Edge tells me to try these delicious bar nuts and gets me to eat a handful of friend grasshoppers.

Larry is a vegetarian; he asks me to taste those nachos and see if there's any meat in them. I get nothing but cheese and beans and tell him it's all clear. Larry takes a bite, swallows, and says, "Chicken! First time I've had chicken in four years and it's your fault! I'll never forget this!"

[142]

"What am I, the royal food taster?" I say. "There was no chicken in the piece I ate."

"You see, Larry," Adam says, "you let an outsider taste your food for you. I'm not jealous, but if you need someone to eat off your plate you should always go to your bass player."

Bono has one big problem with the impending return to Dublin. His wife doesn't want him back. Bono admits that, eight months out, tour life seems completely normal to him. If he's supposed to be getting it out of his system, it ain't working. "Because of this my lovely wife has suggested I not come right home."

"Adam is going to check into a hotel for a week," McGuinness says.

"So am I." Bono nods.

"In Dublin?"

"Yeah," Bono admits. "I don't want to, but Alt says it's better. A couple of days after I get back to Dublin we've got to be on a TV special. It will just confuse the kids if I come home and start working again right away, and she says they'll be hurt if they talk to me and I don't hear them. So I guess I'll spend my first week at home in a hotel."

I suggest that Bono go home but stay in the basement for a week. His kids could come to the top of the stairs and throw food down to him. But, of course, then they might keep doing that after he left on tour again, which would be pathetic.

"It's funny," Bono says. "I really don't feel like stopping."

"Well," I say, "maybe this is your five years to work nonstop, do everything you have to do, and then quit and become a shepherd or something."

"I already am a shepherd, Bill," he says, smiling beatifically. "Didn't you know?" He spreads out his arms to his assembled disciples, apos­tles, and money changers, and says, "And these are my sheep."

Stray crew members go baaaaah.

After a great meal and lots of handshaking and a few more reminders from the boss that he closed the whole restaurant for U2 tonight, the band heads across town to what we've been promised is the red-light district. I dunno. Where they dump us is loud and fun and there're lots of bars and the sort of women one sees in bars, but I don't think it's really a red-light district. Paul McGuinness walks around soaking up the atmosphere and periodically pulling out a portable oxygen mask from which he inhales deeply. Quite the Blue Velvet figure he cuts doing so,

 [143]

too! We settle in a mariachi bar where many of the Principles dance (some claim they have never seen Larry Mullen dance before—I guess I'd describe it as a combination of the young Fred Astaire and the old Jerry Lewis). While everyone's drinking, Bono vanishes for about half an hour and returns claiming he stumbled across a genuine brothel. I am certain it's a lie made up to torture me.

As the night threatens to turn into morning, Adam and I wander out and walk around the Plaza Garibaldi. There are bars set up and selling drinks outside, strolling bands of caballeros playing requests, and swing­ers stumbling out of every doorway. Adam, who has been drinking enough that whatever he says should be taken with a grain of salt (and several glasses of tequila), strolls around the square and says—not that one usually thinks in these terms about oneself—that U2 now is in the position the Stones filled in 1972.

I can truthfully tell him that I have been thinking exactly the same thing. The Rolling Stones 1972 tour was, it will always seem to me and those my age, the hottest rock tour ever. The sixties were over, the Beatles broken up, Bob Dylan had all but retired, Hendrix was dead— and the Stones had just capped their Begger's Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers hot streak with the monumental, head-splitting Exile on Main Street. When they went out on their first tour in three years, every kid—male and female—in every high school lunch room wanted to look like Keith Richards. These were the Stones' second generation of fans. The older brothers who'd liked all the sixties singles—"Satisfaction," "Ruby Tues­day," "Paint It Black"—might not have cared for the new, harder, grungier Stones, but then, the older brothers always lumped the band in with a whole raft of sixties British groups. The teenagers in 1972 didn't know or care about that history; this was their Rolling Stones, reborn outside the shadow of the Beatles as the Biggest Band in the World.

It is telling that U2 talked seriously about calling Achtung Baby, Cruise Down Main Street, and the album's chaotic, multiimage cover clearly evoked the jacket of Exile. I tell Adam that I'm right with him on the Stones '72 comparison: one decade of hit singles and screaming girls down, now let's get past that and get heavy.

'Joshua Tree was a pop album." Adam nods. "This is rock."

He mentions that there are no longer many real bands around, bands of four equal members, all aboard since the start, all working together. I say, "Well, R.E.M."

[144]

"That's a different thing," Adam says, still using the vocabulary of 1972. "U2 are the Rolling Stones, R.E.M. are CSN&Y."

When I get back to New York, who should I be talking to but Mick Jagger. And what do you think Mick's bending my ear about? All these new bands that are trying to sound like the old Stones, even dress like the old Stones. He clearly means the Black Crowes and that crowd. He says that at least U2 seems to be doing something new. He liked Achtung Baby a lot and while he hasn't seen Zoo TV yet, from all descriptions that's one band who isn't just looking back at what someone else did twenty years ago.

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