Center of all the electrical fields on the Zoo TV stage every night than she will be at Chernobyl.

Eno attempts to calm Bono's anxieties by telling him that according to one theory the disaster at Chernobyl was exaggerated by the Ukraini­ans in order to embarrass the Soviet authorities and speed up Ukraine's secession from the USSR. It's a nice theory, but it doesn't explain why Rudolph is no longer the only reindeer who glows.

Since the fall of Communism there has been all sorts of hoodoo in the air. While U2 is struggling to capture on tape the contradictory moods of relief and trepidation, the nations of Western Europe are opening their borders and debating intermingling their currencies. The whole Zoo TV enterprise is taking place as the Channel Tunnel that will connect England to France is being scooped out. Cables are being laid, satellites are going up, walls are coming down. It is certainly the end of one world. The anxiety buzzing through the culture is about what will come after it.

It occurs to me that we might learn something if we figure out when this temporal bulge crested. Let's see, 1914 to 1994 is a nice, neat eighty years. Cut it in half and it means that the pinnacle of this cacophonous century occurred in ... 1954. Well, of course it did! You know and I know the only important thing that happened in 1954, don't we? It was the year that truck driver Elvis Presley went into Sun Studios for the first time and mixed together hillbilly music with rhythm and blues. That year was the beginning of rock & roll! The halfway marker between Sarajevo and Sarajevo is "Milk Cow Blues Boogie." Whoot, as the scholars say, there it is.

Do Not Enter When Red Ligk Is Flashing

A song for squidgy/ the salt in nero's supper/ a bag of money in the back of a taxicab/ adam experiences a mood swing/ the edge in his element

U2 ARE jamming again, coming up with enough songs to insure boxed sets for years after their plane crashes. Watching them work this way, it is really striking how much of the U2 sound frequently credited to Edge alone depends on Adam and Larry. Adam often plays with the swollen, vibrating bottom sound of a Jamaican dub bassist, covering the most sonic space with the smallest number of notes. Larry, who taught himself to drum and consequently got some things technically wrong, plays with a martial rigidity but uses his kit in a way a properly trained drummer would not. He has tom-toms on either side of him, and has a habit of coming off the snare onto them that is contrary to how most percussionists use those drums. We're not talking about huge technical innovations here; we're talking about personal idiosyncrasies that have over fifteen years solidified into a big part of what makes U2 always sound like U2, no matter what style of music they are playing. It is also why bands that imitate U2 never get it right, and why all the guitarists who try to play like Edge end up sounding so lame; their rhythm section never sounds like Adam and Larry.

The great joke is that Adam's and Larry's playing so perfectly reflects their personalities. Larry is right on top of the beat, a bit ahead—as you'd expect from a man who's so ordered and punctual in his life. Adam plays a little behind the beat, waiting till the last moment to slip in, which fits Adam's casual, don't-sweat-it personality. The great bass­ist and composer Charles Mingus said that musicians should not think of the beat as a dot that has to be landed on precisely, but as a circle in

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which one has to land somewhere. Adam and Larry, who have learned their instruments together since they were schoolboys, are working illus­trations of Mingus's point. They've played together so long that they seem to spread the beat out between them. And they create a blanket on which Edge's chord layers rest.

Flood says, "Larry and Adam are constantly pushing and pulling, but because they know each other so well they can work within that. And you get this weird tension in the rhythm tracks. It's such a great back­bone that it allows Edge a sort of freedom to manuever in the fore­ground."

The band finishes playing a slippery jam and then parleys with the producers in the control room to listen to it. Edge grabs a felt-tipped marker so he can add it to the list on the drawing board. "What shall we call it?" Edge asks. "Slidey," Bono suggests.

Edge starts to write it and Eno, smiling, says, "Squidgy." Everyone laughs at that. "Yes!" Bono says. " 'Squidgy!' " Edge writes it. Squidgy is the pet name that Princess Diana is called by her alleged lover in an alleged tape of one of their alleged phone conversations that the British tabloids (and in fact, newspapers all over the alleged world) got hold of and printed. Bono wants to know, "Can we get the tapes?"

Edge says that actors portraying the princess and her paramour read the transcripts on TV last week. "Great!" Bono says. "Get those!" The idea is quickly hatched to have the dialogue between Di and her boy­friend be the vocal over this track. U2 and their sidekicks are turning somersaults in ecstasy at the malevolent brilliance of the idea. "Our je t'aime to the royal family!" Bono says.

Edge says he agreed with Prince Charles for the first time when he told his mistress, in another taped phone call, that he wished he could be reincarnated as a pair of women's trousers. Bono announces that this 'Squidgy" track should be seen as a statement of support for Charles, People roll their eyes and cough loudly at that one.

Finally U2's genetic Englishman speaks up. "You realize," Adam says, "that if we go through with this my mother will never forgive me. Pop star or no pop star you're not coming in this house!' " 'She's a royalist?" Edge asks. "Yes. She's beyond logic." "Who does she like?"

[210]

"Charles. She thinks Diana's lost it. 'Of course, she'll lose the chil­dren. . . .' "

"Anne has become the popular one now," Edge says. "She's the Bruce Springsteen of the royals. 'Got to give her credit, she's hung in!' Whereas Charles is now Sting."

"I guess," Larry says, "that makes Fergie Madonna."

It's time to try playing the track again. Eno summons Larry and Adam back to their instruments by calling, "Send for the plumbers!" Adam—making a horrible mistake—wonders aloud where the word plumber comes from. This sends Eno into an hour-long tutorial on the root of the word plumber deriving from the same Latin root as lead, which leads him to the entwined histories of plumbing and lead poisoning, back to ancient Rome. Eno theorizes that the fall of the Roman Empire may be attributable to lead poisoning (Larry and Adam put down their instruments and pick up the phone to order Indian food) from bad plumbing adversely affecting ancient Italian sanity.

Pretty soon we're in the pub room opening bags of tandoori as Eno continues his exegesis and Edge throws in the occasional question. Over the takeout Eno explains that a modern historian re-created a meal served to Nero from an excavated recipe and found the resulting supper to be so full of salt as to be literally inedible. "Now," Eno says, his index finger rising as triumphant as a battle flag, "what disease has as one of its symptoms the loss of the ability to taste salt?" A hush falls over the table. "Lead poisoning!"

There is little salt shaken at U2's table tonight! As we finish eating, Bono looks around the lunchroom and says, "This is like where we played our early gigs, but those places were smaller."

Larry asks if the others remember the place where Bono had to sing standing on the pool table. He says he was thinking the other day about all of them driving to some gig in the south in Paul McGuinness's car. . . . Bono jumps in: "You kept kicking him in the back through the seat with your knees—and he thought you were doing it on purpose!"

Larry is laughing hard now: "He thought I didn't like him! There s a great book to be written about the early days of U2!"

Edge looks at me and says, "Oh, no, there isn't."

Bono tells the story of when Barry Mead, U2's first road manager, first came to America. He was nervously carrying $10,000 in earnings in the back of a New York cab stuck in traffic when a robber fleeing

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from a $70 stickup jumped into the taxi, put his gun to the driver's head, and shouted, "Take off!"

"We can't take off!" the driver said. "We're stuck in traffic!" Before the argument could continue the cops ran up and blasted the robber dead. They then dragged the shaken road manager off to the station to explain the paper bag filled with money.

The band returns to work. Bono is still trying to find a vocal approach for "If God Will Send His Angels" and still getting nowhere. He is trying out different melodies, singing a newspaper article about a scandal involving a movie star, looking for lyrics as he goes. Suddenly Bono jumps to his feet, his tandoori takeout demanding evacuation. "I'll be right back!" he yelps. "An Indian is after me!"

While he's gone Larry, who listened silently while Bono improvised, says he has an idea for a melody. He sings it and Eno, Edge, and Flood think it's good. When Bono returns Larry sings it for him, and he tries working with it. He's distracted. Bono has promised to spend time at home with Alt before she departs for Chernobyl and so far this week he's been a big liar. Soon he is gone. Eno decamps with engineer Robbie Adams to Windmill Lane studio, around the corner, where they have set up a second shop in order to keep the assembly line humming.

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