There is a great deal of speculation afoot in the outside world about just what U2 is doing in here. What was supposed to be a four-month

[183]

break between tour '92 and tour '93 has turned into a marathon recording session. There has been vague talk of coming up with an EP, four or five songs to release with the summer tour of Europe. But everyone's working much too hard for that. There has been a lot of suggestion that they are recording a film soundtrack, though there is no actual film. Nobody wants to say out loud that U2 might be making their next album here, because there is only a small amount of time and nobody wants to put more pressure on the band. Ask Edge why no one will say the "A" word and he'll give you a lot of double-talk about the subtle distinctions between albums and soundtracks and projects, be­tween songs and tracks and "vibes." Ask Adam and he'll be more straightforward: "I don't know if what we're doing here is the next U2 album or a bunch of rough sketches that in two years will turn into the demos for the next U2 album."

The idea of working through their vacation time seems to have taken hold when Edge got antsy coming home to face an empty house and the reality of the end of his marriage. He needed something to do to maintain the energy he had built up making Achtung Baby and touring for a year—and to keep his mind off his personal loss. Bono was going nuts hanging around his home while still in full tourhead. As he knew U2 had almost a whole other year of roadwork ahead of them, he was not prepared to begin the psychological downshifting that usually allows him to ease back into domestic life.

So when Edge wanted to get into the studio and do some recording, Bono was quick to sign on. Eno and Flood agreed to come in and see what U2 could come up with this time. The band is back to their original method of songwriting—the four of them getting into a room and jamming until a song emerges. Eno or Edge then go through the tapes, finding sections they like and editing them together into proper song form. Then the band listens, suggests alterations, and tries coming up with words and melodies to go on top of the edited tracks. Bono or Edge will then sing these lyrical and melodic ideas into a Walkman while the track plays. When a song has taken shape that way, U2 listens to the tape, goes back into the studio, and tries to play it.

Eno has, with professorial organization, set up an eraseable poster board on a tripod in the studio. On it is written, along with the musical symbols for sharps and flats:

[184]

CYCLE HOLD STOP CHANGE CHANGE BACK

ABCDEFG

Sometimes Eno likes to stand at this board with a pointer while U2 plays, directing when he wants them to go to the next section or change to a different chord. It's actually a workable system, but watching the thin, bald Eno use his board and pointer to direct a rock band is hilarious, like Ichabod Crane conducting the Rolling Stones. I am reminded of the old Three Stooges episode in which Curly is mistaken for a professor at a women's college. He puts on a mortarboard and black robe, grabs a pointer, and teaches the coeds to sing "B-I-bee, B-O-Bo" while he dances around the classroom. I keep expecting Eno to drop his pedagogical demeanor and yell, "Swing it!"

U2 start another song. Sam O'Sullivan, Larry's drum tech, runs into the control room to ask Flood what this one's called. "If God Will Send His Angels," Flood says. Sam rapidly flips through a stack of papers and says, "We don't have a tempo for this!"

"It used to be called 'Wake Up, Dead Man,' " Flood says calmly. "One twenty-eight will do fine. One-twenty-eight or one twenty-seven. Each song U2 plays has its tempo set by an electronic timekeeper, a click track, that not only holds the rhythm steady but allows the group to go back later and edit together sections from different parts of the song, or even from different takes. When they perform the songs on­stage Larry has the option of using those clicks to find his place or set the pace. He decided years ago that he hated having a tick tick tick coming through his headphones on stage, so he instead had the sound of a metronomic shaker or maraca fed softly through his monitor. It sounds more musical, it's unobtrusive, and if a bit of it gets picked up by the microphones it actually adds a subtle color to the sound. In the studio, though, he has to use the headphones and click track—which after eight or nine hours leaves him with a blinding headache.

The band is not sure if the tempo Flood called for is the best speed for "If God Will Send His Angels." They try playing it slowly, they try

 [185]

it faster, they try it too fast. "If God Will Send His Angels" goes from the stately pace of U2's "Walk to the Water" to the energetic plod of Iron Butterfly's "In a Gada Da Vida" to the stumble-footed stampede of the Doors' "Break on Through." This is not progress.

Edge adapts his guitar playing to every different tempo, finding some inspired alternatives along the way, from low, funky wah-wah to high, Ernie Isley phase-shifting to something that sounds like a mosquito pumped up to the volume of a buzz saw. Finally he lands back on the ringing dream tones that a generation of young guitarists calls "the Edge."

Eno is hitting buttons on a synthesizer, searching through the files. Bono addresses the booth through his vocal mike: "We're looking for Brian's 'Dead Man' sounds on the keyboard."

While they're looking, Larry begins playing another song. Bono picks up on it and joins in. This whole Jam/tape/edit method encour­ages the musicians to keep their creative juices flowing—as quick as they get bored with one song they move on to another. The sorting will be done later. Edge comes in with a psychedelic guitar. Bono starts singing about climbing the highest hill, then he repeats a phrase from one of his literary inspirations, Charles Bukowski: "These days run away like horses over a hill."

"Dirty Day" emerges as the title of the song, though Bono also tries out some of the words he's using on another track, "Some Days Are Better Than Others." The lyrics to these two songs might sound ab­stract (a cynic would say nonsensical) outside this room, but given Bono's current state of mind they make perfect sense: "Some days you wake up with her complaining," "Some days you wake up in the army," "Some days you feel like a bit of a baby," "Some days you can't stand the sight of a puppy."

It's a pretty fair peek into Bono's current state of mind as he prowls around his house, trying not to trip over his children, his brain still filled with the smoke and mirrors of the Zoo TV tour. He is in that strange mental neighborhood where life on the road seems vibrant and natural and home life, real life, feels claustrophobic and flat.

Bono was rambling on earlier about trying in these recordings to capture the feeling you get when you're lying in bed in the morning trymg to sleep and the music from your kids' cartoons is coming through the wall. Without the pictures, Bono said, the soundtracks are

[186]

Amazing. They are disjointed, cut up to follow the action in a way that defies the rules of music, and you never know when the violins and trumpets are going to be augmented with a sudden scream, freight train, or shotgun blast.

His divided mental state is affecting Bono's songwriting. A song called "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car" begins "You're a precious stone/ You're out on your own/ You know everyone in the world but you feel alone." Sounds like a good description of U2 on tour in America to me. Bono tries handing me a line about the song as a religious metaphor ("Daddy may be God," he says, "but he could be the devil too.") and I say, "Ah, come on, Bono. Daddy is Paul McGuinness. Daddy is the organization that provides you with all these cars and planes and fancy meals and settles the bill after you leave, pays off the posse if you break something."

Bono says, yes, that's right—but he would probably say that even if it had never occurred to him before. He may very well have in mind for these songs bigger metaphors and deeper meanings than life as a rock star, but the fact that he is so deep in a tour mentality while he's writing means that they are completely informed by that strange perspective.

The new lyrics are full of U2's inability to slip out of the clusterfuck mentality and back into what's supposed to be normal life. And I hear both trepidation and excitement at the prospect. Achtuny Baby was about being tempted away from conventional commitments by the excitement of Nighttown, but the character on Achtung Baby always knew where home was—he was testing how far away he could step and still get back. The character in these new songs has lost his map. He can barely remember how he used to think or who he used to be.

The music, meanwhile, has a slightly drunken feeling. Eno and Flood are getting a sound like conventional pop music underwater. It conjures up the way that, when you're in a strange country and a little drunk, the crappiest disco or pop music can sound weirdly attractive. It's not that you don't know it's stupid—it's that you don't care. It may have some­thing to do with your being, at that moment and by the standards of that place, a little stupid yourself. (At dinner last night Bono held forth on the brilliance of the Bee Gees: "Equal to Abba, perhaps even supe­rior. 'Tragedy' is genius.")

"Crashed Car" begins with a beat like an anvil—harsh, loud, ham­mering—which as the song takes off is replaced by a sound like a bass

 [187]

Drum heard from the bottom of a swimming pool. It takes me a minute to figure out what that switch in tone reminds me of: pushing through an excited crowd into a waiting car and then rolling up the window, sealing all the adrenaline panic outside your glass-enclosed luxury.

Structurally, the songs on Achtung Baby were. conventional—"One" or "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" could have fit on The Joshua Tree. What was radical was the production—submerging Bono's vocal in distortion on "Zoo Station," for example. On the new material, though, the song structures go off in all sorts of bizarre directions. It is up to Bono and the others to come up with lyrics and melodies that impose some sense of order on these wandering tracks. On Achtung Baby U2 took conventional tracks and radicalized them; on this material U2 is taking radical tracks and covering them with a veneer of convention.

U2 returns to working on "If God Will Send His Angels." It is upbeat, a little Doorsy but clearly in the U2 Big Music tradition, which may make it hard to fit with the more disjointed new songs. This song, too, needs a chorus, and Bono has a plan for how to get one. He wants the band to break down at a certain point and beat out one phrase over and over while he chants the title line on top of it. Bono asks Larry to just ride his cowbell to affect this big dynamic shift. Edge and Adam are puzzling over what they should play to make the dramatic gesture Bono wants while still providing the energy lift necessary for the chorus to pick the listener up—not drop him through a sudden sonic trapdoor.

"It doesn't have to be a big deal," Eno says. "You could just hold the E for another two hours."

"Larry," Bono says, "try one of your rolls at the end of this se­quence." Bono mimicks the beat he wants rat-ta-tat-ta-tat and then sings, "OO-OOH, GO-OOOOOH"

They try it a couple of times. Flood says it works. They play it again. Flood says they're losing it—the chorus is now a drop-off, "Not the uplift I imagine you want."

Bono suggests they come into the control room and listen to the different versions. Sitting on the couch during the playback, the band agrees that the song isn't working. Bono says that a circular progression such as this needs a great guitar part to raise it up as the chords go around and around. (In other words, let Edge solve the problem.) Eno says that the problem may be Bono. He's pushing against the

[188]

top of his range. He has to climb too high for the chorus, "Squeaking." Eno observes that the song is in E, a tough key for Bono.

"Yeah," Bono says, "E's tough, but guitar and bass players love it, and unfortunately U2 starts with the music. It's a discussion we often have." Bono says he's good in G, A, and B, but Edge and Adam don't like playing in those keys. Edge is impassive. He's not going to let Bono snake out of dealing with the vocal problem by changing the subject.

After listening to several versions of the song, Eno and Bono agree that a ragged early take is better than the later ones where everyone knew exactly where they were going and the shifts between verses and chorus were sharply denned. As the early version plays again, Eno praises it, saying, "See, that's tense without being thuggish. The way you're doing it now is lowbrow,"

I'm impressed with Eno's use of semantics to sway musical judgment. A different producer might listen to the same version and say, "See, that's nervous without being ballsy. The way you're doing it now has guts."

With the backing track thus selected, Eno begins pushing Bono to figure out how he's going to get over his problem with the key and register and find "a real vocal character" for the song. Bono ducks the issue, which gives Eno an opening for his own agenda. While experi­menting in the studio earlier today Eno ganged together several effects and came up with "a great new vocal sound—thin and hard." He thinks it's just what Bono needs for "If God Will Send His Angels." The cynic in me suspects that excited as he is by today's discovery, Eno would find it the perfect sound for "What's New, Pussycat," "Nights in White Satin," or any other song that Bono happened to be singing tonight.

Bono asks suspiciously if this new sound of Eno's has anything to do with the Vocoder (a device for altering vocals electronically). Eno as­sures him it does not. Bono tries to slip away from the subject by suggesting that he belt out the refrain, "If God will send his angels," like one of those American TV evangelists, like the Mirrorball Man, "in­stead of how I'm doing it now, like a bad rock singer." Bono tries it, sounding like Foghorn Leghorn. It is a slippery attempt to use a caricature to avoid his responsibility to actually hit the notes.

Eno, sensing his opponent's weakness, comes back with a semantic uppercut: "This new vocal sound I've found is like a ... a ..." he

 [189]

pretends to search for an exact description but he knows damn well what he's going to say, "a psychotic evangelist!"

Bono's eyes light up. "That's what I want!" First round to Brian Eno.

As Eno's setting up his sound,' Bono tells Edge that he thinks the guitar should stop altogether during this new cowbell breakdown chorus. "It doesn't matter if you're playing different chords," Bono says, "if you're just playing them the same way."

"The chords are just the canvas," Edge says, Zen-like. "What shape canvas do you want?"

While Larry wanders off to shoot pool and Adam to go home, I sit on the couch between Edge and Bono marveling at the complex higher reasoning function of U2, the bisected hemispheres of the band brain— Edge on the left, Bono on the right—seated high and proud atop the long backbone of bass and drums. Eno washes over both sides like a superego. (Tim Booth of the British group James, who Eno also pro­duces, has pointed out that Brian Eno's name is an anagram for "One Brain." Heavy.) It's great to watch each of these three smart, articulate men try to get his own way by bringing different forms of rhetoric to what are, finally, just matters of taste.

Eno comes on like a philosophy professor, using apparent logic to win his case. Under close scrutiny, though, Eno's .syllogisms are a little shaky. He does not proceed from fact to fact to conclusion. Rather he hits on a conclusion first (based on taste or instinct or expediency) and then bends a few facts to make them fit that conclusion. So when Bono mentions that he wants to sing like a TV preacher, Eno tells him that his new vocal sound is like "a psychotic evangelist." I'll bet if Bono had said he wanted to sing like King Kong, Eno would have described his new vocal sound as "evocative of gigantic monkeys."

Bono, equally clever, tries to win arguments by couching them in moral terms. Even with Eno's new effect Bono does a bad job on his crazed-evangelist vocal. He wants to leave it and go on to something else. Eno keeps after him to redo it, until Bono, pushed into a corner, declares, "I am actually ashamed of that vocal. It embarrasses me." He pauses for effect before coming around with the left hook: "And maybe it is right that I should be ashamed at that moment. Maybe shame is what that lyric demands!"

Here is a bit of rhetoric any schoolboy late with his term paper could appreciate! Bono makes a moral imperative out of his desire to avoid

[190]

⇐ Предыдущая50515253545556575859Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: