Inside, though, the club is pulsating with the darkened vibe of the

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kind of dancing and drug den I thought only existed on Dragnet. It is so dark that you can only see the people within five or ten feet of you, which is fine. As my eyes adjust I can make out women in bras and half-slips dancing on tables and tripping over chairs. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of one of the One-Eyed-Jacks hostesses shimmying through a strobe light. They are our pals now! Every time for the past few days I have tried to go to my room and sleep I have had the ringing phone to remind me that Bono gave them all my name and hotel room number and told them to call me to get tickets for the U2 concerts.

We grab seats behind some sort of table or shelf not far from the door and settle in. I notice several women sitting on the window ledge, holding beers and looking at Bono. One of them, a very pretty, almost fragile-looking young hippie girl, comes over and starts talking to me. She is English. Both her articulate language and perfect bone structure would seem more at home at a country club in Devonshire than here. But she's another wandering spirit. She looks sixteen and says she's twenty-six. She says she lives in the Himalayas and comes down to Tokyo for three months at a time to work as a hostess when she runs out of money. Then she goes back up to the mountains.

She grabs my arm and points to Bono. "I used to put on his records and masturbate to his poster on my wall when I was fourteen," she says. "I don't like his music anymore, though. He sold out and I grew up."

Bono at Bottom

Rejecting the brown rice position/ the future of the zoo tv network/ getting lost and missing sound check/ bono is left stripped and unconscious/ U2 plays a stinker/ god isn't dead, nietzsche is

L OOK at THAT," Bono says, pointing up from the tranquil Japanese garden where we are sitting this morning to the top floors of the hotel. Larry and Edge have each come to the windows of their rooms, one a floor above the other, and without knowing it have each stood in the same way at their windows, surveying the landscape with the same expression (the one Ben Cartwright wore while looking out across the Ponderosa at the opening of Bonanza) and mannerisms, and then turned away.

"We've reached the end of this thing," I say to Bono. "You're out of steam, you've exhausted the spark that set this off three years ago. Fair enough?"

"Yup, I think so," Bono says. "Until we came to Tokyo.'"

"Now you're renewed?"

"No, we're not renewed—redirected. I don't want to play more shows or anything like that, but I could stay here for a while. There's something that's catching my interest here that I don't know quite what it is. Maybe it's just the obvious, the high-tech art-and-people collision. I don't know if it's just that, but I think there's maybe other stuff here that I wouldn't mind rooting through."

"At the beginning of this ride you talked about challenging the age and embracing the age. And you were saying last night that maybe you had succeeded in both."

"I wasn't really commenting on whether we'd succeeded or failed, but that we were confirmed about our instincts that the idea of countercul-

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Ture, the way it used to be in the sixties, that number is up. And I'm interested in these more Asian ideas, which we playfully call judo, that you use the energy of what's going against you—and by that I just mean popular culture, commerce, science—to defend yourself. Rather than resistance, in the hippie or punk sense of the word. You try to walk through it, rather than walk away from it. As opposed to the old ideas of dropping out and forming your own garden of eden—the sort of brown-rice position.

"That's where the TV stations come in. Let's take Zoo TV and turn it into a TV network. To see that go on into another field could be interesting. It becomes an extension of that idea. And why not?"

The proposed Zoo TV network, in conjuction with MTV and paid for by Polygram and some other investors, is snowballing into reality with the same sort of "If it can be done, we should do it" momentum that led to the creation of nuclear reactors, quad sound, and the Fran­kenstein monster. Everyone around U2 seems to have a different idea, though, of what it should be. Bono sees it as a window for the world to the films of Kenneth Anger and Wim Wenders, avant-garde music, progressive theater, philosophical talk shows, and semisurreal home shopping. McGuinness thinks it's a chance for U2 to make a whole lot of dough using other people's money. Edge is cautiously optimistic, Larry is cautiously pessimistic, and Adam says that while he has no doubt U2 could come up with a channel that he would enjoy watching, he's not sure that qualifies them to become network executives. I suggest to Bono that—as long as they're not risking their own money—the only real why not is the added demands and pressure it would put on the four band members.

"Yeah," Bono sighs. "And that's what we have to weigh up. That might be a reason why we wouldn't do it. The biggest threat to the group at present is the complexity of the running of our organization. That's the biggest threat. Our musical life is suffering as a result of it. And even though we can't get away with cliches like 'That's not impor­tant, it's the music that's important,' there is some truth that people who manage themselves lose that. There are a lot of examples. So we've got to be very careful. One of the signposts that we have at the moment is the idea of 'simplifying,' and then there's this other one. And I really don't know which way we're gonna go. Should we go further into the

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morass of options and permutations and combinations, or should we actually simplify?"

"Well," I say, taking a firm stand on both sides of the issue, "it might be possible to do both, but it would demand you four giving up the scrutiny that you put on everything that goes out under your name."

"Right," Bono says. "That's right. Brian Eno brought up the meta­phor of Warhol's Factory, which is not too removed. Warhol brought in a lot of people, and he was just the arrowhead of all that energy. But you could argue that at a certain point maybe he released too much control."

You sure could. Bono and I went to a Warhol exhibit in Australia that gave me the shakes—it was like being trapped with someone you'd gotten sick of years before, showing you home movies of people you tried to avoid. One man's creative laboratory is another man's license to wank. "This sort of project puts another pressure on the band," I tell Bono, "because the four individuals may not have the same interest in it. It seems to me that one of things that Adam's struggling to resolve is the degree to which he wants to have to be involved in all these things."

"Yeah," Bono says. "That is a complex question because in one part it is an observation and a decision about the quality of life that he wants to have, but in another way it's a defensive position from a person whose energy had been eaten up elsewhere. It's so hard here, because nobody wants to fall behind, and when you are a cooperative, and when by and large you don't get paid more for working harder, you feel you can't fall behind, because it threatens the whole thing. This is what I don't have any answers for. But we're all in this one, Adam's not the only one. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about whether I'd like to completely withdraw from megastructures to more of a micro point of view. I think it was you that said, 'Sinatra took fifty years to get the phrasing right.' That comment rattled around my head for a while, and I thought, I've got this voice that gets so little attention. I have a point of view as an artist and an ability to write that is so undeveloped, that gets so little time. You've been there. You've seen me as the air traffic controller writing out of the sky, asking the cleaning lady, anyone who walks by for advice about lyrics. Now, that's partly strategy; it's not just the fact that it receives so little attention. But there are so many others areas. Performance! The ability to perform is innate, but in me it's so undevel­oped. What if I had a chance to think about it, work it? On this tour I ve been sticking to a script that was written very quickly, because you don t

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get a chance in this kind of thing to rewrite. It's like trying to rewrite a movie on the set. You can do it, but you'll pay a very high price. You might make a lot of bad decisions."

It is pretty remarkable that in all matters relating to U2, the parts that the public focuses on—Bono's part: the lyrics, the singing, what he does on stage—are added at the very end—after the music is written, after the backing track is recorded, after the set is designed and the costumes are tailored and the song lists are taped to the monitors.

"In the eighties," Bono says, "when I'd tell people, 'You don't under­stand. We're just scraping the top of this thing,' they'd always think it was modesty. But it was quite accurate. It wasn't any kind of forecast of great things to come; this was just pure frustration. 'What would happen if we could all play in time?' 'What would happen if we got a chance to songwrite?' And so whenever there'd be these quantum leaps those people would say, 'I didn't think they could do it.' "

We wander out of the garden and into the backstreets of Tokyo, talking all the way. As we slip between clotheslines in a back alley Bono says of U2, "Our evolution is back to front. It's completely arseways. And maybe one of the ways the group might progress is through simplification. I don't know. Maybe that's the way. I know people haven't got the energy for anything new right now. And that's why I didn't even mention Tokyo to them. There'd be a collective nervous breakdown. I don't even want them to think about things like that. And it may be me that gets us into trouble, if you like, gets us into these places, but I need them to get us out of those places. We really need each other. That's the other thing. If we end up doing the Zoo TV network I'm gonna need Larry there going, 'This is a wank! Who is this guy?'

'So I don't know." Bono sighs, looking at the fork in the road with the same ambivalence that confronted Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and Robert Frost. "Something in me would love to write a song, and you know, try it in a few different keys. Which still has never happened."

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