T-Bone Burnett, who slept through the earthquake, says he's been worried that I might not know he was joking when he said Bono was a heretic, and he'd hate for me to put that in the book.

"I don't know what you're talking about, T-Bone," I reply. "I don't remember you saying that Bono was a heretic. But now I will certainly have to put it in the book."

T-Bone says that he's decided U2 are a lot like Aimee Semple McPherson, the miracle-working evangelist and supercelebrity of 1920s America. She healed the lame and made the blind see. She rode motor­cycles in her church and became fascinated by the world of Hollywood. She'd disappear with Tallulah Bankhead. Finally she began to think it was her power that was healing people and not God's. I think it's safe to say that T-Bone has a lot more faith in U2 than to think they'll end up like Sister Aimee, but he is enough of an ethical forest ranger to want to warn them of the temptation.

495

Back in New York, Sheila Roche comes through town to pack up her belongings and move back to Ireland, where she is going to be oversee­ing the management of P. J. Harvey. Adam and Larry are making ready their uptown pads. Bono skis in amidst blizzards and ice storms that are freezing North America from Canada to Tennessee to make a speech inducting Bob Marley into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"I know claiming Bob Marley is Irish might be a little difficult here tonight," he tells the ponytailed power brokers in the audience, "but bear with me. Jamaica and Ireland have a lot in common. Naomi Campbell, Chris Blackwell, Guinness, a fondness for little green leaves —the weed, religion, the philosophy of procrastination—don't put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after. Unless, of course, it's freedom.

"We are both islands. We are both colonies. We share a common yoke: the struggle for identity, the struggle for independence, the vulner­able and uncertain future that's left behind when the jackboot of empire is finally retreated. The roots, the getting up, the standing up, and the hard bit—the staying up. In such a struggle, an often violent struggle, the voice of Bob Marley was the voice of reason. There were love songs that you could admit listening to, songs of hurt, hard but healing. Tuff gong. Songs of freedom where that word meant something again. Re­demption songs. A sexy revolution where Jah is Jehovah on street level. Not over his people but with his people. Not just stylin'—jammin'. Down the line from Ethiopia where it all began for the Rastaman.

"I spent some time in Ethiopia with my wife, Ali, and everywhere we went we saw Bob Marley's face. There he was, dressed to hustle God. 'Let my people go,' an ancient plea. Prayers catching fire in Mozam­bique, Nigeria, Lebanon, Alabama, Detroit, New York, Netting Hill, Belfast. Dr. King in dreads, a Third- and First-World superstar.

"Mental slavery ends where imagination begins. Here was this new music, rocking out of the shantytowns. Lolling, loping rhythms, telling it like it was, like it is, like it ever shall be. Skanking, ska, bluebeat, rock steady, reggae, dub, and now ragga. And all of this from a man who drove three BMWs. BMW—Bob Marley and the Wallers—that was his excuse!

"Rock & roll loves its juvenilia, its caricatures, its cartoons. The protest singer, the gospel singer, the sex god, your more mature messiah types. We love the extremes and we're expected to choose. The mud of

496

the blues or the oxygen of gospel. The hellhounds on our trail or the bands of angels. Well, Bob Marley didn't choose, or walk down the middle. He raced to the edges, embracing all extremes, creating a one­ness. His oneness. One love. He wanted everything at the same time and he was everything at the same time. Prophet, soul rebel, Rastaman, herbsman, wildman, natural mystic man, lady's man, Island man, family man, Rita's man, soccer man, showman, shaman, human, Jamaican.

"The spirit of Bob and the spirit of Jah lives on in his son, Ziggy, and his lover, Rita Marley. I'm proud to welcome Bob Marley into the Hall of Fame. Amen!"

It's a beautiful speech, and no doubt it tells us as much about Bono's aspirations for himself as it does his vision of Bob Marley. Bono goes home to Ireland after that. The faxes imploring him to act in the movie Johnny Mnemonic are piling up like pancakes on a slow day at IHOP, and Warner Bros. is offering to write a Macphisto-like character into Batman Forever. He has been invited to give a speech bestowing on Frank Sinatra a lifetime achievement Grammy. Finally making his choices based on conservation of energy, Bono says no to the movies and yes to the speech.

In March, with snow still up to New York's filthy belly button, Bono, All, and Paul again hit Manhattan. First stop is a Rock the Vote party MTV is throwing to celebrate itself and to honor R.E.M. for their efforts in voter registration. Clinton's small, sharp-looking, thirty-two-year-old Senior Policy Advisor George Stephanopoulos leads those rep­resenting the White House at the hoedown, which is held at a nightclub in Times Square. Jeff Pollack makes a speech, Tom Freston makes a speech. Michael Stipe shows up with a shaved head and his mother. Bono and various Principles are given a table in a little alcove overlook­ing the festivities, right next to Sting, and a couple of Roman draperies down from R.E.M.

When Bono and Stipe huddle to talk there quickly develops, as inevitably as it does when two weather fronts come together, a vortex spiraling out from their epicenter. Lesser pop deities, management asso­ciates, record execs, MTV personnel, freeloaders and eavesdroppers circle around the great men in expanding spirals of attendant schmooze. I look out across this widening gyre and see a tall, stern figure plowing through the rings with the sort of fierce determination that always brings to mind the cry, "Half a league, half a league, half a league on!"

497

Imagine my surprise when I see that this invader is an old fellow who was a priest in the Rhode Island of my youth, who later went on to suck up to President Nixon during the Watergate crisis, offering absolution for the president's sins before Gerry Ford ever thought of it and vying to become the Catholic Billy Graham during that fall of that White House of Usher.

Later this same ambitious padre ran for Congress from Rhode Island as a Republican and was thumped. He went over the hill from the priesthood, got married, and was next spotted as the host of an obnox­ious but very popular TV show called The McLaughlin Croup in which the former Father presides over a howling pack of political commentators who verbally groin-kick each other in their drooling haste to spew invective on all statesmen, politicians, and public figures—but especially leftists—from coast to coast on Sunday mornings. The old priest still has a pulpit! So famous that Saturday Night Live regularly parodies him, the post-frocked broadcaster is called John McLaughlin. Not the Mahavishnu. After knocking through the crowd around Bono and Stipe, he finally elbows aside the last small woman in his path, raises his chins, casts down his eyes imperiously on Bono, and shouts with the amplified voice of the hard-of-hearing, "That's not Stephanopoulos!" After which outburst he turns and stalks away.

Well, now my interest is piqued. I leave Bono, Stipe, and Sting and follow McLaughlin into a side room, where R.E.M. has arranged to have an exhibition of photos and paintings by HIV-infected artists. I come up next to the turn-collar, point to a photograph of a man displaying an engorged penis, and ask, "What do you make of that one, Mr. McLaughlin?" He peers over his spectacles, studies the picture, and then says loudly, "Mapplethorpe!"

"It is not," I tell him. "That's my doorman."

I go back to Bono, who is being told by Stephanopoulos that it looks as if the Clinton White House made a big mistake allowing Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams into the United States recently. It was a gamble that if Adams was treated as a diplomat rather than a terrorist the IRA might reciprocate with a serious peace initiative in Northern Ireland. But nothing happened and all the Americans accomplished was to get the British angry. Bono tells Stephanopoulos not to give up yet; Adams was cheered as a peacemaker during that trip. Bono says that a man can

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