Course, in that he would rather swallow snot than let on how much such slights hurt him he is very much like Adam.

Adam says, "I think Paul suffered from exactly the same thing we had all suffered from [while making Achtung Baby]. He wasn't around for the recording of the album. He doesn't really know what went on with that record. Up till that point, when we were struggling with Joshua Tree and with the movie, he had been pretty much a fifth member in the shit that he had to take." Adam adds sarcastically, "Everyone's a fifth member when it's going well. After that point he kind of left the cosmos. He'd been to Hollywood. He came back to Dublin as an impressario, he was moving in political circles, he was getting involved in setting up a TV station. He was in mogul mode. He's come back from that, but I don't think he's back in the studio with us or on tour with us. He still has a good life in my opinion and hasn't had to take the knocks and scrapes that we've all taken over the last three years. In my opinion."

But, I ask, is that not the natural way it should be between a manager and a grown-up, experienced band? Maybe the early relationship was unnaturally close.

"Yeah, it is fair enough," Adam says sharply. "I'm not saying that it is healthy for him to be back in that fifth member role. You asked me to describe what happened to the relationship; I think that is what the relationship has become. I think we instruct him far more now and rely less on his ability to have a creative vision of the music."

Paul says, "I've always rejected that moniker: fifth member of the band. I'm not a member of the band! There are four members of the band and what I do is something completely different. I'm obviously very proud of what I do, but it's not the same as what they do."

Paul's perspective is probably that he is a manager who commissions 20 percent of the income of each of his four clients. How those four clients divide up the 80 percent they retain is entirely up to them—but if they work out a deal that pays some of them less than others it should have no bearing on his commission. Larry and Adam might argue that very few bands in U2's superstar position continue to pay their manager 20 percent. Paul has kept that deal because he was there for them in the beginning, and because he has passed on the chance to augment his earnings by taking on other clients—but if Larry and Adam are willing to recut the pie, Paul must be willing to do the same.

Adam and Larry have allowed that they would, in principle, accept

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Something like a 30/20/30/20 split of the band's money (after Paul's commission) for Achtung Baby and Zooropa, rather than the usual 25 percent each. This in acknowledgment of Edge and Bono's greater contributions to those two records. Next album they will sit down and cut the pie again, reflecting how hard each of them works. The four members of U2 have appointed the great and powerful Ossie to judge how much of Achtung Baby and Zooropa each of them should take home. At this point U2 do not themselves know exactly what the split will be.

During the long flight from New Zealand to Japan I go over and sit down next to Edge and say, "Suppose a year from now the band regroups and Adam or Paul or both of them are not there. Can you see U2 going on?"

"Yes," he says immediately. "But not in the same way. I think the members of the band are creative people and I can't see us stifling or stopping that creative instinct, so I would say that we would continue in some way. But I don't think it could be the same and I don't think we would just carry on as if nothing had happened. There would have to be some kind of difference of approach. But yeah, we would carry on."

Edge's face softens and he adds, "It's not likely, but I guess anything's possible." Edge figures Adam's dive in Australia was "a kind of emo­tional convulsion," a signal to the band that he needed a hand. "We're still friends," Edge says. "This is not a band like most bands. We're still very close. We still care a lot about each other. There is a lot of support for each other and a lot of leeway and a lot of understanding. I like to think that it would be difficult for one of us to really get off the wall and really go out there without the others realizing it and being there to do something about it. Obviously it's not up to me what the other guys do in their private time, but I think you can make it hard for somebody to fuck themselves up, you can be the squeaky wheel, you can just tell him the truth, which a lot of people never get."

I remind Edge of Larry's perspective about the crisis that shook U2 during the making of Achtung Baby. He said that ultimately the four of them realized that the band grew out of friendship, and the friendships were more important than the band.

If we'd accepted that the friendships were over," Edge says, "I think it probably would have been just a matter of time until the band came to an end. It would have taken all the fun out of it and the strength, the belief. You can't do something like this for two years unless you have a

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Very strong feeling about what you're trying to do and that everyone's along for the ride. So much of what we do is trust, you know. The difference between this band and what happened with the Beatles and the Stones is that for whatever reason we never got to that point where everyone is trying to protect themselves and their position in a kind of paranoid way, because they feel threatened that someone else is going to steal their credit or their glory or their royalties or whatever it is.

"Because there is a lot of trust we can kind of relax on certain levels. Like, I feel okay about letting things go. If I've put together a piece of music from scratch and done all the writing, I'm not looking for every last bit of credit, because I feel there's a sort of understanding and there's a balance there. It irons out a lot of those problems. You don't get that paranoid, protectionist, itchy competitiveness if you are all friends. It's when the friendships start to go and the trust goes that all that stuff happens. I think it's the beginning of the end of bands, and that's never kicked in with U2. It probably came closest to it around that time, but we managed to stop it.

"I'm not saying it could never happen. It's very hard to deal with things like credit sometimes. It's sort of tough being the guitar player in a band with a singer like Bono, because he's such a media magnet that if you didn't have a lot of confidence about what you were about and where you stood within the group, you might start to feel, Hold on a second—I'm being overlooked here. Ultimately I don't have a problem. I know that being the guitar player is an important thing. It's never ever going to get the same credit or response that being the singer is. That's just the way life is. I'm cool about that.

"We never wanted to get into a situation where we were crediting every little thing," Edge says, " 'cause that just becomes laborious and, again, causes a lot of friction and misunderstanding and confusion. This production credit (on Zoorooa) was some way of describing my role in the process, which varies over a huge range of different responsibilities from lyric editor to Bono—sitting there and bouncing ideas off him and vice versa—to taking responsibility for developing a lot of the music, either from scratch or taking what are essentially jams and trying to put them into some shape or form—to just the general production work which tends to mean just a lot more worrying than anyone else. But some of what I do really isn't production, some of what I do is just being a songwriter. It has not seemed like an appropriate thing to start

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apportioning credit in that area, 'cause it does vary a lot. Some songs I take most of the musical responsibility for, some I'm just one of the members of the band. It's not the same as the lyrics, where basically Bono takes on the responsibility and writes ninety-eight percent of the lyrics and you can clearly say that's the way it happens. It's not an option to carve it all up. In order for this thing to survive you've got to have that trust."

Preserving that trust is important to everyone in U2. Bono has been talking excitedly to all the inner circle about what a blessing it was that in Sydney, Adam had to face his devil in such a dramatic way, has admitted his problem and resolved to stop drinking. Bono's position is, the storm is over.

"Adam's back!" Bono announced more than once in the last week. "It's great! Some artists become dull when they stop drinking or drug­ging, but Adam's not one of them. He's his old self. He loses none of his rubber band shooting, water gun squirting, public disrobing spirit when he doesn't drink."

And maybe it is as simple—though surely not as easy—as that. Maybe what I've witnessed is an extreme example of how the immediate family of U2 lets its members stray so far and then yanks them back. In fact, I wonder if even the threats of reduced equity are really tough-love discipline, a way to say to any of the five, "There's a price for letting the family down." My analysis is interupted by a sharp pain across my right ear. I turn and look over the airplane seat and see a laughing Adam Clayton several rows back, shooting rubber bands.

Tokyo Overload

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