When we get home from dinner I turn on the TV and Jay Leno is

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making jokes about Bono's obscenity offending Axl Rose, and "Three things you don't want to do if you hope to live a long life—don't smoke, don't eat meat, and don't cut off Frank Sinatra!"

On the Conan O'Brien show the host asks if the audience watched the Grammys and then says, "Bono beat Sting for an award. For most pretentious person with only one name!"

Edge, meanwhile, has been spending a lot of time with Morleigh in L.A. How remarkable that after the long emotional journey Edge began at the start of the Zoo TV experience, he actually came out at the other end with a new hand to hold. He pushed himself and U2 past all their old limits and traveled to the ends of the earth to fall in love with someone he'd known the whole time.

By the time the snow melts, Paul McGuinness has arrived in New York to attend the T. J. Martell dinner, the music industry's collective charity, and spend a week negotiating details of the proposed Zoo TV network with MTV. Every year the Martell Foundation honors some music biz bigwig as Humanitarian of the Year, and this time it's MTV boss Tom Freston—a tremendously deserving recipient, but also, as McGuinness points out—a sure bonanza of thousand-dollar-a-pop tickets, as every record company has to kiss MTV's ass. The entertain­ment is Eric Clapton, who plays an all-blues set, tracing the music from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and previewing his next album in the process.

There is a lot of back-and-forth between Principle and MTV over how to launch Zoo TV. Freston summed it up in his usual style—with a funny quip that contains a hard truth: "Gee, everybody wants their own TV network these days. Maybe as a prerequisite to getting your own network you should first have to try coming up with one good hour of programming a week."

Now both parties are leaning toward trying out the Zoo TV concept with a weekly show and seeing how that works. When asked my opinion (and nobody has to ask me twice) I suggest that one hour could only be a distortion of what a whole Zoo TV network would be like. Better to experiment with Zoo TV as an overnight show—say, midnight to 5 a.m.—on VHI, MTV's boring sister channel. (Another Freston line: "What should we do with VHI? It's like I have this great beachfront property and I got a shack sittin' on it!" He's lining up new manage­ment to reinvent the channel.)

505

Meanwhile Adam and Larry, both settled into their Manhattan apartments, adjust to life as musicians in New York. They spend a week playing together on Nanci Griffith recording sessions. Larry starts mu­sic lessons, commuting up to Boston to work with a drum teacher, and Adam plays on an album by Little Steven Van Zandt. Adam calls one afternoon and suggests we get together that evening. I pick a restaurant in the West Village. Coming out of the Seventh Avenue subway at Sheridan Square, Adam asks the first person he sees for directions. That first person is Lou Reed. Adam feels right at home.

At dinner I ask how the Zoo TV/MTV negotiations are proceeding and Adam says, "I'm staying away from it. I had to decide if I was going to use this period to become more of a businessman or more of a musician. I've chosen music. I had my first singing lesson ever today. The funny thing is, I can do it! And I met a guy there who gives bass lessons, so I made a date to start with him. Then I'm going to try to learn about computers."

Adam says he and Naomi have split for good, but the press doesn't know it so they're not going to say anything. He's a single man living in New York and he loves it. He says he's gotten back something he didn't know he'd lost—the alertness of being aware of everything going on on the street around him. He says it was buried under a self-awareness of Z am a rock star/Those people are looking at me/Here comes a photographer. Here in New York he can see and feel the bigger picture, and it feels great.

I am reminded of Larry's words the last night in Japan, that the way for Adam and him to contribute as much as anyone else as U2 contin­ued to evolve was to go out and work and learn new things to bring back to the band. ("Don't give the impression that I'm doing this to keep up with Bono or Edge or anyone else," Larry warned me. "I'm doing this for myself.") That's how Larry was going to spend 1994, and he hoped Adam would choose to join him. It is great, six months later, to see that Adam has and Adam loves it. He drinks water all night, he's skinny as a skeleton, his hair has grown back in its natural brown and is now startlingly balanced by a long, Russian-looking goatee. Adam looks like he should be making bombs with Mr. Molotov or writing Crime and Punishment by candlelight.

I tell him I got a postcard today from Willie Williams—he's back on the road with Bryan Adams and talking to R.E.M. about enlisting for their next tour. Adam says Suzanne Doyle is doing great working for

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MTV in London. I tell Adam that Bill Carter landed in New York this week and has moved into an apartment in the Village that he found through Vanessa Redgrave—one of the many connections he made through his U2-backed "Miss Sarajevo" documentary.

Carter just completed a reporting assignment in Bosnia for MTV and Rolling Stone. As always, he was full of new stories about the lunacy of that war. I tell Adam he's got to hear this one: the parents of a friend of Bill's had lived for years in an apartment on the outskirts of Sarajevo and refused to leave. The mother was a Muslim, the father Serbian, and they sort of kidded themselves that his being a Serb might spare them from the Chetniks. Most of the other tenants had fled the building, though one woman—a teacher of retarded children—remained a couple of floors below them.

One day the old couple hears screaming and shouting in the street. They look out and see that a Serbian tank has pulled up outside, and four jibbering Serbian soldiers are climbing out and running into their building. This, they figure, is it. So for an hour they sit on the couch, hugging each other, talking about their long life together, and saying good-bye. They can hear the soldiers shouting downstairs, in the apart­ment of the teacher. Then, to their amazement, the voices move outside again, the tank starts up, and the soldiers drive away. They are beside themselves with relief, but figure they'd better go check on their neigh­bor. They go down to the special ed teacher's apartment, knock on the door and ask if she's okay. Oh, sure, she says, that was four of my students returning for a visit.

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