Why joyce had to leave ireland to write ulysses/ the surrey with gavin friday on top/ U2 turns into the virgin prunes/ wherefore wim wonders/ Sunday in the tent with bono

bono met Salman Rushdie through their shared interest in the Reagan administration-backed war against the Marxist govern­ment of Nicaragua. They visited that country at the same time in the summer of '86. They did not meet then but kept hearing about each other as they traveled.

Rushdie's interpreter came in breathless one day and told him, "You'll never guess who's coming? You know who's coming? Bono's coming!" Then she calmed down and said, "Excuse me—who's Bono?" Later Bono read Rushdie's book about his Central American trip, The Jaguar Smile, and was impressed enough to invite the writer to a U2 concert.

I tell Rushdie that on the plane to Italy last month I was reading his collection Imaginary Homelands. When I came to his essay on Raymond Carver, I was struck by a line from Carver's poem "Suspenders" that Rushdie quoted about the "quiet that comes to a house where nobody can sleep." It clearly inspired Bono's line in "Ultra Violet (Light My Way)": "There is a silence that comes to our house when no one can sleep."

Carver was an inspiration for the lyrics of The Josliua Tree, so it wasn t a big surprise that U2 would quote him. But when I mentioned the reference to Bono he said, "Ah, shit! I didn't realize that! I must have read it and forgotten it. I thought that was my line." He grumbled for a minute and then said with mock sadness, "I thought I was the genius.

"Subconscious plagiarism." Rushdie smiles. "Happens to all of us all the time. I had a phone conversation with Bono the day after I was

[347]

Onstage at Wembley in which he talked very interestingly, I thought, about the place of the writer in a rock band. He said, the trouble is, unless you're from a kind of folkie tradition, a Dylan-like tradition, the words have very low status. He said the writer is there to feel what's in the air of the band, what the mood is, and smash it down very quickly. And if the words don't work then you throw it away and something else can be put there.

"That's what they've done and they've of course made great songs out of that. But I got the sense that he was looking to move into a different kind of songwriting, where maybe the words had more status. I think that would be very interesting. The thing about U2—and it was the same thing with the Beatles—is they never do the same thing twice. Once the Beatles had done Sgt. Pepper they didn't do it again. That's what interests me about this band. It seems to me they have that capacity to constantly reinvent itself that the great bands of the sixties did. I haven't seen a band since that did that.

"This is the third time I've seen the show. I was it at Earl's Court last year when it was smaller and I saw it at Wembley, which is twice this size. Tonight I thought the show found its right shape and right size and it worked. Suddenly tonight I could see right onstage all the things I've heard Bono say about the ideas of the show. I didn't need to have it explained to me. I thought, 'This is a fantastic closing act.'

"The gamble the artist—whether it's rock music or movies or novels —always makes is to say, 'This is what's happening to me at the moment and here's the language I found to say it. I say this because I don't have any choice.' Then the risk you take is that you want people to like it. If they don't like it, that's your failure. If they do like it, you're lucky. But what you learn is that the thing must always be generated by what's happening inside you. To try and respond to what the audience wants, what you think the market needs, what the people buy today—if you do that, you're dead, man."

The room is becoming more and more crowded. The same security guards who earlier tried to stop Edge's children from coming in now seem to have thrown caution to the wind. Bono is freaking out as person after person lunges into his face to talk at him. "It's like an Irish wedding," he groans. I ask if he wants to head out somewhere and he says, no, no, he's got to go home tonight. He's got to.

Bono's empty," Gavin Friday says. "There's nothing left."

[348]

At about 1:30 a.m. I grab a ride back to the hotel. Salman's still in the tent having a good time. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. How often does he get to go out to a party? Back in the hotel bar I run into Gavin, who is still fuming over a ticket screwup that stuck him and his mother in the highest bleachers, where the ushers told him that if he were the hotshot he thought he was he wouldn't be up there. It is pretty amazing that literally hundreds of liggers were enjoying U2 hospitality while the single person closest to the band—Bono's own Simon of Cyrene—was getting the bum's rush.

The bar starts filling up with Principles, when who should crawl in but Bono. Perhaps, he reckons, there's time for one drink before going home. By 3 A.M. the hotel bar seems to have filled up with every ligger from the aftershow. Gavin starts organizing a movement toward Lillie's Bordello. There's his fiancee Renee, B. P. Fallon (who has spent much of the night trying to hook up with Bono while hiding from Larry, who cast him off the tour months ago with a threat of "Either Beep goes or I do"), Christy Turlington, and Fightin' Fintan Fitzgerald.

Christy has a driver waiting outside, but he refuses to take six passen­gers. Gavin, B. P. and I tell the other three to go ahead and we'll grab a cab. The hotel taxi stand's empty. A carload of Italian girls screeches up. They scream "Gavin! Gavin!" snap a bunch of flash pictures, and then drive off giggling. Still no cabs. We're walking down the middle of the street when what we do spot, off in the distance, but one of the horse-drawn carriages that promenade around St. Stephen's Green. We ask the driver if he'd consider departing from the usual route to take us to Lillie's. We negotiate a fair fare and then cross Dublin as Joyce used to do it, in a horse-drawn shay. It's like being in The Dead.

Lillie's is hopping of a Friday night. Gavin pulls up a chair next to his old Prune partner Guggi. A bigmouth from the Golden Horde, a Dublin band, careens over and announces in a voice so loud that he must be wearing earplugs, "I saw you play when I was eleven! U2 opened and they were shite, but the Virgin Prunes were brilliant!"

Gavin and Guggi sip their drinks and do not acknowledge the com­pliment. After the loudmouth leaves, Gavin talks about the earliest days of the two brother bands (literally: each had an Evans brother on guitar). At the very first Virgin Prunes gig the band consisted of Gavin and Guggi backed by Adam, Edge, and Larry—in dresses. When U2 got a job that demanded they play for two hours, Gavin would come up

[349]

and sing Ramone's songs and Bowie's "Suffragette City" so that Bono could rest his voice.

"Bill Graham said in 1980," Gavin reminds Guggi, "that U2 would eventually turn into the Virgin Prunes. And with Macphisto it's finally happened. It took thirteen years for Bono to get up the balls to put on lipstick." Guggi nods and Gavin declares, "On my next tour I'm going to come out carrying a white flag!"

Gavin starts singing "Sad," a song he and Bono wrote when they were seventeen. I tell him it's a good song, he should put it on his next album. Gavin says that won't happen; he won't even sing a Prunes song onstage. "The Virgin Prunes are like a first marriage that ended in divorce," he says. "I respect it but I can't return to it."

The stories continue till morning, getting taller as they go. There are stories from tonight, stories from last week, and stories from fifteen years ago, all flying around Lillie's Library like the stories Bono claims the great Irish writers told in this room.

I'm bearing in mind what Bono told me earlier in this week-long speaking tour: "Anthony Burgess said that Joyce had to leave Dublin to write Ulysses, 'cause if he'd stayed here he'd have talked it."

Among the fans who hover outside Bono's house is a girl who looks so much like him that she fooled Bono's own brother when he was driving by. The Principles refer to her as "the Bonette."

At lunchtime Sunday young U2 fans and neighborhood kids are perching on the walls across from Bono's house like stone monkeys, scrutinizing every car that pulls up and is waved through the forbidding electric gates. Bono's house, hidden behind high walls, is a pale mansion on the sea. It is big, but not absurdly big. It sits in a lush green hill that slopes down toward the ocean through bushes, gravel paths, and gardens full of blooming flowers. There is a children's playhouse almost hidden in the trees.

Ali got back from Ireland in time for Saturday's concert and she knew how to bring Bono home. The end-of-tour party for the Zoo crew is at their house. The sultan tent from the gig was lugged over here and set up on the tennis court and a fine buffet has been prepared. One hundred and forty guests wander in. You've met them all already.

⇐ Предыдущая919293949596979899100Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: