I ask if there was any moment when Edge thought U2 had bitten off more than they could chew by bringing Nazi imagery back into that place.

"How 'bout the whole time I was onstage'. Every split second.'" Edge laughs. "Quite genuinely, I was going, What the fuck is this? It's essen­tially doing"—he gives the bum's rush—"to the whole radical right wing and that was a good thing, but y'know, it's a fairly heavy presence that you're mocking. I was a bit intimidated by that tonight. The only way to deal with being intimidated is to launch at it full force, and I think that's why there was such energy."

I mention that Edge's guitar solo on "Bullet the Blue Sky" tonight went off into uncharted waters—it was an acid rock solo.

"Well, I could almost feel those swastikas coming up," Edge says. "That's the funny thing: Bono delivers the line, they come up, and then he fucks off and I'm left there! And I've got to somehow communicate with the music something that makes sense of that. Sometimes it hap­pens, sometimes it doesn't. Tonight there was a lot of energy there."

"It was an emotional moment," I say.

"Yeah, it was for me," Edge answers. "Apart from being scared fucking shitless about it! With this show there's a lot of risk, especially for Bono, who's out there a lot of the time living or dying based on what he can drag out of himself that night. Macphisto is an example. There's a certain amount of it that he's worked out, but he's got to work with the audience and bring it to life every evening without a script, and that's hard."

I decide to hit the exhausted Edge with something Bono said to me the other day—that U2 have six good songs left over from the Dublin

Jam

Italian gridlock/ pearl jam introduces stage-diving to verona/ the trouble with grunge/ news from the front/ a high-tech marriage proposal/ the wheel's still in spin

On the highway to U2's concert in Verona the band's local bus driver pulls up to the wooden barrier the policia have stuck in front of the highway entrance to control the traffic to the U2 concert, sticks his head out the window, and exchanges shouts, curses, and hand gestures with the local cops, who finally move the barrier and let us drive through. When we get to the next barrier the whole routine is repeated. This goes on at regular intervals all the way to the show. As we drive parallel to the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main road, we see that many concert-goers have pulled over on the side of the highway or along the median, locked their cars, and left them there, a Watkins Glen approach to concert-going quite unusual on a major highway in a big city. But then, this is Italy, where it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

It is the afternoon of July third. It is very hot in Verona. People in the stadium are wearing as few clothes as possible. Onstage Pearl Jam, who have with their first album become very big stars in America, are trying to connect to a large audience who don't know who they are. Eddie Vedder, the band's passionate lead singer, is not going to go down without a fight. He is telling the crowd, "This is a big place for such a little thing like music. I can't wait till we can come back and play in a place where we can see you."

The band then plays a new song called "Daughter," a slow tune with a powerful lyric—"she holds the hand that holds her down"—that like many of Vedder's songs seems to be about the grief children suffer at the hands of incompetent or oblivious parents. It means nothing to

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most of the chatting, laughing, drinking crowd, but it clearly means a lot to Eddie. When it's done he stands at the edge of the stage looking out at the disinterested audience and sings, quietly, the first lines of U2's "I Will Follow." It is hard to tell if he is trying to mock the public's hunger for the headliners or make a connection. In a lot of ways Vedder seems like a fan who has found his way onto U2's stage by mistake and figures that as long as he's up there he'll see what singing their song feels like. Behind him the band starts playing a very slow version of "Sympa­thy for the Devil" and Vedder makes up new lyrics to fit his circum­stance: "I got here through twenty-nine stadiums." He holds up a devil mask and the crowd is mildly amused. Vedder tries on his devil mask, then tries on a fly-head mask. I wonder if he's mocking Bono's onstage personas—devilish Macphisto and the Fly.

"I got a question," Vedder says softly, taking off the mask. "How do you spell 1-2-3-41" and with that Pearl Jam rips into a screaming version of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Vedder charges down the ramp to U2's B stage and throws himself off, into the pogoing part of the audience. I don't think Verona has ever seen stage-diving before. The crowd in the grandstands is still fairly disinterested, but the people on the ground in front of the stage go nuts. I see Vedder bobbing up on the arms of the crowd, then disappearing under them, then popping up, like a swimmer fighting an undertow. Finally he scampers back up onto the ramp, most of his clothes torn to rags. He has made contact with the audience with the same sort of recklessness that almost got Bono kicked out of U2 a decade ago.

Pearl Jam, like their Seattle rivals Nirvana, has dominated the imagi­nation of American rock for the last year and a half. U2 has been guarded in their reaction to grunge, the nickname the media has given to the music these bands make, a sort of postmainstream rock influenced by both punk and heavy metal, those opposite poles of seventies rock culture. Both Pearl Jam and Nirvana tend toward lyrics about the inar­ticulate anger of kids growing up feeling abandoned and abused. That merciless rock critic Elvis Costello refers to the style as "Mummy, I've wet myself again" music. Nirvana works hard at being alternative, in spite of the Beatles-like melodic gifts of songwriter Kurt Cobain. Pearl Jam is much more open about its debt to mainstream rock—as Vedder's quick evocation of U2, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young demonstrates.

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