• • •
In 1991, defending the lavish spectacle of their “Zoo TV” tour, Bono talked to me at great length about how they had gone out with minimal shows in their early days because “that was the picture we were painting back then. It was stark. We were staring down the greed of the ’80s—Oliver Stone and the Material Girl and all that. But we’re not a one-line joke. Now the stage is like a huge playground, like Disneyland on acid. In the past, our influences were more classical—an author like Flannery O’Connor or the poetic spirit of the blues. Now they’re more pop; Disneyland, the American elections, TV evangelism, pornography, remote control technology.”
In June 1993, Paul McGuinness called to tell me the good news: Adam Clayton was in love. He and Naomi Campbell were engaged. It’ll end in tears, I told him. “Oh Lisa,” Paul said, “you’re so cynical. Adam has never been so happy.” I knew Naomi in the 1980s through my friendships with her first agent Bethann Hardison and the photographer Steven Meisel. I encouraged her singing aspirations. She accompanied me on numerous occasions to various concerts, and I accompanied her to a boxing match in Atlantic City when she was “dating” Mike Tyson. When Naomi realized at that fight that she was not sitting ringside—Robin Givens was—there was drama. There was often drama in Naomi’s world. But I knew her when she was very young. Many of her hopes and dreams had not yet been dashed. She wanted to meet Michael Jackson. (Within six years, she would appear with him in a video and they became friends.) Naomi was, of course, a beauty, with a knockout body and a real little girl flirt personality. She also was erratic and given to fits of (well-publicized) anger. None of this boded well for Adam who was basically a sweet man and probably had no idea what he was getting himself into. During that phone call, Paul also asked if I’d like to come to Paris to see the band perform an outdoor gig with their opening act, the reunion of the Velvet Underground. Of course I would.
On June 23rd, I took an all-night flight to Paris. I didn’t sleep and arrived jetlagged and completely wiped out. I was staying at the band’s very fancy hotel, the Royal Monceau, around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe. Almost immediately upon my arrival, I got a phone call from Paul inviting me to lunch. Someone must have dropped out of his original plan, because we were going, he told me, to Joël Robuchon’s restaurant Jamin. It was, apparently, the most famous restaurant in Paris, and it was, also, just days before it was due to close. I have never been, nor am I to this day, an adventurous eater. This is an understatement; I have a friend who claims that I eat like a twelve-year-old whose parents are away on vacation. Pizza is my favorite food. I don’t eat fish. I have never tasted it and I don’t want to. Well, I’ll have caviar. Or the occasional shrimp cocktail or smoked salmon. But for me to dine in a serious restaurant is just a waste. Nonetheless, there was no way I was going to turn this down, even though I had no idea who this cook was.
In a semi-daze, I accompanied Paul and Ian Flooks, U2’s European concert agent, to the small restaurant on Rue de Longchamp. Later that week Bono would tell me, “We owe a lot of our good taste to Paul, who would rather starve than not eat in a Michelin-rated restaurant. From hanging around him, I knew more about good red wine than amplifiers when I was twenty.” Rock and roll has never been a world filled with refined culinary experiences. At least not the people I’d been around—with the exception of a few good meals I had in the presence of Mick Jagger. At best, on the road, you remembered a good spot for ribs in San Antonio. Or a clean Taco Bell in a Nashville strip mall. Or a specific steak at the Pump Room in the Ambassador East in Chicago. Or those donuts at the Café du Monde in New Orleans. It wasn’t really until the late 1990s or later that all this silly food stuff started to become a Thing. While big bands had previously traveled with their own drug dealers or “doctors,” now they started traveling with their own chefs. And of course, as the bands aged, along came the cleanses and the detoxes and the grass-fed beef. But that day in Paris, I realized how far U2 had come. The food we ate in Joël Robuchon’s restaurant was delicious and decadent, whatever it was. For all I know, in my state of semi-delirium, I might even have eaten some fish. By the end of the meal, my head was buzzing. It was the closest I’d come to a psychedelic experience since I took mescaline once in the late 1960s. Following the meal, I left Paul and Ian and decided to walk. I got lost and wandered around Paris for a few hours until I got in a taxi and went back to the hotel. My strongest memories of that Paris trip were that meal, the hotel spa, and telling Naomi that she’d better not break Adam’s heart.
Before the band’s concert, I went to Bono’s suite to do an interview. Perhaps because of the presence of Naomi and Christy Turlington (who had posed with Bono on the cover of the December 1992 British Vogue) in the band’s entourage, U2 now had paparazzi following them everywhere. Bono’s suite was crammed with flowers, champagne, and major fruit displays. I asked him: what’s with the supermodels and the cover of Vogue and the luxe hotel? “I’m very fond of Naomi and I’ve always had beautiful women as friends,” said Bono, whose own beautiful wife Ali was out shopping with their young daughter Jordan. “I thought doing the cover of Vogue was a very funny thing to do; any U2 fan would find it funny. Every big group collects celebrity-hunter, rock and roll part-timers, but we have an audience to whom our music really means a lot. They know we’re not a regular rock band. Besides, we’ve always stayed in good hotels in good cities. In order to stay in the Sunset Marquis in L.A. when we first came to America, we would stay in hovels—sharing rooms—for weeks.” (When Adam and Naomi eventually broke up several years later, the rumors were that her high-handed behavior was at odds with a U2 world that did not include ordering people around. Later, Adam would tell me about that period and the paparazzi: “It’s not really my cup of tea; I definitely prefer to live my life in a more private way. At the end of the day, tabloid stories are hurtful.”)
Ostensibly, we weren’t in Paris to shop, eat, or swim in the hotel pool. The show was the reason we were all there, and for me, the actual show was a disappointment. It was held far from Paris at a huge, unremarkable outdoor space called Hippodrome de Vincennes. The opening set by the reunited Velvet Underground was not the magic I had hoped for. Lou Reed and Nico rehearsing in my living room on West 83rd Street twenty-two years earlier had been more hypnotic and memorable. The (briefly) reunited Velvets were managed by Lou’s then-wife Sylvia Morales, and John Cale and Lou were barely speaking. John complained to me that Lou was jumping into limousines with Bono, and that Lou treated John, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker as his backup band. Bono, however, was enthusiastic about the Velvets, saying every night was like going on “after the Beatles.” As for U2’s set, I watched it from a soundboard almost a mile away from the stage. It was undoubtedly a thrill for the paying customers, but by then, I was at a point where perhaps I had seen too much and knew too much. I didn’t feel the excitement. While the songs and the performance might have been good, maybe it was unrealistic to think that a band can matter—the way they once did—when it’s out of context. U2 no longer were the young, passionate rock band that came along at a particularly dull, superficial time in popular music. Now they were mainstream. They no longer were the band that sounded like no one else. In fact, because of their success, dozens of bands sounded like them. Then too, there’s that Chinese rug that Iggy sang about. Bono insisted that they were winking at success, they wanted to take the piss out of everything, they had their core values intact and so forth, were starting to ring hollow. It was a year after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and five years after NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police.” Fifteen years after its inception, hip hop was finally edging its way into popular music and it felt much more relevant than songs about the IRA. Nirvana had startled people with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Trent Reznor’s industrial, aggressive Nine Inch Nails caused a sensation. Even Bob Dylan had re-invented himself with an outstanding performance at a Woodstock anniversary concert and would, four years later, release an amaz
ing album, Time Out of Mind. As a fan, I wanted U2 to still matter. As a band, so did they.
• • •
On March 1, 1994, at Radio City Music Hall, Bono presented Frank Sinatra with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. It would be the first of many flowery, hyperbolic induction speeches from Bono, who was quickly becoming the toastmaster general of rock and roll. Introducing Sinatra, Bono said, “Frank walks like America . . . cocksure . . . a man heavier than the Empire State, more connected than the Twin Towers. As recognizable as the Statue of Liberty . . .” Paul McGuinness, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams and I watched the show on a TV monitor in a small backstage makeup room. Bono did a grandiose, hyperbolic, four-minute introduction. Sinatra came onstage and seemed unsure of where he was. He rambled. He might have been drunk. Or medicated. It was awkward. He told bad jokes. He talked so long that those of us backstage in the dressing room muttered that someone should get him off. It was sad. But when he walked backstage, holding the pointed, Lucite award in his hands, he looked at his wife Barbara and said to her—with that unmistakable Hoboken inflection—“You could give someone a real ka-nock on the head with this.”
• • •
On February 12, 1997, U2 held a press conference to announce their “Popmart” tour. The press conference was held at the giant chain store Kmart on Astor Place in New York City’s Greenwich Village. In the midst of noontime shoppers and surrounded by cash registers and polyester lingerie, the four members of U2 stood on a stage under a sign that read “POP GROUP.” In the “audience” were over 100 journalists from around the world, music industry types and Allen Ginsberg. Bono announced that they were into “trash” and “kitsch,” and promised that everything would be “bigger, better, taller and wider” than anything they had done before. He referred to the concerts as “the Superbowl every night.” Larry appeared uncomfortable. Among the props U2 planned to take with them on the road were a 150-square-foot, 65,000-pound video screen, 1,000 lighting fixtures including 5,000 feet of disco rope lighting, a plexiglass dance floor, a 12-foot-high illuminated stuffed olive on a 100-foot-tall toothpick, a 35-foot-high mirrorball lemon and a 100-foot-high Golden Arch. In keeping with the band’s tarted-up new image and upcoming disco-supermarket theme, Edge wore a glitter shirt. “We still have the same ideals,” Bono proclaimed. “Our music is still painfully insufferable and earnest, but we finally figured out how not to look like it. Kmart seemed like the right place to announce this, because we too, are a multi-outlet outfit.” Afterwards, when I mentioned to Bono that it seemed strange to have held this press conference on Ash Wednesday, he said, “Ash Wednesday and Kmart—that just about sums us up.”
The media missed the intended irony of the “Popmart” tour. Many people thought the tour was actually sponsored by Kmart. The shows got off to a dodgy start. On one early show, in a true Spinal Tap moment, the band got trapped inside that 35-foot-high lemon. Special planes were needed to transport all the equipment from city to city and the daily operating costs were $250,000. I asked Bono why they hadn’t scaled everything back after their previous over-the-top “Zoo TV” tour. “That would have been too predictable,” he said. “We’ve been through this at least five times—where small is big. The worship of the garage comes from people who never started out in one or can’t get out of it. We did.”
During that tour, I accompanied the band to Hartford, Connecticut, to see a show. Bono was defensive about the seeming dichotomy of serious ideals alongside this glitzy Las Vegas presentation. “What’s wrong with wanting to be a big commercial band and also an art project?” he asked me. “The notion that you can’t do that is retarded [you could still say that then]. If you are a writer and you write a book that captures the public’s imagination and it becomes a best seller, does that take away from the book you wrote?” And he added, “I don’t think we’re old fashioned, but I think we’re out-of-fashion. I start getting worried when U2 is in fashion.” By that time, he constantly wore those tinted, wraparound sunglasses. I asked if he was trapped by them. “Are you kidding?” he said to me. “This is my way out. It’s a mask.” I said I thought stadium shows were dated. “I think they’re really, really dated,” he said, “which is why I think a band like us can take this tired old ’70s format into the next century.”
*
In February 2001, I saw U2 at a Grammy rehearsal at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. During the band’s soundcheck, Bono spotted me and started singing what would become a constant refrain whenever he saw me: “Lisa is a punk rocker,” to the tune of the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.” Afterwards, we talked, and I told him that Mick Jagger had once told me the most important thing for a lead singer was to have “a lot of front.” He laughed and said, “I’ve certainly got a lot of front.” He said he stopped dying his hair black because he remembered that I had told him he was beginning to look like Roy Orbison. After the Grammys, at Universal Music chief Doug Morris’ party at the Cicada Restaurant, I hung out with Bono, Dr. Dre and Eminem. Both Bono and Dre had posed for Vanity Fair’s first music issue cover earlier that year. Eminem had shockingly lost the Best Album Grammy that night to Steely Dan. Dre introduced me to Eminem as “my girl,” which was his seal of approval. I talked to Eminem about how his loss to Steely Dan kept his outsider status intact. That conversation was the highlight of the night.
• • •
By now, Bono was taking time off from the band to raise money for AIDS relief in Africa. Enlisting the assistance of Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs and Kennedy family member Bobby Shriver, he lobbied to eliminate $354 billion in Third World debt. He met with world leaders—including President Clinton, Tony Blair and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch—who told Bono that he too, was a songwriter. Bono gave a speech at the United Nations. He had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican and gave the Pontiff his wraparound sunglasses. (He once gave me a pair too; he must have had boxes of them.) Sometime in 2000, we met in the bar of the Mark Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to talk about his escalating activism. Bono told me that the Pope gave him a rosary, “and we took pictures [with the Pope wearing the sunglasses], but they’ve disappeared. Apparently his courtiers do not have the same sense of fun that the funky Pontiff has.” Funky Pontiff? I asked, in disbelief. “Oh, I disagree with the Pope’s position on contraception and the like,” he said quickly, “and I’m not a disciple. But I think he’s a sincere man.” He told me that U2 had finished a new album—All That You Can’t Leave Behind—and, knowing that I would welcome this news, he said the band planned a more intimate, scaled-down world tour that year.
In May 2001, I went to see U2’s “Elevation” tour at Chicago’s United Center. By now, all the band members were in their forties. They had performed in 256 countries including, in 1997, Sarajevo—after the end of the war in Bosnia. There was a heart-shaped “mosh pit” at the front of the stage; I told the band it was like having CBGB’s within the massive arena. The band walked onstage with the lights on. During the show, Bono took a large spotlight and shined it on the audience. This simple, inexpensive lighting effect was far more dramatic than anything in their last two big productions. I was, once again, excited. And then, on October 24, 2001, at Madison Square Garden, in a chilling, emotional moment, the names of all the victims of 9/11 rolled on a screen behind U2 when they performed “One” (one of the most beautiful ballads ever written and, ironically, about a breakup). The band dedicated a song to Joey Ramone, who had died of lymphoma six months earlier. Reportedly, Bono had called Joey on his deathbed. Given Bono’s busy humanitarian schedule at the time, one could only imagine how many assistants it took to place that call. Backstage, after the show, an over-protective U2 staffer made Joey’s mother and brother wait far too long to see Bono in his dressing room.
*
At Paul McGuinness’ fiftieth birthday party at the Park Restaurant in New York City in June 2001, I made a toast, commending the band’s organization on t
heir kindness. I noted how considerate and thoughtful they had always been to the press, which certainly was not the norm. And I added that I was certain this was because their management company was staffed mostly by women. Not run by women, mind you, but there were many women who worked closely with, or rather for, the band. This was unusual in rock and roll. As a member of the press, you often had to fight your way past a rude, unruly male staff—and the British were the worst—to get whatever it was you needed to do your job, which, incidentally, helped the band publicize their career. With U2, it was seamless. Their road manager, my old pal Dennis Sheehan, was a doll. There were a lot of fantastic women—Sheila Roche, Susan Hunter, Keryn Kaplan, Catriona Garde and Regine Moylett, to name a few—who worked for the band. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized that these women were all quite possibly rewarded less than men in similar positions. And of course, they worked harder.
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll Page 25