Edge reminds Bono that there is a band meeting in a couple of hours

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At the Clarence Hotel, a local landmark U2 has bought and are in the process of restoring.

"Ah, well then," Bono says. "I guess there's no point in my going home."

Under My Skin

The walking tour enters its third day/ how edge lost the secret of the universe/ bono dubs a sinatra duet/ the old fool controversy/ secondhand smokers/ a pub crawl with gavin/ michael jackson loses face

You know, just because I have to hang on Bono's coattail through every gin mill, juke joint, pool hall, and pub in Dublin doesn't mean I have to drag you along with me. Let's skip ahead twenty-four hours, to Thursday of the week of the Dublin concerts. You haven't missed anything. Bono's still coming up with excuses not to go home, he's still in the same clothes he's had on since he got offstage in Cork on Tuesday. We're both still awake and engaged in one of the greatest walking talkathons since Johnson jabbered to Boswell.

"Do you know the story of how Edge lost the Secret of the Uni­verse?" Bono asks. Oh boy, a Hibernian folktale! "No, Bono, tell me."

"It started when Edge got a jar of psychedelic mushrooms," Bono begins, as wise as Uncle Remus. The legend, in summary, goes like this: Being very scientific, Edge decided that if he was going to sample any psychedelic mushrooms at all, he might as well eat the whole jar. Apparently those were potent fungi. Edge's eyes spun around and his hat flew off his head. He figured he'd better not take a chance on any impressionable members of the U2 Fan Club seeing him like this, so he went upstairs and got into his bed. He lay there for a while and then imagined he heard his wife calling him. He went to the door. No one was there. He went back to bed. And then, amid kaleidoscopes of spinning dimensions like an old Dr. Strange comic, Edge was given the Secret of the Universe.

Wow!" he thought. "The Secret of the Universe! I'm no fool, I

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better get this down on tape!" See, Edge reckoned that he was not the first traveler on the astral plane to grok the S.O.T.U., but that others might in their altered state just assume they would remember it. That's where they goofed! Edge would take no such chance. He swam over to his shoulder bag and found his Walkman. He turned it on—and began laughing hysterically at the little red light. Finally the scientist within got control, he regained his composure, and spoke the Secret of the Universe into the recorder.

His duty done, he put down the Walkman and exited Earth alto­gether.

Upon returning the next day, Edge got out of bed, went down to the kitchen for something to eat, and when he opened the refrigerator more than one light went on. "Hey!" Edge said. "I learned the Secret of the Universe and I got it down on tape!" He ran upstairs and found his tape recorder, played it back and heard himself saying, "Gn@rjB ®8a'Bxr! Kt~rcg+Bing fr'azzp!"

Complete gibberish. Badly recorded gibberish, too, as he seemed to have been holding the Walkman upside down when he taped it.

Early in the afternoon Bono heads to STS, a small recording studio in Dublin's Temple Bar district, a sort of student/hippie section, where U2 makes many of their demos. STS is up a narrow flight of stairs, over a record shop. The first floor is the kitchen and dining room, the second floor is the recording studio. Open windows look out over shingled roofs and brick chimneys.

Bono goes into the small engineer's booth, where he is introduced to record producer Phil Ramone and EMI Records executive Don Rubin. They have come from America for this meeting with a tape recording of Frank Sinatra singing "I've Got You Under My Skin." Bono's here to overdub another vocal alongside Frank's, creating a duet for Sinatra's big comeback album. Ramone sent Bono a cassette of Frank's version so he could get familiar with the arrangement. The producer had helpfully dubbed onto that tape an American session singer doing a Bono imita­tion to give our hero a hint of how he might approach the song.

Bono, however, managed to lose the tape before listening to it. When it arrived he stuck it in the glove compartment of his car, and then immediately loaned the car to George Regis, one of U2's American lawyers, to take on a fishing trip to the west of Ireland. George got back

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last night—we ran into him at Tosca's, Norman Hewson's restaurant, where he told Bono how much he enjoyed the Sinatra tape. Oh, Bono said, that's where that went!

So Bono shows up today unprepared but undeterred. He's ready to sing with Frank. Ramone is a sort of old school New York hipster. In the seventies he produced Paul Simon, Billy Joel, and Barbra Streisand. As he puts up the track and plays Bono the guide vocal he assures him, "Just to give you a suggestion—there's no script here." Ramone has had the session singer pitch his vocal high, to stay clear of the Chairman's ever descending range. Bono says that's fine, he has no problem with flying above Frank's airspace.

The Sinatra project is a bit of a gimmick. Old Blue Eyes hasn't made a new album in the last nine years. He has no interest in doing so. He says there are no new songs out there he wants to sing (which lends a depth of tragedy to Bono's inability to get "Two Shots of Happy" to him—at least to Bono) although that may mean there are no new songs out there he wants to have to learn. Sinatra continues to tour regularly. Some nights he has extended stretches where he's fantastic, making up in phrasing, acting, and originality what he's lost in range. On a good night he proves why he is considered the greatest popular singer of his era. During those shows even Sinatra's corny moments are fun and his famous rudeness (introducing the orchestra leader as his son, Frank, Jr., and then, as soon as the applause dies down, saying, "His mother made me give him the job, nobody else would hire him.") forgivable. Also, it's great to see the old blue-haired ladies squealing like bobbie-soxers and yelling, "Oh, Frankie, you've still got it!" On a bad night Sinatra's barely there. He runs through the songs distractedly and reads his lyrics from a TelePrompTer. There's a lot to recommend Sinatra's attitude that there is no reason for him to make any more albums. If people want to buy a Frank Sinatra record, he has dozens still in print. And he is certainly not —in his seventies—going to do anything as good as the introspective masterpieces he recorded in his thirties. Why dilute the legacy?

Well, to make a lot of money, for one thing. EMI—which owns Capitol, the label for which Sinatra did his best work in the 1950s— stepped in after Sinatra let his long association with Reprise Records lapse and suggested this easy way to return to recording. All Frank had to do was go into a studio and sing the songs he did every night onstage. Ramone would take the tapes and dub in other famous people singing

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along with him. A great marketing hook! A way to reach all the baby boomers who would like to own one Frank Sinatra CD but don't know which one to buy. (A similar kind of marketing strategy seems to be driving a planned Johnny Cash album for which every happening cat in current rock is being asked to write a song. In a single twenty-four hour period last month Bono, Elvis Costello, and Mark Knopfler all told me, "Guess what—I'm writing a song for Johnny Cash.") Bono told the Sinatra producers at the outset that he did not want to be just "a wheeled-on celebrity." And the other guest stars—Carly Simon, Barbra Steisand, Kenny G—are not cutting edge. Madonna apparently backed out when she learned hers was not going to be the only duet on the album.

When they got Sinatra down to the studio to do his do-be-do's he had the same reaction many music critics had to the idea: "What is this? Why should I record songs I've already recorded?" Ramone and Rubin pleaded and cajoled and Sinatra gave it a try, but the first night ended badly. The singer left early in a rotten mood, leaving Ramone in a worse one. They talked him into coming down again and promised they would not ask him to sing any song more than twice. Sinatra, insecure beneath his tough-guy pose about the diminishing of his chops and the public's interest, turned in some fine work. Ramone plays us a haunted version of "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)." Bono points out that when Sinatra first cut that song in the 1950s he was looking out at the road ahead. Now he's looking back at the road he's traveled.

"I'm thirty-three," Bono tells Ramone, "and I'm beginning to get an idea of what that road is. Frank knows."

Bono sits down on a small couch in the control room, picks up a mike, and says, "Let's make a map." Over the next hour he sings the song five different ways. One time he does it all in falsetto, on another he mumbles and nutters, as he did on U2's 1990 version of Cole Porter's "Night and Day." The third time he sings all his lines late, so that they echo Sinatra's. The fourth time through, when the instrumen­tal break comes up, Bono unleashes a high, blaring scat solo, sounding like I imagine Margaret Dumont would if she swallowed a trumpet. Don Rubin almost jumps off his chair in surprise.

I'll bet Bono's thinking of Miles Davis. After three days wearing his Miles T-shirt I suspect the jazzman's style has sunk under Bono's skin. Miles once told Bono that Sinatra's phrasing with his voice influenced

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Davis's phrasing with his horn. This might be Bono's way of reconnect­ing with that influence, of returning the favor. (When Miles was dying, by the way, he sometimes asked to hear Unforgettable Fire. There's the sort of tribute that makes up for any hundred insults.)

Ramone likes the first half of Bono's mouth trumpet solo, but thinks he loses the thread toward the end. The producer asks the singer to rethink the resolution and Bono tells them to roll back the tape and listen to this: Bono proceeds to turn into Gavin Friday, bleating Brechtian la la la's like a homesick storm trooper swinging a stein in Bogart's Casablanca. It's so campy that it's dangerous; it would be easy for a listener not familiar with Bono's frame of reference to think he was just goofing, caterwauling like a Vegas drunk at a Dean Martin show.

Ramone and Rubin break up laughing. They seem so delighted and impressed that I wonder if they're for real. Ramone is a big, gray-bearded beatnik bear. Rubin is slight and meticulous, impeccably dressed for summer in pale pants, pale sweater, pale socks, and pale shoes. (He explained that he used to produce Bobby Darin with a historical gravity lost on Bono.) If these two go off and put together a final mix that includes some of Bono's eccentricities, this will be a weird and interesting track—a little pop music meta-text with Bono's voice serving as the contrast that comments and puts attention on Sinatra's. But the two old record men could just as easily be indulging the rock star so that they can go home and cobble together a conventional duet.

Ramone suggests that Bono go to lunch while he assembles a rough mix. Bono heads off to meet McGuinness at a restaurant a few blocks away. Walking through Dublin with Bono these days is like walking through the Magic Kingdom with Mickey Mouse. Everywhere he goes people do double takes, follow him down the street, whip out cameras, and beg for autographs. He generally says okay.

During lunch Bono and Paul ask me about the poetry slams in New York. An increasingly popular entertainment in the East Village is for poets to get up and recite their verse in clubs while audience volunteers judge them on a scale of one to ten, a sort of Olympic Pentameter.

"You hear some good stuff and a lot of bad stuff," I say. "The obnoxious thing is that a lot of them are desperate to prove that just cause they're poets doesn't mean they're sissies. They try to act punk, they try to dress tough. It's like those classical violinists who think dying their hair green will make them connect to the kids. It's hard to listen to

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spoken word by people who are so horny to convince you that they're macho."

"Like Henry Rollins," Paul says.

"Ah, no," I say. "Henry Rollins is good." And I immediately wonder if I've put my foot in my mouth. Rollins has a monologue on one of his spoken word albums in which he mocks U2's fans, rags on the band, and rants, "They could never fool me.' We always had to see over and over again on any television channel that shithead climbing up and down the P.A. at Redrocks! That guy with the bubble butt waving a white flag!

A white flag says, Aim your crosshair sights over here! Kill ME! The one with the flag. Pop that guy. And Edge doing that fucking fake-ass pilgrim gig like, I'm so pious and low-key with my millions. I'll just play this one Enoesque chord. They've been milking that same bassline and the same guitar change for like five albums and the world kisses their ass and it is the biggest pile of shite I have ever heard!"

The air hangs heavy over our lunch table for a moment and then Bono says casually, "Henry Rollins—is that the vegetarian?"

Walking back to the studio Bono and Paul run into Bill Graham, the smart Irish rock critic who introduced them when U2 was a teenage band and McGuinness was an aspiring wheeler-dealer. If this were America, Graham would be trying to shake out a finder's fee, but as it's Dublin he just grins and suggests a couple of local musicians Bono and Paul should check out.

When Bono returns to the control booth Ramone plays him the comp he's assembled—and it's great. He's used the first half of the mouth trumpet solo and finished with the Octoberfest la-las. He's made smart choices all the way through. These old guys are okay! As Phil has turned out to be so cool about that, Bono decides to hit him with this:

Since Frank is singing, 'Don't you know, little fool, you never can win,' " Bono says with a huge smile, trying to slip in the stinger, "How would it be if the second time through I say, 'Don't you know, old fool, you never can win?' "

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