The bomb japan scandal/ U2's promoter banzais madonna's/ t-shirts save the day/ larry takes stock/ the 157th and final zoo tv concert/ the secret of the universe

U2 HAS A FEW misunderstandings to sort out with the Japanese. The biggest is a report, widely circulated in Japan, that during the American leg of the tour the Zoo TV screens lit up with the message bomb japan now. An Atlanta newspaper reporter said he saw it, and he wrote it, and while it was no big deal to readers in Atlanta it was a hell of a big stink in Tokyo. The polite teenage girls who wait in the hotel lobby all day with their U2 albums like to come up and ask questions about the band of any Anglo who passes, and one of the most popular is, "Do they really hate Japan?"

What U2 has been unable to make clear is that while it's possible that those three words—bomb, Japan, and now—might have shown up in rapid sequence one time, it was not intended and there is no way to check. During "The Fly" all the screens around Bono flash hundreds of random words at high speed in random sequence. Those three words are all in the file, so they might have come up together, but given that each word flashes for a fraction of a second it's equally possible that the reporter saw those three amid a barrage and his brain connected them into a sentence that didn't really exist. There's no way to tell and it's a waste of time guessing, but since U2 is unable to issue a flat denial, the bomb-sensitive Japanese are touchy about the band these days. It just goes to show: give a monkey a typewriter and he'll eventually offend some national sensibility.

In addition to those hard feelings there's bad blood with the local promoter who is putting on the Zoo TV concerts here. As I explained back in Australia, one of the mean side effects of the enormous expense

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of this tour is that U2 had to demand big guarantees from promoters who wanted to book them. Some bands—the Rolling Stones, for exam­ple—do that as a matter of course, but in the past U2 operated by sharing more of the risk with promoters. This time McGuinness had to tell local hookers to pony up the big bucks up front. This led to some promoters trying to cover their asses by jacking up the ticket prices, which at some shows led to unsold seats.

The Friday show at the forty-five-thousand seat Tokyo Dome is packed, but Thursday was not even close. The promoter is angry that McGuinness will not consider giving back some of the advance and sharing the loss. McGuinness's attitude is that this whole week of the tour and journey to Japan has been added just to accommodate these two concerts, and it would be unfair to his clients to now tell them they are not going to be paid for it.

The situation is especially touchy because the promoter battled like a ninja for U2 when their dates were threatened, when the Tokyo Dome, which promotes some events in-house, made a deal with Madonna to come and play for five nights. The Dome wanted to take back one or both of the nights promised to U2 to accommodate the Material Girl, and since it's their house they might very well have done it. U2's promoter hit the roof and hurled a samurai curse at the backsliders: "If you break your word to me about this I will destroy you, even if in doing so I must destroy myself!"

The Tokyo Dome freaked. McGuinness got an angry call from Madonna's people saying, "Your Tokyo promoter has threatened to kill our Tokyo promoter!"

McGuinness said, more or less, "Good for him." (McGuinness also says that the threat was symbolic, a demonstration of determination.) U2 got their dates. Madonna has to play around them. But the pro­moter who was willing to go kamikaze for U2 is now so bitter that he won't even come to the shows.

This week it's possible to look at the final figures for the two years of heavy work. U2 has landed in the black, but not by a wide margin. What saved them from being wiped out was the garment industry. "We grossed $30 million in T-shirt sales," McGuinness says. "Without those we'd be fucked."

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