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Righteous pilgrim who reveals himself, over the course of the lyric, to be pretty much deranged.



There's a lot of merit in both arguments, but I suspect that neither one tells the real story. I think that the real reason Bono does not want to sing "The Wanderer" (the title is a conscious shot at the macho swagger of Dion's "The Wanderer") is because when Bono sings the song it comes off as a mea culpa for all the glitz and surface that U2 has spent the last two years creating. When Bono sings "The Wanderer" it seems like a public confession that beneath the fly shades he is hoping to find God by searching through the glitter and trash.

The character in the song has used Jesus' exhortation to leave your wife and children and follow Him as an excuse to skip out on his responsibilities. He is playing with the ancient antinomian heresy that you can sin your way to salvation ("I went out there in search of experience/ To taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can before he repents"). By having Johnny Cash sing the song, Bono erects another false face. The part of the audience that shares his spiritual side (as well as the part that understands how serious a figure Johnny Cash really is) will understand the deeper message, and those who want to think it's camp will just get a kick out of U2 casting Johnny Cash as Hazel Motes.

So Flood and Eno can argue all day about how disruptive it is to have the Boy Named Sue come strolling into the finale of U2's most Euro­pean, most avant-garde, most systematically disordered album. They're not going to win this one. Bono has another agenda.

Macphisto

Larry injects bull's blood/ eno proposes a library sytem/ fintan goes shopping for shoes/ songs are cobbled together/ bono paints his face/ the zooropa tour begins/ hope for rich men to get into heaven

BONO gets a sandwich from the studio pub and slips off into the sitting room to wolf it down. A minute later a howl comes through the door. Bono emerges holding his cheek. Yesterday he went to the dentist with an abscessed tooth and thought he'd gotten it under control, but it just went off again. He's reeling from the pain. Suzanne digs up some painkillers, which he swallows. By the time Bono raises his dentist on the phone the pills are dulling the discomfort, so he decides to tough it out. He will do his vocals today with a toothache. Last week he was working with a damaged leg, hurt while jogging on the rocky beach outside his house. There are bound to be wounds in an operation this size.

Bono doesn't want Larry to know he's hurt or he'll get a lecture and prescription. Larry takes a great interest in people's medical problems. He's been known to carry bags of vitamins, powders, and pills—a portable cure for any malady. Larry pays careful attention to his health but has still had some real problems—trouble in the tendons of his hands once threatened his drumming career. After overcoming that he was cursed with a disk protruding from his spine that screwed up his back terribly. Bono says Larry tried different doctors without success until he went to a German who brought in a holistic healer who started giving Larry shots of bull's blood. That did the trick! Larry's Irish doctor refuses to accept it—he looks at X rays of Larry's crooked spine and says it's impossible, but Larry feels fine. He flies to Germany for shots of bull's blood regularly.

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Suzanne looks up from her desk. "Larry is full of bull's blood?" she asks. "That explains so much."

Later, when I ask Larry about this miracle cure, he puts less emphasis on the injections than on a series of exercises he does to build up the muscles around his damaged disks. The stronger muscles relieve the pressure on the spine. Typically, Larry says his problem was solved through discipline, while Bono prefers a supernatural explanation.

Back in the control room there's a discussion under way about secu­rity. Each of the four band members is taking home cassettes of Flood's rough sequence, and both Edge and Robbie Adams are worried about bootlegs. Rehearsal tapes and songwriting sessions from Achtung Baby were in stores before the album was, and it caused U2 all kinds of aggravation. Edge says there has to be a penalty so severe that no band member will dare lose his tape. "Everyone should have to sign some­thing saying if you lose your tape you lose your house. Or a finger!"

Eno suggests instituting a library card system where "one of your trusty men" holds all cassettes and any band member who wants one must sign it out. That suggestion is much scoffed at.

The looming deadline imposed by the start of the European tour is giving U2's creativity a solid kick. Bono has been unable to finish the lyrics for a track called "Lemon," his attempt to write a Prince song. Faced with such a block, Eno and Edge dig up and sing an alternative melody and lyric ("A man makes a picture/ a moving picture/ through light projected he can see himself up close") that had been rejected for being too much like the Talking Heads. This second lyric is about filmmaking and quotes the director John Boorman, who once employed the young Paul McGuinness as a production manager and who used to say he made his living "turning money into light." Edge and Eno put the movie song together with Bono's Prince tribute and the result sounds nothing like Prince, Talking Heads, or U2.

The same sort of juxtaposition turns out to be the salvation of "Numb," a Kraftwerk-style track Edge has been keeping alive since the Achtung Baby sessions in Berlin. Bono had tried to find a way into "Numb" by singing in the high Eartha Kitt voice he used for the background vocals of "The Fly," but it didn't lead anywhere, no one could come up with a strong enough melody to carry the song, and "Numb" was almost put aside again. Then Edge suggested that maybe it didn't need a melody as much as it needed a rhythm. Maybe the words

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of the song could be used like percussion, like a conga. So he came up with a list of orders ("Don't grab. Don't clutch. Don't hope for too much. Don't breathe. Don't achieve. Don't grieve without leave.") and delivered them in a monotone while Bono's Fat Black Lady voice was dropped in behind it, and the two contrary approaches together created something weird and interesting. Larry came up with a melody for a hook line ("I feel numb") and sang that as a punctuation. "Numb" is the first U2 track with three different members of the band singing different parts. Bono's assessment: "I can't believe it works'"

"The First Time" is a gospel song U2 comes up with very quickly and starts to put aside as inappropriate. Eno surprises them by saying, "I love that song; it must go on the album." Bono figures the song— about a prodigal son who wanders off into a life of sin and then returns to his father's forgiveness—seems more like something from Rattle and Hum than this project. But the band trusts Eno's instincts, so they try playing it in a real disjointed way that disguises its gospel form. Bono sings about a lover who teaches him to sing, a brother who is always there for him, and then a father who "gave me the keys to his kingdom coming, gave me a cup of gold. He said I have many mansions, and there are many rooms to see. . . ." Suddenly Bono cannot bring himself to sing the lines he has written about returning to his father's house. Instead he finishes the verse, "I left by the back door and I threw away the key."

The questions raised in Achtung Baby have still not been settled. Bono is not ready to promise that he will return from this journey into Nighttown that he's only halfway through. I ask him if he's familiar with the heresy about sinning your way to salvation. "Yeah," Bono says. "Finding God through indulging the flesh." He then says that when Jesus said it was more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he was not—as most people assume—saying it was impossible. He was referring to a tight gate into Jerusalem that was called the Needle's Eye. "To get through it," Bono says, "you had to stoop."

They're down to the last days before the European shows. Tour rehearsals are going on simultaneously with the recording sessions. U2 realize with some unease that they will not be able to work out live versions of any of these new songs to perform onstage as the new album is being released. Hopefully they will get the chance to practice them at

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