Even the bippest metropolis—New

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York, London, Hong Kong—covers only a small area from the air. You fly over satellite towns and half-developed areas for a while before the big city looms up. Not this place! Mexico City is, by population, the biggest city in the world. Ringed by rugged mountains, it has no outskirts. You are in wilderness and then you are in urbania, and urbania seems to go on forever.

Some of the vastness comes from the lack of skyscrapers. It is as if God lined up New York, Chicago, Houston, and Toronto, lopped all the tall buildings down to three- and four-story structures, and then flung them across the horizon. The population here is estimated at twenty million, but no one pretends to have any real idea; it's uncount­able. Aside from being the capital of Mexico, it is the magnet for refugees fleeing political and economic hardship all over Latin America. Mexico City is the cultural center of all the nations between Texas and the South Pole.

The scene at the airport is like A Hard Day's Night. There are fans pressed against the glass of the terminal overlooking the runway, and about twenty-five or thirty screaming girls—the children of bigwigs who pulled strings—screeching for U2 on the tarmac. The screaming gets louder when U2 descends the stairs to the runway. There are two secondhand-looking limos waiting. Adam and Larry, as is their habit, get right in the cars while Edge and Bono, as is their wont, go over and pose for photos and sign autographs while the blessed swoon in ecstatic proximity. (Larry once accused Bono of getting an ego boost out of signing autographs, which annoyed Bono to no end. "Yeah, I really enjoy signing autographs and posing for pictures after traveling for seven hours," Bono snapped. He said to me, "I just find it impossible to ignore people who have been waiting for you and then drive past them in a limo.")

Hey, no passports checked or luggage examined around here! An honor guard of local cops on ancient motorcycles pulls up to escort the two oversize limos down the runway and out of the airport. The first car zooms off and the second follows—despite the fact that Paul McGuinness is standing with one foot in the car and one foot out, hanging on to the door for dear life and hopping along while Principle s Sheila Roche screams at the driver to stop. The cars are too low and heavy to make it over the speed bumps that pop up every few hundred feet, so at every bump the motorcycle cops dismount, blow their

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whistles, stop all traffic in each direction, and wait while the limos torturously turn twenty-two degrees and ease over the tar impediments one wheel at a time. I daresay we could walk to wherever we're going faster than this, although that would deprive those of us in the second car of the fun of watching the trunk flap open and shut on the first car as various U2 luggage bags bounce in the air like happy appaloosas. McGuinness sighs and says, "Welcome to the Third World."

Time demands that U2 haul ass straight to the Palacio de los Deportes—the sports palace—and tonight's show. The cars part the cheering fans, slip through a gate secured by many alert guards, roll into a quickly opened and closed garage door and disgorge U2 into the dusty belly of the rickety arena. From the outside, the place looks like an enormous armadillo shell. Inside it's dirty, ugly, and rusty. The audi­ence on the floor are crammed together on cheap red plastic chairs, the sort you'd find at a PTA slide show in a poor school. B.A.D., U2's opening act, are rocking the casbah when we arrive. The narrow aisles are littered with cigarette butts, ice cream wrappers, and gum. Hawkers walk through the crowd yelling "ice cream" and "soda" in Spanish, above the music.

I wander the upper reaches of the hall while B. P., splendid in his cape and Zorro hat, stokes up "Be My Baby" for the cheering audience. The seats that climb up the sides of the arena are shaky and old. The bathrooms are dirty. It seems like a place where someone could get hurt. I go back down to the floor, to a seat not far from the soundboard, just before U2 comes on. When the lights dim, the audience, already wildly excited, climbs up on their chairs. I do too. I remember this sort of intense, overcramped energy from the punk days and I have my mean face on and my elbows pointed out, set for two hours of shoving, insults, and dirty looks.

And let me tell you something—I am full of gringo crap. U2 comes on and while the energy level is as high and wild as at an early Clash show, the gentleness and shared openness of the audience reminds me of the heyday of Joni Mitchell. It is really something to feel. The fans' pulses must be doing triplets, they are frantically enthusiastic—yet they are so careful and considerate of each other than I feel like the greatest cynic since doubting Thomas. I should be ashamed of myself. It's a good thing I found the backstage kitchen crew filling up Evian bottles

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with local water or I would think I'd misjudged human nature com­pletely.

Flipping around the Zoo TV screens Bono hauls in a soccer match and announces the score: "Mexico dos, Costa Rica uno!" The crowd explodes and begins chanting a football cheer: "Mejico! Mejico! Me-jico!" When Larry gets up and takes off his shirt he gets plenty of applause. When he then puts on a Mexican football jersey it turns into an ovation.

Out on the B stage Bono is so excited he launches into "La Bamba" while Edge follows and Larry and Adam just stare at him. When Lou Reed's face appears on the big screen during "Satellite of Love," Bono and Edge look up at him like worshippers on the road to Damascus. I love this film of Reed because it shows his real face, not young and quite gentle. Lou works so hard at projecting a tough-guy image that to see his private side displayed in public is a pleasure.

"Bob Marley was from Mexico, right?" Bono cries as the audience cheers. "Well, he could have been." Bono plays "Redemption Song" as thousands of lighters flash on and off together in perfect time. Then, during "Sunday Bloody Sunday" a big owl flies through the hall and lights on a rafter looking down at the spectacle like the Paraclete Himself. I overhear several evil crew members making plans to catch a mouse tomorrow and attach it to B. P.'s hat just before he goes out to deejay. They want to see if the owl will carry him away.

After the concert Bono is delighted. "I felt I was completely empty before I went out there," he says, "but it's a funny thing. That audience washed over me and we rode their energy as if we were surfing on a wave. I've been told that the shows here will get better every night, but I don't see how that's possible."

Bono's new rockish persona extends to the aftershow meet-and-greets where he dons a hideous crushed-plush smoking jacket to mingle with the music-biz insiders waiting to eat potato chips and shake his hand. Tonight there are a lot of guest stars from the States, flown in for the end of the 1992 tour and U2's first visit to Mexico. Hanging in the anteroom is Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, U2's label. Blackwell is a legendary character in the music business, a blond Brit who fell in love with Jamaican music and built an English label on reggae, brought Bob Marley to the world, and in the late sixties and seventies raised an empire beyond reggae with such acts as Traffic, Free,

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And Cat Stevens. Also along this evening are Frank Barsalona, U2's American agent and his partner Barbara Skydel. And here comes Rick Dobbis, president of PLG, the new multilabel umbrella company formed by Polygram, the multinational that bought Island from Black-well a few years ago. Why, there is enough music business power in this room to revive Milli Vanilli and make Kajagoogoo the next Led Zeppelin, should that power ever be turned to evil.

These topcats have every reason to line up to light Bono's little cigar tonight. With one more show to go before the Christmas break, U2's statistics for the first ten months of 1992 look like this: more than 10 million copies of Achtung Baby sold, 5 hit singles, 2.9 million tickets sold for the Zoo TV tour (106 shows in 84 cities in 12 countries), 54,615 miles traveled so far. The frequent-flyer miles alone will pay for this expedition. After the requisite palm pumping and nyuk-nyuking with the power brokers and local dignitaries, Bono and Edge split off to go outside to the fence where fans are waiting and sign autographs and have their pictures taken. Then it's into the limos and into the night.

We make a twenty-minute pit stop before regrouping for a night on the town. The Hotel Nikko is posh and tall, with panoramic views of the illuminated city from the upper floors, a spiderweb of lights spin­ning out in every direction. There is a whole secret world that the famous and powerful travel in, demarked by the special holding rooms and escorts at airports and even more by the private floors of ritzy hotels. In a place like this there are special elevators that carry the privileged to their privacy on restricted levels with their own check-in desks, their own lounges, their own butlers—so that the famous and powerful don't have to associate with the merely rich.

I have no time to trifle over such observations! I gotta brush my teeth, change my shirt, and get back downstairs without even breaking the seal on my toilet seat. I grab my key from the secret desk clerk and find my room where I share a tearful reunion with my luggage. The great thing about traveling with high rollers like U2 is that your bags disappear from your hotel room in one country and reappear in your room in the next without your ever seeing them move. The bad thing is that some­times, as happened to me this week, my suitcase was grabbed and shipped with the bags of the Principles and crew, who came down to Mexico two days ahead of the band with whom I was loitering. I returned to my room at the Sunset Marquis to find myself with nothing

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but the shirt on my back. I hiked to the only clothing store within walking distance that was open at night, an athletic shop that special­ized in sweatsuits emblazoned with images of Charles Barkley. I'm happy to get my real clothes back; I'm sick of slapping five with B-boys.

Back downstairs everyone piles into cars and vans to head to some hotspot that the Principles have already scoped. Our driver takes off with the back door open and one crew member halfway out and scream­ing.

"I'm very impressed with Mexico City, I must say," Edge declares as we cruise, and he's said a mouthful. You always hear about the terrible poverty, the awful pollution and ugliness of this place—and no doubt there's plenty of all that in this eternal (kilometer-wise) city. But no­body tells you about the parts of town we're riding through, which looks like what Washington D.C. could be if it swiped ten or twenty of Rome's best buildings. There are beautiful parks and boulevards sepa­rating great white stone monuments and museums. There are illumi­nated fountains and statues and immaculate city squares. There is also a lot of Moorish influence in the architecture, a suggestion of minarets. I can't believe we're in North America.

I suppose that most of the reports about the grimness and griminess of Mexico City come from tourists who have been communing with nature in the deserts or seashore and then drive in here through miles of slums, or who only see the area around the airport on their way to the resorts. Or maybe it's just the northern European prejudices against Spanish culture that were handed down from the Old World to the New. I don't know. I do know that Mexico City is beautiful.

We are eventually deposited at a fancy, multilevel restaurant/disco in what seems to be the happening part of town, Adam, Bono, Edge, and Larry grab a table together and sit laughing and talking for a couple of hours. McGuinness, at the next table, points out that one of the most unusual things about U2 is that the four of them still prefer each others' company to anyone else's, and after so many years stuck together they still have no shortage of things to philosophize, laugh, and bust each other's balls about.

U2 are seated in front of an elaborate (and dare I say, mental') strobelit Santeria spin on a manger scene. Populating the life-size tableau are very large sculptures of the Holy Family accompanied by the usual angels and wisemen, but augmented here by a cowboy among the shep-

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herds, an elephant among the sheep, and a grotesque, bat-winged flying devil sticking out his tongue at the Christ child. Now wouldn't it be a drag to learn that when William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" he was not carving out a great prophetic metaphor for the twentieth century but was simply drinking in a Mexican restaurant like this and describing a sculpture like that? Unlikely? Perhaps, but proba­bly worth credit toward an advanced degree at any number of tweedy little universities. The four members of U2 sit laughing, oblivious to the tableau in front of which they are posed. I'll tell you, though, if the center cannot hold, that flying devil on his flimsy string is going to land right on Adam's head. He'll be picking himself up off the floor, asking, "What rough beast is this?"

The rest of the Principles and Zoo crew spread out through the rooms, some eating, some dancing, most drinking. Sheila Roche, an Irish wetback who has been working under Ellen Darst in New York, is feeling blue because Ellen has handed in her notice. The woman who guided U2 through club gigs and radio interviews when they first came to America, who tutored Paul McGuinness about the U.S. music busi­ness, and who has for the last eight years been in charge of Principle's American operation, has gotten tired of the road and accepted a job with Elektra Records. She put off the move until the American tour was finished, but now Ellen's saying good-bye and Sheila, who moved from Dublin to New York to work with Ellen, is going to miss her. Ellen's longtime second-in-command, Keryn Kaplan, will take over. One of Ellen's legacies is the number of women in power. "In the New York office we have only one man," Sheila smiles. "The receptionist."

For all the credit given to U2 and McGuinness for employing so many women, though, I have run across a minority opinion that, as all the women are in support roles, nurturing roles, and all the creative decisions are made by men. Principle is really maintaining patriarchal values under a sheen of being progressive and nonsexist. It's hard to resolve that; it's so much in the eye of the beholder. I would not deny that many of the women around U2 are nurturing, gentle types, but so is U2. There are people in the music business who will tell you that Ellen Darst and/or Anne-Louise Kelly is the real brains of that outfit and McGuinness rides their coattails. No doubt there are other people who assume that Paul, the man, must do all the brainwork and the women in power are glorified secretaries. People see what they want to see. If the

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Rap against the Principle women is that they are too nurturing or gentle, then maybe they have made more genuine progress by feminizing U2's perceptions than they would have by adopting so-called masculine values themselves.

Suzanne Doyle, the deputy tour manager, comes tearing by looking for Larry. It seems he scolded a crew member for something that was not, Suzanne says, the guy's fault and she wants to ask him to apologize. It is an unusual hierarchy U2 has set up, where the people who work for them are allowed to tell them they're full of bull and bring them down to earth when their big heads start to interfere with operations or morale. I'm always amazed that, far from treating me like the new kid in school, crew members I've barely met greet me by name, pat me on the back, and invite me to join in when they're looking for fun. That sort of generosity is rare on rock tours.

"It comes from the top down," Sheila says. "Bono has told me that if any big shot who comes backstage ever gives me a bad time, I can tell him to fuck off. Do you know what a relief that is? Some people—L.A. is the worst for this—are so rude, so demanding and ungrateful. They get complimentary tickets and if they see somebody they know with better complimentary tickets they get upset with us. Their prestige is determined by how good their free seats are!"

In the next room Joe O'Herlihy, the band's soundman, is shaking the disco music out of his ears. Joe has been with U2 since 1979, before they had a record deal. Easygoing, likable, and possessed of whiskers that make ZZ Top's beards look like baby bibs, Joe launches into the tale of how he made it home to Dublin for the birth of his fourth child. Joe had missed the arrival of his first three kids years earlier, because he was always on the road with rock bands. He vowed to his wife that he'd be at her side when this late baby was born. U2 was filming a concert in Virginia for Rattle and Hum when word came that his wife back in Ireland had gone into labor. Joe flipped, but U2 had prepared for such a sudden evacuation. Joe was rushed to an airport and flown to New York. He called from JFK and heard, "It's coming!" over the phone. He ran for the Concorde and spent the four-hour supersonic flight pacing the aisles, watching the posted speed click around, and praying, "Faster, faster, faster!" Landing in London he ran to another phone. "She's at the hospital! Hurry, Joe!" He ran to the Irish flight gate and got on the next plane to Dublin, raced to the hospital, was given a sanitary robe to

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Throw over his smelly clothes, and charged into the delivery room, pushed the attendant aside, and told his wife he was there. Ten minutes later he was holding his new daughter in his arms, weeping and weeping. Two days after that he was behind his sound desk in Tempe, Arizona, mixing U2.

"That was the first time on the whole tour the band's had a chance to sit down and tell each other our road stories," Bono says as the party starts breaking up. "We give each other space on the road, and when we get back to Dublin we won't see that much of each other."

"The only time we get to do this is when the four of us go away on a little vacation without anyone else," Adam agrees. "Then we revert to type: Edge makes all the plans, Larry handles the money, and Bono is the greeter—he interacts with other people." I don't ask, but I assume Adam's job is picking up the girls.

Adam is not one for leaving a bar while the drinks are still flowing, but at 3:40 a.m. the other three U2's are ready to call it a night. When they step outside, the street is filled with kids screaming, waving auto­graph pads, shoving toward the band, and pounding on the limo. Bono jumps into the car first and the driver floors it, scattering fans and leaving Edge and Larry behind, in the mob. Bono shouts at the driver to slow down and back up. Edge and Larry fall into the car with the fans tugging at them.

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