Van sends back word that Dylan should come join him there. The two kings never do confer.

The next night, though, everyone including Dylan goes to see Van put on an electrifying show, inspired, perhaps, by having Dylan in the house. He goes back to the sixties for "Sweet Thing" and up to the nineties for "Enlightenment" and makes plenty of stops in the decades in between. For the encore Van summons Bono to join him on "Gloria." Bono isn't sure of all the words, but he is annoyed that the audience is sitting in their seats reverently, so he improvises a gospel rant on the theme, "This is not a church—but this is holy ground!" That gets the crowd on their feet and jumping. Van looks over at Bono, impressed.

Van starts summoning the other famous guests from the wings. Edge, having visions of himself banging a tambourine, refuses to go, but Hynde and Costello are there in a flash. Dylan is still looming offstage, hidden under several layers of hooded shirts and coats. Bono goes back and hauls him out, recruiting Elvis and Chrissie to help peel the layers of clothing off Dylan while Van leads them through "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," a Dylan song that Van recorded in 1966. Celebrities are climbing out of knotholes onto the stage around Morrison now. Who knew Kris Kristofferson was in Dublin? How did Steve Winwood get behind the organ? It is a surreal finale to a remarkable pair of evenings.

Van throws his arm around Bono's shoulder and tells him he did well

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on "Gloria" with the paternal pride of a dad who's let his sixteen-year-old borrow the family car for the first time and has seen it returned to the garage undented.

There are many beautiful women in the room and Bono is ap­proached by former Miss Ireland Michelle Rocca. Van comes up and tells Bono, "That's my girl.'" Van starts pointing to all the best-looking women in the room and saying, "And that's my girl, and that's my girl and that's ..."

Bono is happily drunk, as are most of the other people bellying up to Van's bar tonight, but through the haze he wonders just how important alcohol is to the pursuit of the muse. Most people are delighted when Van has a few drinks, loosening up and shaking off the angry Morrison persona that usually keeps even well-wishers at bay. Who's to say he shouldn't indulge that social impulse? Yet Morrison and Dylan's pursuit of art and faith seems to have taken them up some strange and painful roads. Bono is trying to keep his balance while exploring those roads— trying to get a taste of the journey without falling off the edge of a trail on which the map is always changing. He often dwells on something Dylan told him: "There's only two kinds of music: death music and healing music." Dylan and Van are two decades farther along the road than Bono, and perhaps that much farther away from healing them­selves. Maybe Bono is more blessed than they are. Maybe he has less genius. Or maybe we should wait and see where he is in twenty years before making any assumptions.

Changing Horses

Death in the family/ the clinton inauguration/ adam and tarry solicit a new singer/ everything don henley doesn't like/ bono and edge at the thalia theatre/ unbuttoning fascism's fly/ what the president said to the prime minister

There are two momentous events set to take place in America in late January of 1993. Bill Clinton is being sworn in as president in Washington and U2's farewell dinner for Ellen Darst is taking place in New York.

Although U2 doesn't feel comfortable accepting as a band an invita­tion to Clinton's swearing-in, Paul McGuinness and his wife Kathy go along. At the last minute Adam and Larry decide to join them. They arrive in Washington and jump into a buzz of parties and get-togethers between all the guests, entertainers, and dignitaries piling into town for the ceremony and the balls that follow it. Paul hooks up with some of his Democratic connections and is having a real good time being a power broker among power brokers when word reaches him that his younger brother has died suddenly of heart failure.

Paul, stunned, begins arranging for a flight back to Ireland. It is a terrible reenactment of a past tragedy. Thirteen years before, when U2 was making their debut album, the young manager flew to America for his first meeting with Frank Barsalona to discuss the agent taking on U2. When his plane landed in New York that time, Paul was met with news that his father had just died of a heart attack. He had to cancel the meeting with Barsalona and get right back on a plane for Ireland then too. Both times his family members died, he was off in America attend­ing to business. And to have both die the same way—his younger brother now, not even forty—must inevitably make Paul wonder if he is black-marked by heredity. He goes and packs his bag and heads to the

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