Rock and Hard Places (50 page)

ABOUT A HUNDRED miles from here, about a decade ago, four young Irishmen stood amid the cacti of Death Valley and gazed grimly towards the dusty horizons while Anton Corbijn took their pictures for the cover of
The Joshua Tree
, an album that remains a benchmark for ascetic introspection. Tonight, the same four Irishmen will perform songs from an album called
Pop
on a stage decorated with a fifty-foot-high lemon-shaped mirror ball, an enormous glowing olive atop a towering swizzle stick, and a giant golden arch obviously intended to signal associations with populism and disposability. U2’s reinvention, first flagged with 1991’s
Achtung Baby
album and subsequent Zoo TV tour, has been an act of total auto-iconoclasm. It’s been like watching a Pope touring the world’s cathedrals with a tin of kerosene and a lighter and has, as such, been well rock’n’roll.

However, there’s self-destruction and there’s self-destruction,
and when U2 open their
PopMart
world tour tonight in Las Vegas’s 37,000-seater Sam Boyd Stadium, they deliver an excruciating example of the wrong kind. Beset by technical hitches, grappling with material that seems even less familiar to them than it does to the audience, U2 play a shocker. That they make little attempt to disguise their own disappointment is some mitigation, but not much—it’s difficult to extend much sympathy for first-night nerves when tickets are $54.50 a shot. It’s perhaps only this consideration that compels the band to grit their teeth and go the distance. If this had been a fight, it would have been stopped.

 

LAS VEGAS, WE press junketeers have been told, is a logistical rather than a conceptual choice for opening night. If this is true, it’s the happiest of coincidences. Las Vegas is the city in which the characteristic American refusal to acknowledge that such a thing as vulgarity exists has reached a triumphantly crass apotheosis. In the arcade leading into Caesar’s Palace, I stop, entranced, in a foyer where a faux-marble Aphrodite stands among the ten-cent slot machines. “Wow,” says a camcorder-encumbered American next to me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Vegas’s casinos are fleetingly amusing but eventually terribly depressing places. At the endless rows of slot machines, people lose and win thousands with a total lack of emotion. I wonder how many of these dead-eyed people feeding in money, pulling a lever, feeding in money, pulling a lever, feeding in money, pulling a lever, are on holiday from repetitive, menial factory jobs. As I sit around the roulette tables, every so often someone will swagger along, throw a ludicrous amount—five hundred, a thousand dollars—on one number and then, when they lose it, shrug and walk away, bearing a strained no-really-itdidn’t-hurt-at-all expression. It seems bizarre to spend so much money to impress total strangers; there again, I’ve come to Vegas to watch U2 do exactly that.

If U2 have decided to see what happens when you submit to, even revel in, the junk, kitsch and flash of popular culture, they’ve come to ground zero. The only problem is that bringing a fifty-foot lemon-shaped mirror ball to Las Vegas, of all places, and expecting anyone to impressed, is a bit like trying to attract attention in London by driving around in a red double-decker bus. In a short walk along the
Las Vegas Strip from my hotel, I see a pirate ship, King Kong, a blue glass pyramid, the New York City skyline, a volcano that erupts every fifteen minutes and marble dolphins frozen in mid-leap above the fountains next to an automatic walkway. To create a stir here on a purely visual level, U2 would have needed to invest in an entire fifty-foot mirror ball fruit salad.

Of course, for all the gaudy window-dressing of
PopMart
, it’s the music that’s supposed to carry it. Tonight, it mostly doesn’t, though things start well. In fact, only rarely since the ancients of Babylon finished work on the Ishtar Gate have people made entrances this spectacular.

To a remixed fanfare of M’s lone hit “Pop Muzik,” U2 enter the arena from under one of the stands along the side. A spotlight tracks their progress through the crowd. Bono, his hair cropped and dyed blonde, is wearing a boxer’s robe and sparring furiously. Edge is clad in a very Las Vegas rhinestone cowboy outfit and looks like an escapee from The Village People. Adam Clayton has drawn the short straw in the outfit department for roughly the thousandth time in U2’s history
—
he wears an orange boiler suit and a facemask and looks like one of those poor Chernobyl technicians who were given a shovel and ten minutes to shift as much glowing rubble as they could off the roof of the reactor before they started growing extra heads. Larry Mullen Jr., consistent throughout U2’s image rethinks, has come dressed as Larry Mullen Jr. (I’ve always imagined that, stuffed in some Dublin filing cabinet, there must be the dozens of extravagant costume ideas that the band have presented to Mullen over the years, only to be rebuffed every time with, “Well, I thought I’d wear the leather trousers and a t-shirt, again.”)

At the back of the stage, on the largest LED television screen ever built, the word “Pop” appears in red letters taller than your house, or taller than your house if you’re not a member of U2. They start with “Mofo,” the most explicitly dance-oriented track from the new album. Immense images of the band fill the screen. It looks fantastic, and sounds twice as good.

The wires start coming loose almost immediately. Having established a giddy forward momentum, U2 stick a pole in the spokes by exhuming their 1980 rabble-rouser “I Will Follow” and follow that with two relatively undemanding newer songs, “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and “Do You Feel Loved.” When they go from those into
“Pride” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” there’s an almost audible grinding of gears. These two songs were among the most exciting parts of Zoo TV
—
the former was graced with a spectacular guest appearance by its subject, Martin Luther King Jr., testifying from the ether on video, and the latter sounded like a raging defiance of the temptation to rest on lucrative laurels. Tonight, they just sound tired, the evening is turning rapidly into a bewilderingly timid exercise in nostalgia, and I’m thinking of that episode of
Yes, Prime Minister
in which Sir Humphrey is advising Hacker about his address to the nation, counseling that if he’s got nothing new to say, he should wear a bold modern suit and fill his office with abstract art.

It gets worse still when U2, hamstrung by sound which is killing the bottom end and making everything sound like it’s being played down the phone, move down a catwalk to a smaller stage in the middle of the arena. “If God Will Send His Angels” is lovely, but “Staring at the Sun” is a disaster, lurching to an abrupt halt in the middle of the first chorus. “Talk amongst yourselves,” says Bono. “We’re just having a family row.” They get all the way through at the second attempt. Edge leads the crowd in a karaoke sing-along of “Daydream Believer.”

Some hope that
PopMart
is going to be something more than watered-down Warholia is provided by “Miami” and “Bullet The Blue Sky.” Both are played with an intensity that verges on the deranged, and the latter is illustrated with a dazzling animation of Roy Lichtenstein fighter planes, chasing each other across the immense screen while, around the stadium, perpendicular lasers point towards the summit of an immense pyramid of light. It’s an unabashed steal from Albert Speer’s Nuremberg illuminations: that the only lasting cultural legacy of Nazism is stadium rock is an irony U2 underscored during the Zoo TV shows by getting the crowds to clap along with a Hitler Youth drummer boy excerpted from Leni Riefeinstahl’s
Triumph Of The Will
. Bono has at last found his voice, along with a bowler hat and a stars’n’stripes umbrella, and is goosestepping along the catwalk in the style of Chaplin’s
Great Dictator
. This is more like it: if Zoo TV marked the first time a band of U2’s stature had acknowledged their own absurdity, this may be the first time such a band has asked its audience to do the same.

The rest of the set is an inevitable comedown, and the encores are
flat enough to putt on. The giant disco lemon putters slowly down the catwalk in a tornado of dry ice fog, and U2 emerge from inside it. On a better night, this might look like endearing self-mockery, but given what has preceded it, it’s a little too close to the pods scene from
This Is Spinal Tap
for comfort. U2 proceed to make rather a madwoman’s custard of “Discotheque,” follow that with an inconsequental “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” and then engage in an ungainly race with each other to the end of “With or Without You.” They come back on once more, do a shambolic “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and a desultory “Mysterious Ways” before locating some form to close with a beautifully turned-out “One,” illustrated with a touching Keith Haring sequence.

U2 are about the only famous people on earth who don’t make an appearance at the after-show party at the venue, or the after-after-show party in Vegas’s Hard Rock Café. At both of these gatherings, there is much excitement about the presence of R.E.M., Dennis Hopper, Bruce Willis, Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen, Winona Ryder, etc., etc., but I’m more interested in the large inflatable
PopMart
-logo-branded lemons suspended from the Hard Rock’s ceiling. The more daiquiris I drink, the more convinced I become that one of them would look great on top of my fridge. With the help of some passers-by, a table and two chairs, I get up high enough to get a grip on one and, despite the warnings of a bouncer shouting at me from the ground, remove it from its moorings and climb down.

“Sir, I must ask you ...”

I was leaving anyway.

My hard-won souvenir nearly goes missing on the way back to the hotel, when I am diverted towards a roulette table somewhere en route. Using an infallible new system of my own instant and inebriated devising, I do okay, turning ten dollars into 500. Continuing with the same infallible system, I lose nearly all of it. I totter off to collect what remains of my winnings.

“Sir!” the croupier bellows across the casino floor. “Sir! You forgot your lemon!”

 

THERE IS ONE building in Sarajevo that would fit in nicely along the Las Vegas strip. The Holiday Inn, a distended cube of lurid purples,
yellows and oranges, can only have been the work of an architect who was totally insensitive to the city’s architectural heritage, or a chronic glue-sniffer, or both. The first time I came to Sarajevo, in March 1996, this absurd building, stranded in the open boulevard known as Sniper Alley, was a wreck, shot to pieces. It sat incongruously amid the ruins of the city’s other, relatively demure, buildings looking like some bumbling spacecraft that had been brought down by crossfire.

The Holiday Inn has been repaired since Sarajevo’s war ended in late 1995, though some twisted fragments of stubborn shrapnel still pock the walls. On a grey autumn morning, in a room decorated entirely in brown, a singer, who looks in need of some restoration work himself, is trying to explain what he’s doing here.

“There is a history,” croaks Bono, “of artists having a response—and they ought to have a response—to situations like this. Dada and surrealism were responses to fascism.”

Last night, U2 brought
PopMart
to Sarajevo’s Kosevo stadium, making good on a five-year-old promise to play in the Bosnian capital. Bono’s voice didn’t quite make the journey with him.

“They call it Las Vegas throat, did you know that?” says Bono, tentatively rubbing his neck. “It’s the desert air. When seasoned old crooners hear of a new boy coming to Las Vegas they all giggle, because they know what’s going to happen. We even rang Sinatra’s people about this thing, and they just went naaaah, just keep drinking and smoking, it’ll sort itself out.”

When I first heard that U2 were definitely coming to Sarajevo, I assumed they’d be playing a scratch show with the bare minimum of equipment. When I heard that they were bringing the entire
PopMart
circus—500 tons of equipment carried by seventy-five trucks, operated by 250 personnel on sixteen buses and one Boeing 727, with a total daily operating cost of £160,000—I assumed they’d been out in the sun without hats on. It was less than a year since I’d come to Sarajevo with China Drum, all of whom fitted into one truck, and that had degenerated into the most ludicrous expedition undertaken by man or beast since Scott’s to the Antarctic.

“The idea,” explains Bono, “was that we’d flash bastard it into town—you know, the big private plane with the lemon on the side, the police escort from the airport, the lot, you know, you saw it, you were
there—and play a rock’n’roll show like rock’n’roll bands do. Don’t patronise these people, just do it. That was the plan. I was gonna give ’em the full whack, you know. I just wasn’t able to, because my voice kind of . . . went. But, you know, what happened last night. . . it dwarfed
PopMart
. That’s what I thought was interesting. Arches, lemons, fucking drive-in movie screens, all kind of disappeared, because . . . something else went on, something that I, as an outsider in this city, probably can’t fully understand. I just have to say that those were the cards we were dealt, and the crowd made it very special.”