U2 Versus The U.S.A.

Eight miles high and then I touch down, go through immigration at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and, hey, it’s The Edge all on his own. “Bill, how are you? Nice to see you,” he greets me, attired in sloppy jeans and jacket, most unbecomingly unlike what Americans expect in their rock stars. Turns out he’s waiting here for his girlfriend Aislinn, who’s meant to be on the same flight as mine.

“I didn’t see her,” I tell him, explaining that she was probably grounded by the same morning fog at Dublin Airport, meaning that she’s also missed her connection at London and, like me, will arrive a day later than planned (which is exactly what happens).
Such schedule-scrambling means that I’ve lost a day’s acclimatising for jet-lag and must muck into U2’s American tour, hoping that my mind and body will improvise sufficient of a working relationship to let me attend to both the business and pleasure of the assignment.
But that flight. Not eight but six miles high (who am I to spoil a good introduction?) over Greenland, a worthy burgher two rows behind me is taken with a severe angina attack and, until three flying doctors appear to calm both his condition and my and the other passenger’s anxieties, I’m fearing that someone just ten feet away is going to die on me (you get very selfish at 34,000 feet), whilst simultaneously I’m panicking as to what the next reel of this disaster movie will bring.
Not the most soul-settling introduction to America. When the Jumbo lands at Chicago, I and I are hardly talking to each other. Excuse me while I collapse into the next paragraph ...
America, yes you’ll find that it’s stranger than Nome. But I don’t intend to log a pat tourist’s summary – “America: Its Myths, Mores And Mince Beef” – since I’ve already suffered through my share of London journalists’ instant commentaries on Ireland.
Instead let’s just stick with music, specifically U2 and their campaign in the mid-west through Chicago, Cincinnati and Detroit – here, rather than the coastal cities, because this is where the real touring drudgery occurs, here in its heartlands where America finally decides which acts it will accept.
U2 have already impacted on the coasts. As I arrive, Boy is at No.63 in the Billboard charts, a stirring performance for a first album. From an English vantage point, U2’s chart achievements here – ahead of both 1980’s Top of the Bopsters and the Liverpool bands with whom they’re constantly associated – may seem anachronistic, given that the patchy sales of Boy (strong in London and the north-west, weak elsewhere) ensured that it never entered the British charts. Yet there are good reasons, business, artistic and ultimately sheer attitudinal, why U2 are so successfully splashing in the American pool.
Business first. By signing to Island, U2 filled an important and ‘til then vacant niche in the company’s roster. Ever since Eddie and The Hot Rods crumpled, Island lacked an identifiable modern rock band. Indeed they had Bob Marley and dance-masters like the B-52’s, Grace Jones and Robert Palmer, but anyone who remembers Island’s line-up circa ‘73 will recognise how tilted their collection of acts had become. Certainly such appears to have been the opinion of their American distributors, Warner Brothers.
The Burbank Brothers Warner indeed. If a band has their promotional engine powering the machine, first flight is so much easier. U2 have been awarded a national promotional priority by Warners, the same treatment that has just guided Stevie Winwood’s Arc Of A Diver album to No.1. Nobody in the band or the record company expects any such immediate dizzy fame – U2 are still putting their name about – but the band can tour without watching their backs for morale-deflecting seizures in their plans and so confidently concentrate on their music.
Finally, U2 are booked by Premier Talent, the most experienced agency in the business. Under Premier’s patronage, U2 have as human-suited a schedule as can be organised in America. No playing in toilets. No tiring cross-country night-flights. U2 may not travel in style but they do tour according to a logical plan.
Manager Paul McGuinness is most proud of the coup, and also his timing since he won over the agency before he contacted American Warners for their support – thereby persuading the record company of U2’s serious intent towards America. McGuinness doesn’t have much regard for the manner in which many English managements approach America. Unsentimentally, he believes they disguise their failures in understanding the States by allowing their bands to propagandise about their artistic integrity and American intolerance – in short, The Stranglers’ ‘Americans have smaller brains’ syndrome. He may have a point.
But the noise! U2 may suit America because these continentals prefer their bands to be positive, extroverted and dramatic. U2’s current weaknesses in terms of passing British fashions – middle-class art bands must be inward and moody, working-class bands must dance to a revival beat – are reversed into strengths trans-Atlantic. 2-Toners cause too many translation difficulties and the New Romantics may be too delicately reserved for American tastes, also perhaps a whit condescending.
Ultimately it’s a matter of attitude. Many English bands seem uneasy about their American appeal and almost boast of their failure there, as if it were a badge of honour, possibly fearing that US success would stigmatise them in the eyes of their home fans. Being Irish, U2 have no such insecurities and aren’t automatically conscripted to take sides in the trans-Atlantic cultural war. Mid-way through each set, Bono tells his audience, “We’re not just another English band passing through. We’re Irish (pause)... and we’re in your country for three months.”
The Yanks generally see the point of his sentiments.
So having imbibed all such relevant information in Paul McGuinness’s room at Chicago’s Holiday Inn, I’m hauled off to U2’s university gig tonight. I try to relax but hadn’t reckoned with a Palestinian taxi driver who monologues about the struggle of his people with Israel. I’m wearily content to play the standard Irish anti-colonial role – our lads in Lebanon, the possibility of a PLO office in Dublin – but McGuinness counters the cabbie’s case.
“Don’t you think,” he inquires, “the reason the Jews are so stubborn is that six million of them, more than you’ve yet lost, were killed in concentration camps during the war?”
“Oh no, that’s just Zionist propaganda,” answers our driver, “it’s only about 200,000.”
He continues to rifle out his opinions faster than Garret Fitzgerald on speed. McGuinness bargains him up to half-a-million but my paranoia rating has shot through the roof. Already I’ve caught a severe case of America. Wheel me out, get me to the gig!
Which is rather disappointing. My own disorientation certainly contributes, but U2 and their student audience don’t mesh ‘til the final stretch before the encore. The crowd comprises solely students, with a sizeable minority just out for a night’s cruising and boozing, whoever be the band, and U2 seem to recognise this: they don’t seem to be playing on full power ‘til near the close. I only become attuned during Bono’s routines in ‘Boy Girl’ when the front rows fling up a salvo of cigarettes for his nervous teenager act and he wildly flexes his palm over the spluttering lighter. He’s acclaimed, a clue granted as to the U2 chutzpah with which Americans identify.
Otherwise all I remember is the local Warners promotion person who compares The Edge’s guitar with Duane Eddy. Or was it Link Wray? Anyway, it was one of those nights. I take a body count.
At this point a wise man would have slid between the sheets but my medical advisers tell me that the best cure for jet-lag is to hammer the body into submission, forcing its rhythms into American time. So we go out clubbing.
I have professional reasons. Echo & the Bunnymen are playing at Tut’s, a downtown club so there are comparisons to be made between U2’s fortunes and theirs. The word in the U2 camp, said without any gloating, is that the Bunnymen aren’t enjoying the smoothest of tours. Despite being signed to Warners, they are a secondary priority behind U2 and a later investigation of an American radio playlist directory shows how little airtime the Bunnymen are receiving.
Indeed there are rumours that American Warners won’t pick up the option to release their second album in the States, an indication of how harshly the American machine can react if it’s encountered unprepared. At Tut’s, the Bunnymen are booked to play two lengthy sets, a commitment U2 have so far avoided on this tour. Verily fates and methods are contrasting.
Bono and the band go backstage to talk with them, the singer being set on mediating in the Crucial Three feud between lan McCullough and Wah!’s Pete Wylie. I settle on watching the local support to learn about American waves.
Well, I don’t know how representative they are but I trust there are better bands in Chicago. What’s offered is efficient posturing, crisp industrious riff-rock from a band so determined to sell themselves that they’ve mislaid their soul.
They have a chick singer – and when I say a “chick” singer, I mean a “chick” singer – garbed in black tights and regimented as a platinum plastic fantastic lover. The Jenny Darren revival starts here, and when she and the guitarist mime sexual assault, they do it so ineptly I immediately flash on The Prunes.
Such automatic music immediately stimulates one sub-theme of the trip. Questions, questions. Why are American bands so elderly? Why can’t the kids in America play for themselves? What chance does a high school band, a potential U2, have in the States?
I’m still pondering when Bono slips beside me to hawk-eyedly watch Echo. I do my best and my few antennae that are still working order me they’re good but their set seems interminable, a conspiracy solely aimed at preventing my exhausted body find sleep. So long Bunnymen, I think I met you on a grouchy night.
Next night I’m feeling less like I’m still cruising at 30,000 feet each time my feet touch the pavement. U2 play the Park West, a club that is what the Venue should be. Warmly hospitable, an excellent sound system and with a democratic layout that discriminates against no spectator, the Park West does not follow an exclusive New Wave (US record company term) policy, having featured Don McLean the preceding night. U2’s appearance there is further corroboration of their refusal to be shoved into any newly-developed rock ghetto.
Their advance reputation and the grinding of Warners’ promo mills have filled the club to its 1,100-plus capacity, and now that Bono has an audience to play with, the set is several notches superior to yesterday’s.
Playing America, U2 have to be more explicit, highlight their main features and shadow the subtleties. I have to keep reminding myself that virtually everyone in this hall has never encountered them live before and that the lines of communication therefore are routed towards the innocent.
Their 50-minute set is essentially based round the album, opening with the casually self-effacing and thus proud ‘The Ocean’, revving upward with ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ and then smouldering into ‘An Cat Dubh’, U2’s invitation to majesty that silkily ties the bonds between band and audience. Tonight, there is reception, the audience scrappily clapping along to The Edge’s guitar hymn. From then on out, U2 have lift-off, Paul McGuinness pronounces it one of those rare champagne concerts and Bono feigns inability as he struggles to screw off the cork. Chicago, it’s their kind of town!
But settled in my plush seat, I can’t endorse their manager’s judgement. I’m happy because U2 are happy but there the circle stops. I’m intellectually appreciative of the entertainment but still unmoved by jet-lag and my severe case of America-itis. As the promotion persons and the disc jockeys press the flesh in the dressingroom, I conspire to get back on the road again.
In the Mid-West, American radio is worse than even this pessimist feared. When U2 play Cincinnati, their album stands at No.29 according to national radio play rating, figures created by the airtime they’re winning on the coasts and in certain regional pockets. So a logical human specimen would expect such ratings to be reflected by Cincinnati’s rock media, particularly since they are about to play their debut concert in the city.
Not so. Except for some low-powered college stations, U2 have been non-persons on Cincinnati’s radio dials and even though they pull 800 to Bogart’s club and send them home happy, they can’t anticipate more than a minor presence on the listings.
Or take Detroit the next leg of the trip. There U2 haul in 1,400 to Harpo’s, again without benefit of any commercial airplay whatsoever in a city twice the size of Dublin. Pause and reconsider oh ye Comsat Angels and Altered Images, ye Bush Tetras and Raybeats!
Warners’ Detroit promotion man has tagged along with the music directors of the main stations, but even after an excellent show they’re still saying “no commitments Bob” – and he has no idea if they’ve been persuaded.
But then Detroit may be the Black Hole of radio – or so I’m informed. In the last six months, a new station has opened up whose performing policy is to rotate only eight album acts, these being such mastodons as Styx, REO Speedwagon and Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page’s problem – how to be Aleister Crowley in Scotland and a hamburger in Detroit!). This institution of cultural extermination has achieved such an audience rating that its Detroit competitors are running scared, restricting and imploding their playlists. I’m told that even such a doughtily conservative outfit as Aerosmith are meeting resistance from programmers.
What such blackouts indicate is that even if the American music industry implemented all the intelligent reforms Robert Fripp and others advocate, the impact could be minimal due to radio oppression. One can’t escape the tragic fact that American radio, increasingly owned by conglomerates with no vocational interest in broadcasting, is not interested in the welfare of the native music industry. In so many cities, it is exclusively – and I mean exclusively – interested in its own profit margins. American radio holds a bull-terrier’s grip on the jugular of the nation’s popular taste.
Fortunately Chicago isn’t such a desert. The afternoon after the Park West date, Adam Clayton taxies out to the city’s proper rock station W-XMET, accompanied by producer Steve Lillywhite, who’s joined partly to holiday, partly to supervise material for the second album. There they meet disc-jockey Bobby Skafish (for trivialists, cousin of Skafish who had an album out on Illegal last year) for an interview. Here’s some of what they told Chicago: here’s how U2 promote themselves to Middle America.
Skafish: At the show, Bono made a remark that you’re not just another English touring band. Do you have an interpretation on that?
Clayton: What Bono was trying to say is that we are putting a certain amount of energy and commitment into the United States. We’re not just coming over because we have to tour because our record company says so. We actually enjoy America. We’re not here to slag it off or say America stinks and they don’t listen to good music. We’re actually feeling very good about America and we want to be here and we want to put that commitment down and work that hard. That’s the point he’s making.
Skafish: There’s a tendency in a band touring in your situation to be treated as the one after Echo and The Bunnymen and the one before Adam and The Ants?
Clayton: I think there is that danger but I like to think we have more identity than that. In many ways, people find it difficult to group us in with other acts like that – because we do define our own territory to a large extent. In many ways America is different because you don’t have the nationwide press that you have in England which is where such thoughts and ideas come from. So people are basically hearing about U2 on the radio and going to gigs so they can’t really link it in with anything that has been experienced in England. To them, it’s totally new rock and roll. And that’s important. That’s the way we should be viewed.
Skafish: What about the way that bands can be subjected to criticism for trying to get out of their own little corner of the world? The Clash are probably the best example of that, a band who took criticism for playing to the United States. I gather from you, your attitude is: It’s a big world, let’s go after it.
Clayton: Yeah. Obviously you’ve got certain standards and ambitions which you set yourself and which you wish to attain within a given time. Progress is what stimulates the creative juices.
Skafish: Reading some of your press, I get a sense of mission with your touring. It’s not a standard “We’ll break the album, we’ll go home, we’ll establish our market.” There’s a little bit more, farther-reaching ramifications.
Clayton: In a way we’ve taken quite a serious commitment. We’re here for three months which is very unusual for a non-American band. We’re encouraged because we’re getting good reactions. At the same time, we feel and I think many others feel, that things are going to change in America musically. I don’t think it’s going to continue much longer with very strict radio programming and very, like, middle of the road, and RE0 Speedwagon, very bland type of music.
Skafish: You’re speaking in their home town, I’ll have you know.
Clayton: Oh, shake them up a bit ...
Skafish: Have you written the second album?
Clayton: Steve Lillywhite is in America now to make us do the work (laughs). We’ve got the songs in rough form. But it basically needs us all sitting down and being a bit disciplined about it and actually shaping them up into songs.
Lillywhite: I don’t think they will be as shaped as the first album at the start.
Clayton: I think there’s going to be a lot more air in the next recording. At least this is what he tells me.
Skafish: Where are you going to record?
Clayton: We’re going to record in Dublin again. We’ve got a great studio there and we’re all very relaxed and happy there and we’re all in love with the studio manager.
Cincinnati is just so much more pleasant. After Chicago’s gusty, bleak spaces and intimidating skyscrapers, it’s a Kentucky sunshine drive from the airport across the Ohio river to a student suburb where the main street buildings are no more than two storeys and the food is edible (no more Holiday Inn jellied Kleenex). I breathe.
You too U2 – the girlfriends have arrived. Aislinn has been with The Edge since Chicago, but now there’s Ali for Bono and Annie for Larry. Guess who they’ll be playing to impress tonight! Lucky Cincinnati!
I know it’s a great set because super-fan Larry Mullen is smiling. This fan’s rule for U2 is that if Larry is grinning, the band must be enjoying themselves and if the band are ...
I figure Bono’s amended the words of ‘An Cat Dubh’ for Ali and there’s probably all sorts going down I don’t understand, but the romance takes hold and all the worries that nudged me in Chicago are dissolved and I put them down to the jet-lag. Hey, it’s my champagne gig! Damn. Bogart’s don’t have any! Nor even sparkling white either! What do ya mean bartender, will red wine do?
No champagne in Cincinnati – but in the most intimate hall of the tour, it’s my favourite. Just like Chicago, they earn two encores. I go back to the dressing room, l’m spouting praise left, right and centre.
“That was almost as good as Chicago,” says The Edge.
“Oh... well... I...”
Adam escapes the attention of two ladies who tell him they drink much milk and wine and we retreat back to the tour bus, lazily rapping with fans on the balmy street. I slip into the back compartment of the tourer, check out their tapes and see the light.
Or rather a copy of The Byrds Greatest Hits. “Oh yeah, we got that when we started the tour,” roadie Pod says.
Time to think, dizzy thoughts. Lazy writers in the American press have lumped U2 together with the Liverpool bands in a “psychedelic revival”. I can’t speak for the Liverpudlians but U2 have never given any forethought to the matter. Bono does have a Love compilation but he only picked it up after U2’s sound was patented. Somehow through The Edge, they just stumbled on a sound that is the other side of ‘66 from The Jam.
Still, The Byrds... They do share the same rush... The first record I ever bought was a CBS sampler with ‘Eight Miles High’ ... It’s your favourite track of the moment, Edge? Roger McGuinn knows of you, really?... And what’s that you’re saying Edge?
“I’m buying a twelve-string.”
En route to Detroit, and from the bus the Ohio countryside looks like a giant golf course. “The road is the fairway,” adds Steve Lillywhite.
Up front are himself, Tim Nicholson, Joe O’Herlihy and John Kennedy of the crew, Ellen Darst of Warners, who’s taking care of city-to-city promotion, absorbedly knitting, driver Bill, his girlfriend Sue, and Adam. Detroit is the longest set I witness, U2 slipping in the instrumental ‘Things To Make And Do’ and a new song conditionally titled ‘Fall’ that has some of the chugging road rhythms of America. Remarkably there are Irish fans present who offer up a white sheet, smeared with an “Up The Dubs” slogan. Bono wraps it around him.
U2 persuade the Motor City audience to three encores, symmetrically finishing as they do all sets with ‘11 O’Clock’ and ‘The Ocean’. The largest crowd with the least pre-publicity, the strongest response, it has been the most profitable date I’ve seen.
In the dressing room, the pressure has finally fallen on Bono and he quits to a private corner when the business well-wishers arrive. His voice has become huskier each day since Chicago, but that affliction is a welcome excuse for someone who tonight can’t handle another round of ritual hand-shaking. With Bono’s voice in such disrepair, we’ve left the interview ‘til the last possible moment. He’s still croaking the next morning but at least he has the knowledge that after three more dates, the band take their first break in three months when they fly to the Bahamas for a holiday.
I flash on the comparison between Irish showbands and the Mid-West megabands. On a higher dimension, U2 are fighting a similar struggle. Detroit could be a larger Limerick. He doesn’t disagree with my theme, though he diplomatically refuses to upset the Limerick jury by accepting my comparison of cities. But he quickly moves to a more positive line.
“The audience are open in themselves but because of the conservatism of the media due to advertising – because the radio depends on this – it’s a lowest common denominator and they’re not giving songs a chance to mature.
“It’s a battle. The people who are in the streets need to hear it and the only way of being able to change that is by getting the radio programmers to change and the only way to get them to change is to get them to see us face to face. We’re over there knocking on doors hard and if you have to come back a second time, a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, those radio stations will fall because when they come down and see a place like last night, a huge place basically sold out and there’s been no radio play, they start thinking – what is this?
“Also they still have the bad taste of punk rock in their mouth. And anything that has any resemblance frightens them because change frightens those people, and they’ve got this industry sewn up. So the idea is to sit on change.
“But if they see all those people squashed up into this hall, giving, applauding, it starts to make them think – well hold on, we’re being left behind.”
Just like Adam Clayton, Bono will argue that American music is about to improve. “I really think something is about to happen. The idea of an explosion in 1976 has been somewhat delayed. I think it’s happening now.” And in earlier chats, he speaks of bands in Washington DC, Texas and a San Francisco band, Romeo Void, with whom they’ve been particularly taken. Perhaps such optimism isn’t induced by their own euphoria and I’ve just tripped through the glummest region of America. I sincerely hope so.
Bono accepts that they run a potentially disturbing gauntlet by playing to audiences older than themselves, but again he refers back to early Irish experiences.
“It reminded me of the Baggot Inn last night. I mean we were 18-years-old and there were people outside who couldn’t get in because they were under-age so there were fifty people turned away one night.
“We’re playing to audiences older than ourselves and it hasn’t changed, nothing’s changed. It’s like bees around honey all those people – they see excitement, something moving. Personally if I don’t feel ready for it, I opt out – just like last night in the dressing room.”
Wasn’t that a small example of how such pressurised American touring can weaken the will? Don’t you have to keep catching yourself?
“You caught me catching myself last night and that’s a process I know I go through and each member of the band goes through every week. We’ve been touring six months now with three weeks off. We chose to do that. We don’t have record companies telling us to do that. It’s the other way round and we have chosen to do that because U2 could be misinterpreted as a group, and we feel the only way to lay a foundation for us to grow on, is to play to people face to face and let them make up their mind.
“That’s why we toured for three months in England. That’s why we started off in the pits in the Hope and Anchor and worked our way up to the Lyceum, that’s why we did it in Europe, in Germany playing beer kellers right up to cinemas and that’s exactly what, on a different level, we’re doing here except that we’re starting much higher – but we have to get higher because it’s a bigger country.
“I think in many ways the Americans are innocent and more honest than us. They’re very wide-eyed, it seems, but they make up their minds by instinct and I think that’s very healthy. The reason that music is stale over here is that they haven’t been given a chance to let their instinct go to work. But when it does, it sparks.”
Sure, but they can be misled into expecting juvenile hippies when so much Mid-American press is touting you as part of a psychedelic revival?
“I think people who are using that term are people who are inarticulate and who can’t explain what we’re doing. Anyone who comes from Dublin can cope with that, because they know us and they know what we’ve been doing over the years. It’s just that in America they’re only meeting us this year, so they think maybe this band sat down and worked on a psychedelic revival.”
In this Holiday Inn restaurant, we’re about to sign off and stop the tape but the husky-voiced Bono is insistent on one last message.
“You must mention the family arrangement in the bus between Joe O’Herlihy, John Kennedy, Pod and Tim and the fact that there was somebody born during the tour.
“Joe O’Herlihy’s wife bore a daughter in Cork. I think that’s very important.
“And we apply that arrangement to everybody, management, record company, agency and gradually the whole unit is getting bigger and stronger. We’re standing on our own two feet and gradually getting more mature.
“Last night I could have turned to Ellen Darst and said, “Ellen, I want those people out” and she would have – and we’ve done it before but we’re getting that power and that control.
“This unit is getting stronger and working, and at the top of it are four people who may be twenty-years-old and there’s all those people 30, 34, all their jobs depending on it and that’s an interesting situation coming from 10 Cedarwood Road. And there’s literally millions of dollars at stake.
“And there’s all these people hustling around you and I can see how people are sucked in. It’s so easy because there becomes this complete wall around you, of people who think you’re great.”
“There’s just one final thing 1 want to say. This touring. We’ve beaten it, it hasn’t beaten us. We’re not going out like a showband, playing tra-la-la every night.”
The bus is leaving for their next appointment in Columbus, Ohio. I shake hands all round, wave goodbye and muse in the Holiday Inn’s forecourt, all forebodings diminished and dismissed.
So far U2 have retained immunity, so far U2 have made no pacts with the devils. Clear-sightedly and with total commitment, they’re taking on America the only way it can be conquered. You cannot afford waste or sloth, you cannot permit distraction, you cannot condescend and you must purge yourself of preconceptions.
The bus drives South. Hello Columbus.