Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  This must be the weirdest part of the musician’s job. Most of us scream at pictures of ourselves a decade ago, cringe at the memory of things we thought, said or bought when we were younger. But a successful musician never escapes it. Everything ridiculous you did or wore as a youth is a matter of record, part of the fabric of other people’s lives.

  “Yeah . . . playing the old songs is a bit like what I imagine travelling back in time and meeting yourself would be like. We’re quite lucky in that when it comes to the early embarrassing moments, we have so many that it’s actually just pointless even trying to defend ourselves. There’s so much there that we just have to laugh at, and be thankful that we’re still growing, still getting better at what we do. The first few weeks of PopMart were . . . well, we’d jumped in at the deep end and hadn’t prepared as much as we should have. But now . . . on previous tours, I remember Bono being under such a cloud for hours after coming on stage, but on this tour we’re just laughing so much. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had on the road.”

  Adam Clayton, when he’s wheeled before the tape recorder after Edge, offers a similarly sanguine view. As the only member of U2 to have racked up the traditional rock’n’roll accoutrements of court appearances, tabloid scandals, supermodel girlfriends and excess-induced absenteeism (at the end of the Zoo TV tour in Sydney, U2 had to play one show with Clayton’s guitar tech on bass), Clayton has perhaps had a better view of the bottom of the abyss than the others, but he doesn’t have any complaints this evening.

  “You can have bad days,” he allows, “and every day is a challenge, because the preconceived ideas you had, as a sixteen-year-old joining a pop group, as a twenty-year-old releasing your first album, as a twenty-seven-year-old releasing The Joshua Tree, you have to battle against those, you have to get to the essence of what being a musician is, and you have to remember that, well, tonight I could have been playing in the Holiday Inn. By the time showtime comes around, you’ve got yourself centred. There is a discipline involved, and—I mean, this sounds very Californian—you have to reduce the number of stimuli in your day in order to become a sort of hollow vessel, so by the time you go on stage, you’ve actually got some energy to run off.”

  Clayton has a strange accent that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Irish.

  “What’s fun about this now,” he continues, “is that an awful lot of the uncertainties have been removed by the fact that we have a history, by now, that indicates that this is probably what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives. We have a history that says we’ve done something very hard and very unnatural, for four men to grow together and live with each other for twenty years. I think everyone’s a lot more rounded and settled, and I’m realising that this is the most interesting musical engagement I could be involved in.”

  That’s the thing about great bands, though: they’re always more than the sum of their parts. Lennon and McCartney’s post-Beatles efforts ran the gamut from the adequate to the excruciating. The Smiths splintered into an occasionally inspired session guitarist and a risible self-parody. Even the ones where you’d think it wouldn’t matter go this way, like Pixies—Black Francis wrote all those fantastic Pixies songs, but listening to his solo albums was like wading through knee-deep mud in loose wellies.

  “That chemistry,” nods Clayton, “is gold dust. If we went off and tried to make solo records, I’m sure they’d be as crap as everyone else’s solo records. For some reason, each of us works best in this situation. And that’s a nice thing to have figured out. We still all live within twenty minutes of each other. We spend a lot of time with each other, so we can chew a lot of ideas over. Other bands, when they get to our age, there’s a couple of divorces, there’s a couple of jealousies between members, there are management problems, and it’s very hard. We’ve been lucky, or wise, and we can devote most of our energy to being in U2. We keep a full-time staff on, which a lot of people don’t. We’re in a unique position, and we do take those risks, and we look like fools sometimes, but other times people say ‘Yes!’ and that’s the kind of band I always wanted to be in.”

  BONO IS A restless interviewee, physically and mentally, sitting up and lying down as ideas occur to him. It’s the afternoon of the day after the Miami show, and we’re sitting in the sunshine in the Delano’s garden, roughly equidistant from the swimming pool, the cocktail bar and the giant-sized lawn chess set. Things could probably be worse.

  “Are you enjoying Miami? It’s a very interesting city. It’s kind of the crossroads between North America and South America ...”

  In Bosnia, Bono had said something about his attraction to the idea of Sarajevo as a cultural crossing place, though in Sarajevo’s case it had been between east and west . . . trying not to sound too much like a hack in search of an underlying theme, I wonder if he sees similarities.

  “Exactly. Well, here you have the Catholicism of South America, which is the sexy end of the religion, you know, carnivals ...”

  I’m starting to get used to Bono’s associative monologues.

  “. . . which is something I’m becoming more and more interested in, the carnival, the celebration of the flesh—you know, carne meaning meat—before the denial, which is Lent, going into Easter, that kind of thing ...”

  Keeping him to one theme is like trying to cage water—like a lot of people whose understanding of the world has come largely from going places and finding out for themselves, the connections he draws tend to be as individual and eccentric as his experiences, and as he’s one of the most famous people on earth, it’s safe to assume that his experiences are more individual and eccentric than most. When transcribed into cold hard print, Bono can occasionally read like a stereotypical cosmic rock’n’roll mooncalf, but in person, his intellectual promiscuity just feels like the vigour of a compulsive conversationalist. It’s also something I’ve noticed in a lot of Irish and Scottish friends—a fondness for constructing elaborate, even absurd, theories out of bugger all just for the fun of seeing where the pieces land when the edifice topples over.

  “... and you just get this sense that South America is coming through, you can see it in the writers and filmmakers, and this is its interface. You know, South Beach looks like lots of blocks of ice cream, Neapolitan, or ...”

  I’d been thinking that earlier. The violently clashing pastel paint on the beachfront apartment buildings looks ghastly and ridiculous all day, until sunset, when the sky behind them becomes daubed in the exact same colours. Then it looks like heaven, or at least like Ernest Hemingway’s idea of it. Except I’d been thinking that the ice cream was more like tutti-frutti. U2 recorded some of Pop in Miami.

  “Tutti-frutti, okay. Well, we came here to see if there was something here for us, but in the end our record wasn’t going to be about any one location. Because sometimes there’s almost a physical sense of location, Berlin for Achtung Baby, the US for The Joshua Tree.”

  While we talk, passers-by stop to ask Bono for an autograph, or mumble terrified hellos. Bono’s lack of annoyance or condescension is startling (I mean, the interruptions are annoying me, and I’ve only been putting up with it for an hour). U2 started young—it feels like they’ve been there forever, but Bono is only thirty-seven—and they’ve been U2 all their adult lives. It may be that because of this they really don’t know any better, but they seem remarkably free of cynicism. They still get excited—they would scarcely have sunk a tidy fortune in taking PopMart to Sarajevo otherwise.

  “Well,” muses Bono, “when you get what you want, what do you do? But we haven’t got cynical, you’re right. We’re still trying to make that record that we hear in our heads, and can’t quite play. I guess when we were twenty-three or twenty-four we went through that phase where groups move out of their flats, and into houses, and start wanting to put paintings up on the walls, and they don’t want to look like rednecks, so they start reading up on what sort of paintings they should have in their houses, and what Chinese rugs . . . I guess we
must have gone through Chinese rug phases, but we were over it coming out of our twenties. The weird thing is that you’re left, in a way, with only the right motives. If the reason you joined a band was to get laid, get famous, get rich, well, they all went by the way fairly quickly, so all we’re left with is . . . make that record.”

  U2 in general, and Bono in particular, have often been scoffed at—indeed, back in the dusty-leather-and-white-flags pre-Achtung Baby era, I had, occasionally, been party to that scoffing. Scorn is not unusual for a successful rock group. What is unusual is the equanimity with which U2 shrug it off—many are the millionaires who will, given half the chance, bitterly recite every bad review they’ve ever had. I once spent an afternoon in New York listening to Gavin Rossdale of Bush relate chapter and verse of the critical batterings his band had received, mostly in publications that sold a hundredth of what his records did. I suggested that a) next time, he send the journalist a statement of his net worth and a photo of his big house in the country, or vintage car collection, or whatever, and b) perhaps he could lighten up; “You don’t understand,” he replied, and rarely has a truer word been spoken.

  “Oh,” says Bono, with a dismissive wave of his cigarette, “bands at our level deserve to be humbled. But it was the very gauche nature of where we were at that allowed us entry into a world where much more careful and cooler acts couldn’t allow themselves, or depending on your point of view, were too smart to want to visit.”

  The trouble is that most artists—most people, come to that—condemn themselves to mediocrity because their fear of looking like a fool outweighs their potential for greatness. Hoping that Bono will forgive the impudence, I think it’d be fair to say that this has never looked like a problem for him.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Obviously, it’s better to do it in private, but when you’re growing up in public, that’s hard. People who . . . people who jump off, like . . . like Jimi Hendrix trying to put Vietnam through his amplifier, or like the way Lester Bangs wrote about rock’n’roll, that takes a certain courage. I think one of things I found difficult in the 80s was this din of voices telling me, ‘But you can’t fly, you arsehole.’ But that’s the kind of thinking that results in restrained, reasonable music—or, for that matter, restrained, reasonable writing. You must not find yourself tiptoeing.”

  Pop contains at least two songs, “Staring at the Sun” and “Please,” that appear to address the Northern Irish peace process, and concludes with an open letter to Jesus, titled “Wake Up Dead Man.”

  “Well . . . look. As far as what I actually believe myself goes, I’m not up for discussing it in any detail, because some subjects are too precious for interviews. I let them come out in songs. Also, I haven’t got it all figured out, so I don’t want to make an arse of myself. But yes, I do feel that there is love and logic behind the universe, and that in recent years that instinct that we all have has been written off, we’re reduced to being two-dimensional. There’s a heartache that goes with that, or if not a heartache, then certainly a soul-ache, that music . . . I mean, I have great admiration and respect for atheists, though. I feel God would have a lot more time for them than for most people who are part of a religion, who seem so odd, to me, or doped, or just believe because they were told to. I think atheists have a certain rigour. In the absence of God, people have promoted a lot of lesser types to the same position, which is quite confusing. Film stars, pop stars, royalty . . . are not actually heroes. Nurses are. Mothers are. Firemen are. Some things are arse about tit.”

  It must also be difficult trying to maintain a conventional view of religion when you’ve spent so long being worshipped yourself.

  “That’s . . . good,” he laughs. “I’ll have to have a little lie down after that one. Wow, that’s great. I’ll get out of bed for that. No, basically, but most musicians I know say that the great stuff they kind of stumble on, and the average stuff is what they can claim authorship over. I do still feel that U2 write songs by accident, and maybe that’s why we keep shifting ground, to stay out of our depth.”

  The hapless metaphor is left to try untangling itself. Bono’s away again.

  “It all started with the Psalms of David,” he continues, with a smile that indicates that he knows he’s being preposterous, but is determined to see where this goes. “They were the first blues. There you had man shouting at God: ‘Why have you left me? Where have you gone? Who do you think you are anyway?’ That’s basically what music has been doing since. I’m still a student, so I’m still knocking on Bob Dylan’s door ...”

  Ouch.

  “. . . no pun intended, and I’m still going to turn up to Al Green’s church, I’m still going to invite Bob Marley’s mother to our gigs, talk to Frank Sinatra, talk to Quincy Jones, just trying to figure it out.”

  It could be argued that this reverence for their forebears was what got U2 into trouble on Rattle & Hum, when they recorded with Dylan and B.B. King, effectively sneaking into the rock’n’roll hall of fame and hanging their own portraits on the walls. Rattle & Hum was derided, and not without reason, as work of epic humourlessness and egomania. Though it did, buried somewhere beneath the homage and piety, contain the line “I don’t believe in riches but you should see where I live,” which might have been the beginning of U2’s rebirth, an acknowledgement that they badly needed to resolve a few contradictions.

  “I think you’re trying a bit hard, there, but . . . for us, revenge is getting better. I don’t think John Lennon ever got over the fact that he was in a pop group, that The Beatles were the girls’ group and The Rolling Stones were the boys’ one. And that was the greatest gift, in a way, because he was constantly trying to recover from that. So I think that maybe when we were younger we didn’t have the brains to say fuck off, what we’re doing is more interesting than what you are. Today, to some degree, I can back that up. Back then, we just wondered did people hate our haircuts this much? The answer was yes, of course—and the haircuts were terrible, awful—but it was that very lack of style in this group that led us to soul.”

  Bono borrows another cigarette from another autograph-hunter. The sun is beginning to set now, and South Beach is enjoying its daily hour of visual harmony between ground and sky. Rankin is making wind-up gestures in the distance, worried that the light will vanish before he gets his photo session, so I ask Bono if he can imagine a life beyond being the singer in U2, the only job he’s ever had.

  “Yeah . . . I’d like to be alive. I’d like to chase little children across the street with a big stick. I am curious about. . . I love people like Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, there’s something about their voices as they get older. Bob Dylan’s voice on his new album is just . . . I love to write, and I think that’s what I’d do if I couldn’t sing, or perform. The deadlines that you have to deal with as a journalist are something I’d obviously have a problem with, but I like people who write. Where I’d be writing from, or where I’d be living I don’t know, but it’s something I’m getting more interested in, and you don’t get to do much of it when you’re in a band, because the lyrics are your attempt to put the feelings of the music into words.”

  As we wander down the beach to do the photos, I comment that it can hardly have escaped his notice that, back home in Ireland, there might be more exciting career opportunities awaiting someone with his credentials. After all, if Dana can give the Presidency a shake on the strength of one long-past Eurovision appearance . . .

  “Naw,” Bono says, and rubs one eye under his silver shades. “I wouldn’t move to a smaller house.”

  FOUR MONTHS OR so later, after another PopMart show, I’m in a big room full of free drink and freeloading people somewhere underneath Waverley Park, an Australian Rules football stadium in an inconvenient suburb of Melbourne. I’m in Australia on holiday, reminding my parents what I look like. I’m about to get a fine demonstration of the famous law devised by another great Irish thinker, Murphy. By which I mean that if I ever take someone to a U2 con
cert whom I’m actually trying to impress, I just know I’ll be lucky to sneak in to the one-beer-and-a-hundred-straws C-list wing-ding for local radio drones, record company deadwood and spotty competition winners. But the night I take my mother . . .

  “Andrew? Bono wants to say hello. Follow me.”

  Mum, fair play to her, is very cool about the whole thing. She bows her head just slightly when Bono swoops low and kisses her hand, and when he asks her whether she liked the show, she just says she thought it was amazing how much of a racket four young men could make. Someone else I know waves at me, so I go and say hello to them, leaving Mum and Bono to it.

  I’ve seen some weird stuff. But when I look over from the other side of the room at the pair of them still yammering away to each other, I wonder if it gets stranger than this.

  28

  I WANNA BE YOUR ZOG

  The Blazing Zoos in Albania

  JULY 2006

  IT IS AXIOMATIC that all music journalists are frustrated musicians. It is also untrue. By early 2006, I had been writing about music for some or all of my living for nearly twenty years, since a Sydney street paper saw fit to print, and pay me for, a 300-word assessment of the merits of a show by Ed Kuepper & The Yard Goes On Forever at the Mosman Hotel (don’t look for it—it isn’t there anymore). I had also, during all that time, generally had a guitar about the place. Despite being equipped, therefore, with everything one might need to write songs—an ability to place words next to each other, and a musical instrument—the idea of doing so had never occurred to me, much less the desire to then perform such things in public. Until, for reasons outlined below, it did.

  It is important, however, that my decision—or, really, in the circumstances, somewhat demented instinct—to mount a stage relatively late in proceedings should not be interpreted as an expression of any sort of inferiority complex attached to being a rock journalist. The idea that rock journalism is by definition inferior to rock music is curiously commonplace, and often expressed by the deployment of that annoyingly quotable quip, usually—though I’d prefer to be believe erroneously—attributed to Elvis Costello, to the effect that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This assessment is wholly correct, though not for the reasons believed by the lackwitted dullards who generally cite it. Rather, it acknowledges, explicitly, that rock writing and rock music are discrete and uncomparable means of expression—as different, indeed, as ballet and building. Just because rock writing is about rock music doesn’t invalidate it as an arena in which great things can be created—any more than rock music counts for anything less than whatever it was the rock musician in question was making rock music about. And, you know, like dancing about architecture would be a bad thing to do.