Bono Not God, He Admits

With U2 and Crew at a Zoo TV Stadium Dress Rehearsal, 1992

You had to work your way up the U2 stepladder to get an audience with Bono. My friend, their publicist Paul Wasserman, started me with drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton. The next time around, guitarist The Edge participated. Thanks to the persistent success of the November, 1991 release of Achtung Baby, U2 were preparing to take its Zoo TV tour to outdoor stadiums at the end of August 1992, including Yankee Stadium. Wasso, as he was known, invited me to what is now known as Hersheypark Stadium in early August for a dress rehearsal for the expansion of the Zoo TV tour rebranded slightly as “Outside Broadcast.” After watching hours of rehearsal with a gargantuan and complicated video and audio system, the band and crew went backstage to eat a buffet dinner, where Bono joined me for a 45 minute chat. There were no other press guests that day of which I’m aware.

HERSHEY, PA— The lights 80 feet above the stage go on at Hershey Park Stadium, multicolored patterns flash on the huge Philips Vidi Walls and 36 supplementary video monitors. Hard rap music thunders from the 176 speakers of the million watt sound system when U2, the band that went from Dublin to the top of the world, lunges onto the stage. An audience of maybe two dozen gazes on politely.

Last week's show was a rehearsal, a run-through of the show that began as U2's successful Zoo TV tour when it began playing in arenas last spring. The tour goes al fresco today when the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast Tour begins at Giants Stadium for the first of two consecutive sold-out shows. An Aug. 29 concert at Yankee Stadium is also sold out.

Earlier in the day in Hershey: Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen stood on the small supplementary, or "B" stage, connected by a runway about 50 yards from the main stage, jamming and trying to get the sound balanced. "I'm gettin' Radio Moscow here in my earphones," Bono, the band's black-clad singer complains to technicians in the sound booth on the opposite sideline of this high school football stadium.

When U2 is on the "B" stage, it's one time in the tightly structured Zoo TV concert when they can play whatever they feel like. This afternoon, U2 goes through the Beatles' "Dear Prudence," a few bars of the Temptations' "My Girl," their classic anthem "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and improvised jams that contain tips of the hat to both the Grateful Dead and Johnny Cash.

The sound still isn't perfect. Partly to release the tension, the band keeps cutting loose: "Angel of Harlem" gives way to a few bars of Abba's "Dancing Queen" and Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love."

"I've still got Radio Moscow coming in on this headset," Bono repeats, frustrated. "All kinds of stuff. It's like being underwater." The Edge begins to play the guitar introduction to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Bono walks off, down the runway. Adam Clayton, in mock pique, removes the strap from his bass and hands the instrument to an assistant. Rehearsal is over.

"It was fairly psychedelic," Bono says later over dinner backstage in the commissary tent. "Close by the center of the stage, you could hear both the drum kit through the p.a. and the kit directly, so it sounded like some funky dreadlock mixing. It was a lot better than the original," he laughed, "but it's not how we intended it."

Bono seems anything but the aloof, self-righteous figure he's been portrayed as. He's just read Lester Bangs' posthumous anthology of rock criticism, "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung." His eagerness to talk about Bangs and the milieu in which he worked, at Creem magazine in the 1970s, reminds Bono of his own humble beginnings as a rock journalist.

"I worked for a Dublin magazine called Hot Press in 1975, when I was 15 or 16," Bono said. "I did a few articles about Iggy Pop. They were just to get me in free (to concerts). I'm sure they're horrible. I think I trashed Thin Lizzy. You know the way you can hate bands you love? That was it. They'd become something else as far as I was concerned in my angry young man phase." [I did not realize how sacrosanct Thin Lizzy was in its native Ireland until I saw the statue of the band's singer Phil Lynott in the center of Dublin in 2022. "Phil's short life has been immortalised by this fabulous life-sized statue placed outside the famous Bruxelles Rock Pub on Harry Street, just off Grafton Street," according to the "Visit Dublin" website.]

There are those who could say the same thing about U2, which has gone through a number of transitions since the angry, punk-inspired minimalism of their debut album "Boy" in 1980. Their flag-waving anthems "New Year's Day" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" made them arena headliners with strong support from both alternative-rock fans and more mainstream rockers. They remain one of the-core artists on Long Island's alternative rock station WDRE, and they currently top Billboard's Album Rock Airplay chart with their new single, "Even Better Than the Real Thing."

"With Or Without You" and "l Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," their No. 1 singles from the 1987 album ''The Joshua Tree," established U2 with a massive pop audience. Some of their huge following, however, was alienated by 1988's double-live album and movie "Rattle and Hum," a firsthand attempt at exploring American blues, gospel and rockabilly styles that included collaborations with B.B. King and a gospel choir.

"We thought people would actually love a record on which we were loose enough to actually screw about in Sun Studios and put it out." Bono said. "We thought, 'Let's show the side of America we love, which is the music that we don't know squat about.' Our rhythm section is very taut, it needs maybe to loosen up a bit . . . We were completely taken aback when people thought it was egomania. But I understand it now. It was size. Bands can get too big. We were just in people's faces. I understand. 'Get out of my face.' It was just that."

U2's most recent album, "Achtung Baby," marks an attempt at deflating both the sound and the image of the band. On the surface, it's as moodily atmospheric as anything U2 has done; but at its heart are down-to-earth song structures that have made for more pop hits, like "One." And the lyrics have become more personal than political, private than public.

"We didn't know until after 'Joshua Tree' was released that it was a 'stadium' album," bassist Adam Clayton said. ''This was a reaction to that. We didn't want to feel the pressure to write stadium songs. We wanted to write club songs that we could take outdoors if they were good enough."

The stadium show looks quite similar to the Zoo TV show U2 played at area arenas during the spring. The first part of the show is still heavy on "Achtung Baby" material, with older U2 songs such as "Bullet the Blue Sky," "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'' clustered near the end.

There's still a belly-dancer with whom Bono undulates during "Mysterious Ways," and typographic art flashed on the video screens with epigrams inspired by artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger: "YOU ARE! A VICTIM OF YOURSELF" and "REACT OR DIE" and "ENJOY THE SURFACE." As he did in the earlier show, Bono dons a suit that looks like gold or silver lame (depending on the lighting), but is actually made of the material used in disco mirror balls. At rehearsal, he improvised a song called "Mirror Ball Man."

The elaborate multimedia staging is a stark contrast to earlier U2 shows, in which the only props were waving white flags.

"I can't get over how some people don't give rock-and-roll artists the latitude they give filmmakers or book writers," Bono said. "You do what the music tells you to do. You do the work, and you move onto something else. You get into new subject matter, and you lose yourself in that, write about that. Scorsese makes 'Raging Bull,' then he makes 'King of Comedy.' What's the fuss?"

Bono has a point: Many rock artists don't change much from album to album, and their audiences tend to prefer the proven and familiar to the daring and innovative. ''You think about where you want to go, and you might wonder if they'd come with you," Bono said of U2's audience. "And you'd be stupid if you didn't. And if you're smart, you can take your audience with you. I think they're smart, and they've followed us down some roads, maybe some of them have been more interesting than others. But if you think of the different phases the group has been through, they seem to want us to challenge them and take them on a ride. Some of them aren't interested and get off; others get on. But you can't have the tail wag the dog."

Released at the end of '91, "Achtung Baby" has sold more than three million copies. The Zoo TV tour has taken the group to 31 North American cities; the stadium shows will crisscross the continent through mid-November. But it's uncertain how far U2's huge audience follows its extra-musical forays. The group has a reputation for serious social consciousness, from Irish pride anthems like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" to invoking the spirit of Martin Luther King in songs such as "Pride (In the Name of Love)" "MLK." The band has performed high-profile benefits for Amnesty International, and in June wore protective gear and joined a tense Greenpeace action at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, England. A 1957 fire was reported to have been the worst nuclear accident in Britain, and in 1983, when there was a discharge of radioactive liquids into the Irish Sea, according to the Journal of the Society for Radiological Protection. The protesters dumped what they said was contaminated mud from ongoing leaks from Sellafield, which has been gradually undergoing decommission for decades.

"We knew we had to choose carefully, that we had done quite a bit last year," Bono said, referring to the band's reputation as self-righteous do-gooders. "I think it's dumb that people are trying to put rock and roll back in its box. "Whenever I hear 'rock and roll isn't about this, it's about that' it reminds me of myself, because I'm like that. But it annoys me at the same time. You can't put restrictions on it. It can be anything, rock and roll: It can be reverent, it can be irreverent. It can be sacred, it can be profane. It can be trashy, it can be transcendent. Sam Shepard said, 'the center of a contradiction' - that's the place to be. And there's more of it in roek and roll than anywhere else. It's planet Narcissus, and it's save-the-planet Narcissus, okay?"

Bono has obviously heard the jokes, like the one about the guy who dies, looks around Heaven, and is shocked to see a guy who looks like U2's lead singer somberly clutching a microphone. He is assured by his guide that U2 is actually still on Earth.''That's God - he only thinks he's Bono."

To his credit, Bono has learned to laugh at his image. "Guilty, your honor!" he says, raising his right hand and smiling. "You know, show me anyone interesting in the last hundred years who hasn't delusions of grandeur and full of pretension, and I'll show you a fluke! You don't get in line for this job if you're not screwed up in some way. And anyone who's even an amateur psychologist will tell you that kind of behavior comes out of defensiveness. We were a band coming out of Ireland, and we had an attitude that was . . . we did and do take ourselves painfully, horribly, annoyingly seriously. But then again, I don't know any artist I was ever into who didn't. There are some out there who are much better at pretending they don't. But I'm getting better!"

[There's a subtext here that I did not include in the original Newsday story: When I was introduced to Bono, he shook my hand and said, 'Wayne Robins, your stuff in Creem meant a lot to us when we were growing up." Teaching Craft of Interviewing at St. John's, I told my students that their bullshit antennae should tingle when they hear a line like that. I figured his publicist had tipped him off. Jack Nicholson once said to me in an interview, "guys like you and me, Wayne" and I said, whoa! I know I'm not a guy like Jack Nicholson: listen carefully to what he's about to say. But for a mini-second I allowed myself the fantasy of hitting the VIP bars in the Meatpacking District that night, me and Jack. Never happened].

Founding Member Honor Roll:

Peter Himmelman, Santa Monica, Ca.

Jamie Nicholson, Pensacola, Fl.