In the USA—thanks first to my old pals Keryn Kaplan and Dan Russell. And to Susie Smith, Catherine Owens, Tom Freston, Judy McGrath, Jeff Jones, Jeff Pollack, Carter Alien, Phil Joanou, Jimmy

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Iovine, Peter Buck, Hyacinth Amero, Nathan Brackett, George Regis, Nancy Sullivan, Ina Meibach, Rick Dobbis, Dennis Fine, Cameron Crowe, Holly Peters, Bess Dulany, Barbara Skydel, Frank Barsalona, Sue and Kevin Godley, Holly George-Warren and all at Rolling Stone Press, Paul Wasserman, Brian O'Neal, Richard Lloyd, Heather M. Beckel, the Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, Billy Graham Ministries, Rhonda Markowitz, Michael Shore, Al Dunstan, and the inimitable Hal Willner. I owe an enormous debt to everyone at Musician magazine, especially Mark Rowland.

Please give a big hand to our guest stars—R.E.M.! Naomi Campbell! Christy Turlington! Bruce Springsteen! Axl Rose! Salman Rushdie (such a nice guy that after the first hour I forgot about trying to collect the reward).' Gary Oldman! Lou Reed! Peter Gabriel! Pearl Jam! Mick Jagger! Bob Dylan! Van Morrison! Sting! Frank Sinatra! John Lydon! Randy Newman! Aimee Mann! Robbie Robertson! Let's all get together and do a charity concert.

Thanks for the good advice—T-Bone Burnett & Sam Phillips, Elvis Costello & Cait O'Riordan, Jeff Rosen, Jim Stein, Lavinia Trevor, Thom Duffy, John Telfer, Ed Bicknell & Mark Knopfler. Thanks to Betsy Bundschuh for getting it from the get-go.

All the reporting and interviews in this book are my own, except where I cite another source in the text. Fred Schruers was kind enough to ask Dan Lanois some questions for me when he interviewed Dan for Musi­cian. Thanks, Fred. My work on the chapter about the coming changes in communications technology led to my asking Fred Goodman to write a story on that subject for Musician. Goodman's reporting, in turn, gave me new information, which I used in the book. How's that for a snake eating its tail? I swiped Bono's exclamation on hearing Clinton had been elected from an article by Paul Du Noyer in Q magazine.

Adam Clayton, Bono, Edge, Larry Mullen, and Paul McGuinness have a reputation for exerting tight control over media access to U2. It is not, by and large, a bum rap. But when I approached them about cooperating with this book they agreed to give me unlimited access to the band and their organization and asked for nothing in return—no manuscript

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approval, no financial remuneration, no controls of any kind. My experi­ence writing about well-known people is that you cannot predict what they will like and what will get them angry. It seems very unlikely that I could write a whole book about U2 and not cause some hard feelings. That is the nature of biography; it's the nature of journalism and criticism. I am very grateful to them for letting me get so close.

Larry Mullen told me at the outset of this project that he was comfort­able with it because U2 had been introduced to me in 1980 as a journalist and, however friendly we'd become, that had remained our relationship. There was no question between us about confidences being betrayed or motives being questioned. If they said or did something in front of me, it was fair game. During the months I traveled with U2 they were extraordinarily open and generous with me, but we both knew that if they didn't want something to get into print they should keep it away from me.

There must have been occasions when U2 regretted that I was around, but they never tried to get me to bury something. They took the best attitude anyone can take with a working writer: "I knew he was a scorpion when I put him on my back."

I've thought a lot about why a band with nothing to gain let me so far in, and I think the answer is in an interview I did with Bono ten years ago. He said, "I would aspire to being a soul singer," and he explained, "A singer becomes a soul singer when he decides to reveal rather than conceal." For all the sunglasses and photo-approval and image-shaping that they have learned since then, U2 still believe in their hearts that the truth will justify and set them free. They still reveal everything when they play their songs. They are soul singers now.

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