The alertness of U2 security/ neo-nazis stink up germany/ larry descends into underworld/ macphisto scares the bellboy/ a theology monograph from cyndi lauper

bono is sitting at a table in the private lounge of the private floor of a Cologne hotel when Larry comes up and sees the eggs, toast, and potatoes that Principle's Sheila Roche ordered and had to abandon when duty buzzed her walkie-talkie. "Great!" Larry says, pulling up a chair. "I was just wondering how I'd get breakfast!" Larry no sooner has the first forkful to his mouth than a waiter steps up holding the bill for all the breakfasts eaten at this table while Larry was sleeping. Bono motions to the waiter to give the check to Larry, who looks at the sum, raises an eyebrow, and signs. Then I ask for an Evian and begin to sign for it and Bono says, "No, Bill, no, no!" That's too much for Larry. "Let him buy the water, Bono! I paid for all your breakfasts!" I sign and Larry says, "I'm sure the advance will cover it."

Adam comes in, sweating from a workout in the hotel gym, and pulls up a seat. McGuinness appears a moment later and asks Adam if he and Naomi are really getting married on September 15. "Bullshit," Adam says. "Absolute bullshit." But I'm reading it everywhere" the manager says. "You're probably telling them," Adam replies.

Bono goes off to dress and comes back a few minutes later in the black clothes, slicked-back hair, and bug-eyed shades of the Fly. His whole demeanor changes when he's dressed like this. He stands and walks with the straight back and rigid shoulders of a colonel inspecting his troops.

When everyone is assembled we ride an elevator to the lobby, and

[242]

Edge and Bono do their ritual signing of autographs for the kids waiting outside the hotel while Larry and Adam do their ritual waiting for Bono and Edge. Eventually the procession of black cars pulls out. Larry's riding his motorcycle to the gig today, which jacks up the sense that we're in a diplomatic motorcade. McGuinness stares out the car window, studying the strange architectural mix of Cologne, a city with some magnificent ancient structures surrounded by modern buildings— the result of most of the old city being destroyed by Allied bombers. Paul's father was an RAF pilot who bombed Cologne.

At the Mugersdorfer Stadium U2 settles in their dressing room and Edge tries playing "II O'clock Tick Tock," an early song they have not performed in ten years. Adam asks what key it's in and Edge suddenly laments, "I can't remember the solo."

Bono says, "That might be good." Bono says that although you'd never know it, "II O'clock Tick Tock" was conceived as the sort of cabaret song sung in the last days of the Weimar Republic, but Martin Hannet, U2's first producer, could not accept it that way, and so it was given the early U2 rock & roll treatment. Now Bono's interested in resurrecting the embryonic version. In Macphisto, they finally have a Cabaret character to sing it. (Edge, by the way, says this story is complete crap and he has the first—rock & roll—demo of "II O'clock Tick Tock" to prove it. Well, I suggest, perhaps it was Weimer in Bono's mind.)

At soundcheck, in a light rain, U2 plays "I Will Follow" for the first time on the tour, and decides to throw it into the set tonight. As soon as they finish their run-through the crowd begins pouring into the stadium and the first of the opening acts go on. Between warm-up bands, U2 has invited a theatrical group called Macnas (Irish for "madness") to stir up the crowd by strutting out in giant U2 heads and doing a miming parody of the four band members, as if U2 had joined Mickey and Donald at Euro-Disney. The giant Edge head is especially grotesque— it looks like the Merchant of Venice. The fellow playing Larry mimicks Larry's upright, macho posture, the one doing Adam imitates Adam's haughty, nose-in-the-air stance, and the actor portraying Bono minces and overemotes like a bad Hamlet hanging off the balcony. There is a real element of the jesters mocking the kings. The audience loves it. A funny thing about German crowds, though—they cheer in low voices, making a friendly outpouring sound sort of ominous.

 [243]

Backstage U2's bodyguards are speaking into their walkie-talkies, sharing signals. Adam passes by two of the security men on his way to the catering tent and they transmit to their agent downstairs, "Number three coming down!"

Adam joins Larry in catering to do a TV interview. Edge and Bono are still up in the dressing room. Outside the tent one crew member approaches Willie Williams and asks if the band is around. "Haircuts down here, hats up there."

"How's Bono's mood?"

"Good, still not great. Lifting from yesterday."

Geez, I say, it sounds like you guys are issuing weather reports:

Number one partly cloudy, clearing expected later. Number three over­cast.

"Believe me," the crew member says. "It pays to know."

Another roadie is heckling one of the security guys, holding up an imaginary walkie-talkie and saying, "Number one is going to the toilet! Number one is doing a number two!"

Adam and most of the crew who aren't working head out front to watch the support set by Stereo MC's, whose song "Connected" seems to be playing in every disco, boutique, and cafe in Europe. Everybody on the tour loves the Stereo MC's—which was not the case with the opening act U2 fired last week. Einsguzende Neubauten, a German industrial band who "plays" tools and pile drivers, was thrown off the tour after one of them threw a steel bar at a Dutch audience that was pelting them with vegetables. It hit a girl who had to go to the hospital. Willie Williams observed, "Angry German performance art doesn't go over well in football stadiums in midafternoon."

This season, Germans who display too much belligerence are particu­larly liable to be hit with produce by hypersensitive Europeans. The neighbors are edgy about the old fatherland regaining its superpower status. In the year and a half since reunification Germany has been struggling with tremendous social adjustments. One and a half million immigrants have poured into the country since the collapse of Commu­nism, and last week the parliament decided to impose some limits. West Germany had had a wide-open asylum policy since World War II, a reparation demanded by the countries that had absorbed waves of refu­gees from the Nazis. Of course, in the years right after World War II

[244]

There was not a widespread desire by people to move to Germany. Now Deutschland is the promised land for immigrants from the collapsed Communist countries and the Third World. In shutting down the gates now, the German government may be simply trying to protect its economy, already strained from having to absorb all of broken East Germany in a single swallow. But the effect is to apparently ratify a growing German xenophobia.

It may be unfair that other countries think they see the specter of fascism behind any display of German nationalism, but there has been great attention focused on recent violence against non-Aryans in Ger­many, particularly the Turkish population. Neo-Nazis are in the news this week in Solingen for burning a Turkish family's home and painting swastikas on it. Two Turkish women and three girls were killed in the attack. Last November a grandmother and two girls were killed in Molln in identical fashion. In response to last week's murders, Turks overturned cars and smashed store windows across Germany. What is hard for people from other countries to comprehend is that German citizenship is not conferred by birth, but by ethnicity. So a person of Turkish heritage born in Germany is not considered a German, though a person of German heritage born in another country will easily be granted German citizenship. Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been widely accused of appeasing rather than resisting the bigots. He did not attend any of the funerals of the Turkish murder victims, and declared that "Germany is not a country of immigration."

Onstage tonight Bono introduces "One" by saying, in German, "This song is for the immigrants to Deutschland." He gets solid, not heavy applause. "Until the End of the World" takes on a political charge in this atmosphere, which is doubled by the insertion after it of "New Year's Day," a song at least partly inspired by and associated with the rise of Solidarity in Poland ten years ago. During the acoustic set on the B stage, Bono sings Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" as a lead-in to an unexpected—and passionate—version of "Sunday Bloody Sunday,' a song about the Northern Irish troubles. That hangs in the air while the band returns to the main stage for "Bullet the Blue Sky," their exploding evocation of the wars in Central America. U2 are as political as the Clash tonight. The climax of it all comes when Bono, as Macphisto, picks up the telephone to make his nightly celebrity call.

[245]

"Around this time I usually make a phone call," he says in the lilting voice of a Profumo pimp. "Often to the president of the United States. But not tonight. Tonight I will call the chancellor, Mr. Kohl." The crowd cheers as Bono punches the numbers and explains, "When you get very famous, people give you their telephone numbers." A secretary answers and Bono says, "Hello, I'd like to speak to the Chancellor, Mr. Kohl, please." He is asked for his name. "This is Mr. Macphisto." Then, playing to the audience, the video screens lit up with his leering devil face, he says to the phone, "He's an old friend of mine, a close friend!"

"Do you know what time it is?" the voice demands.

"I know many things," Macphisto snarls, playing up the Satan side of his horned persona. "Could I leave a message for him then?"

"What is it?"

"Could you just thank the Chancellor for letting me back into the country?" The crowd lets out a gasp and the devil continues, cackling, "I'm baaaack! I'm baaaackl"

U2 is living up to their promise to push the envelope in Europe. If you give them a chance, Bono and Edge will talk your ear sore about the dadaists, the nonsense-art movement that popped up in Europe after World War I. U2's take on the dadaists is that they sought to deflate the rising fascists through mockery, that by refusing to accept the vocabu­lary being used to subordinate them they erected a moral defense under the pretense of anarchic silliness. U2 see Zoo TV in general and Mr. Macphisto in particular as owing a debt to dada. That the Nazis set out to wipe the floor with the dadaists is seen by Bono as proof of their potency. (Though the fact that the Nazis succeeded in stomping them may suggest a pretty good case for their long-term impotence too. Remember Woody Allen's observation that against Nazis biting satire is less useful than baseball bats).

Not that all the silliness going on around the show has such serious undertones. While Bono was doing his solo opening of "One" tonight, Larry slipped into the vast underworld beneath the stage to stretch his legs. One of the crew took off his phone operator's headset and handed it to Larry, who put it on and listened in to the video directors talking to each other, calling shots, ordering close-ups, and generally making sure the giant TV screens were jumping. Larry dialed up Monica

[246]

Caston, the live video director, and said in an American drawl like one of the security crew, "Monica, ah don't like this shot of Bono."

Her flustered voice came back, "What do you mean you don't like it? What's wrong with it?"

"Ah don't know, ah jest don't like it. Why don't you change it?"

"Blow me!"

"Monica," Larry said, switching back to his own stern voice, "this is Larry." Her scream almost blew out a few headsets. Laughing, Larry slipped back behind his drums.

At the hotel after the show everyone congregates in Bono's suite in the hope of finding something to eat. Room service seems to have disappeared. The road crew are, as one of them describes it, lumbering around searching for food like a herd of migrating cattle. By 3 a.m. everyone's holding their bellys and groaning. Sheila Roche, Suzanne Doyle, and publicist Regine Moylett have taken up seats on a couch by the phone and are calling the kitchen every half hour or so. Every time they get the same answer: "Ten minutes."

Finally Bono decides to step in. He grandly picks up the receiver and purrs, "Hello! This is Mr. Macphisto. I ordered french fries and sand­wiches an hour and a half ago and if I don't get them immediately I will . . ." and here he degenerates into a string of incomprehensible mumbles that must sound even more threatening in the translating imagination of German room service than they do in their native gibber­ish. Anyway, it works. Within minutes tray after tray of french fries is wheeled in by frightened-looking bellboys and the entire touring party falls on them famished. I whisper to Bono as he sticks a chip in his mouth, "They probably spit on them."

Somehow our party has been joined by the pop singer Cyndi Lauper, who is also staying in this hotel, and a couple of her Cyndiesque gal pals. Cyndi starts discoursing to Bono and Larry in her broad Queens accent about the shortcomings of their religion (and, in fact, everybody else's too). Cyndi lectures Bono that all the major religions are patri-article." She loves the word, she says it more than once. She says she herself was a Hare Krishna as a kid until she realized that they expected to sit on their fat asses while the women did all the work, and the women were supposed to wait until the men had finished to eat and then were only allowed to eat in the kitchen like dogs! There's a word, Cyndi says, for that kind of behavior: "Patri-article!"

 [247]

Sheila Roche sits quietly on the couch and says to Suzanne and Regine, "Someone's been reading Camille Paglia. . . ."

I go to bed before dawn but I can't find a switch to shut off the Muzak pumping through my room. I'm not kidding—it's "Girls Tust Want to Have Fun."

Innocents Abroad

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