Four retarded kids in a tank.' There are places on this planet where fiction cannot take you.

Oh, and I was watching some TV talk show today and the guest was Pete Best, the Beatle drummer deposed by Ringo. The interviewer asked him if any other band had ever come along who had what the Beatles had, and he said he thought only U2.

After dinner Adam wants to talk about how I'm going to write about the proposed restructuring of the deals between the four members of U2 and Paul McGuinness that was such a touchy subject by the end of the tour. He says that things have calmed down a lot.

"I think whether Paul's interests at the end of the day are musical is still in the balance for him," Adam says carefully. "I don't know where he gets his new energy from, his new blood. He seems to enjoy the

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corporate and the political world, and that's a great thing for us—for him to operate so well in those particular worlds. But as a fifth member to a partnership, it's not as good as it could be."

So will Paul be asked to accept a reduction from his equal fifth of U2?

"I think that's impossible to say at this point," Adam says, "and I don't think it's fair to allude to that as being the discussion. The roles and imbalances are a more important thing to address than the equity. If one accepts the point of view that it is the corporate, political, business world that Paul is best at, well, nobody's been in this position before! Maybe that's what he should be encouraged to go and do. Make Zoo TV into the Zoo TV Corporation, that sort of thing. It's only when we've sorted those things out that any rearrangement will be able to be thought about or discussed.

"But I'm now thinking it's not a choice of this or that. It's 'Look at the situation and see how to make the picture work for you.' These problems are resolvable. These are growing things. I'm not as negative as I may have once been about them. It's only as I start to learn more about other people's business that I realize the uniqueness of our own situa­tion. Not that our own situation should be hidden because of that. I think it should be revealed because of it."

I couldn't agree more. The world, especially the music world, should understand U2's collectivise approach. They should understand the generosity Bono, particularly, displayed in agreeing that everything the band generated would be split equally between the four musicians and the manager. Is the system fair? Of course not, not in the way capitalism understands fairness. But it is fair according to the New Testament parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which Jesus taught that as long as one man is paid fairly, it does him no injustice if a man who does less is paid the same.

It was this all-for-one belief that allowed U2 to grow together as musicians and as people. It encouraged an environment in which if one person fell behind, the others helped bring him along. No one in U2 could profit from anyone else's loss.

And if now, fifteen years down the line, the contributions of Bono and Edge have outpaced those of the others—or if the extra time Bono and Edge put in entitles them to some extra compensation—honesty demands that they all consider how to make things equal again. But it is

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To their great credit as people that rather than recut the pie to reflect recent contributions, they have decided to see if Adam and Larry can each in his own way expand what he does to make the whole thing equal again. Paul is involved in a similar enterprise.

Faced with a partner who was not generating as much revenue as others, most multimillion dollar corporations would say, "You should accept less." U2 says, "You should add more." So far everyone's rising to the challenge.

And at the risk of making this read like an inspirational book for boys, it is satisfying to see both Paul and Adam turn away from the pursuits that were separating them from U2 and bring that energy and interest back home. God knows there was a real chance that Adam was going to opt for the easy life of a millionaire playboy, jet-setting around with the world's most glamorous women on his arm. Instead he's playing sessions and taking lessons. And Paul seems to have decided that if he could get involved in TV projects that competed with his time for U2, he could just as well get involved in setting up a channel/or U2. He is putting all of his considerable business creativity back into the service of the band.

Adam and Paul still have a lot in common, including carrying them­selves as sophisticated and unsentimental men of the world. They don't like to let on that they love U2 as much as anybody.

Adam says that U2 will reconvene in six months to decide what they will do next. Adam says that the next U2 album could be a rock & roll record (that would start off from the rock songs left off Zooropa), or it could be a high-tech computer album (as Edge said that last night in Japan, the future's not looking bright for the old guitar) or it could be an Irish album, lyric-based and inspired by that metaphysical, linguisti­cally promiscuous Wildean/Yeatsean/Joycean/Beckettean/Van Morrisonean gift of gab tradition with which Bono feels such kinship.

Adam, though, is starting to evolve a different idea. He sees the future in a black woman named Me'Shell Ndgeocello, who combines a post hip-hop sensibility with a sense of seventies roots funk. He sees a point at which the rap-jazz fusion movement will find common ground with the pop audience that's gotten tired of Madonna and Prince. There seems to be a new community forming in New York: a dreadlocked, politically conscious and poetry-conscious crowd that lis­tened to rap as kids and is now looking backward to Curtis Mayfield

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And Gil Scott-Heron and forward to some new hybrid—a sensibility that allows for crack musicianship alongside machines and amateurism, that would let rap move past the dead-end of gangsta without denying the harshness of ghetto life.

Adam's right on top of it. He's been checking out the atmosphere around the soul club the Cooler, discovering the Brooklyn scene that has grown up in the last ten years around Spike Lee and the M-base musicians, and listening to Me'Shell and old Stevie Wonder back to back. He loves what he's learning, and he is sending tapes of the stuff to Bono, hoping to pull Bono away from what Adam worries will be too literary an approach to the next U2 music. He says that on the next U2 album, instead of Larry playing drums with the band and then overdubbing conga or shakers, wouldn't it be great to start with the band playing with congas or some such looser percussion, and then overdub as much drum as was necessary. Of course, he shrugs, ultimately the songs will dictate the approach. But he's going to keep mailing these tapes to Bono, hoping it sinks in.

We end up heading down to S.O.B.'s to see Gil Scott-Heron, the man who wrote "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and who Adam is considering recommending to Mother Records. Scott-Heron, the spiritual godfather of Disposable Heroes and a ton of other socially incisive black music, can no longer raise the roof the way he could twenty years ago, but there is one enormously emotional moment in his show, when he dedicates his 1975 antiapartheid song "Johannesburg" to Nelson Mandela—who became the first black president of South Africa yesterday. That such a day would ever come seemed beyond imagining when the song was recorded. Hell, it was beyond imagining when Bono sang on Little Steven's protest song "Sun City" in 1985—when Mandela was twenty years in prison.

And maybe, maybe for just the length of Gil Scott-Heron's song tonight, we could consider that we might all have, in these last few years, dodged the bullet. Maybe we got those Fatima warnings in time and the apocalypse was averted. If ten years ago some prophet had predicted that the Berlin Wall would fall and all the Soviet states be set free, that apartheid would crumble, that the political prisoners Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela would be not only released from jail but become presidents of their countries, we would have said it sounds like a golden age.

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Instead we've come to a crossroad, with an age of miracles over one horizon and chaos across the other. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back at this as the last moment of peace before everybody got nuclear weapons. At this moment of change, in these last days of the tortured twentieth century, no one's naive enough to expect the joyful moments to stay forever. So it is important that we grab them and celebrate them for as long as they last. Even if it's only the length of a single song.

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