Slowly, the song works its way to the chorus which, as the audience recognizes the tune, is picked up with a roar. "Sweet Caroline/bah bah BAH/Good times have never felt so good..."
Is this how the guitar hero spends his time--leading Neil Diamond karaoke for a stadium full of people?
If you're The Edge and this is U2's PopMart Tour, the answer is "yes." The karaoke bit--he's also done The Monkees Daydream Believer--is his moment during the show. "I can go out and be totally crap and be loved for it," he says. It's one of many tongue-in-cheek moments in a show that features the world's biggest video screen, a giant olive skewered by a 100-foot toothpick and a 35-foot tall mirrorball lemon (a kind of citrus cousin to the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership), from which The Edge and his mates emerge during the encore.
Let's just say it's a far cry from the band's "three chords and the truth" slogan of yore.
But then again, so is everything U2 has done during the 90's, since the sincerely self conscious Rattle and Hum closed the door on the era of the Properly Earnest and Highly Concerned U2. 1991's Achtung Baby and its companion Zoo TV tour the following year brought with them a more playful U2, and nothing's been the same since.
Except, perhaps for The Edge's dedication to redefining the guitar's role in rock and roll. Along with REM's Peter Buck and Echo and the Bunnymen's Will Sergeant, The Edge (who was born David Evans, 35 years ago, in Dublin) brought a new sensibility to guitar herodom during the early 80's. When U2 roared out of Dublin with its populist, spiritually minded anthems, there was no question it was a guitar band. But what a guitar: The Edge offered a ringing, thoroughly original tone that sounded more like Gabriel's trumpet than Jimmy Page's power chords.
What The Edge brought to rock was ambiance with oomph, an uncanny knack for both setting and helping to define the mood of such U2 classics as Sunday Bloody Sunday, Gloria, and I Will Follow. Working with producers like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois at the close of the 80's, his approach became more nuanced and supple, whether he was spreading hazy blankets of sound over With or Without You and Bad, or deploying the raw rawk licks on Bullet the Blue Sky and Desire. More recently, on Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and this year's Pop, he's assimilated bits of industrial, ambient and techno, combining dense layers of effects with his patented sure-fire melodicism.
The Edge's devotion to his craft is perhaps illustrated by a brief, but telling, moment in August of 1993, when U2 was rehearsing for the North American stadium leg of the Zoo TV tour, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Bono sat with some journalists in a catering tent, having his dinner and talking about all things U2. On-stage, The Edge stood alone, rehearsing the stun-gun opening of Zoo Station over and over again. At one point, Bono halted his discourse in mid-sentence. "How long have we been talking? An hour?" he asked. "The whole time we've been in here, he's been up there playing that part."
The singer gazed towards the back of the stage as the two-chord lick seared the speakers again. "Amazing," he muttered, "Just amazing."
Guitar World: Now that you're into the tour, what's been your own reaction to PopMart?
The Edge: I think it's just exactly as I thought it would be. We've always been a band that's really reacted in a chemical way to the audience. So for us, the opening night in Las Vegas was the real critical test--how would it be, coming in cold with a whole bunch of new songs, playing them for the first time in front of an audience.
And then there was all the new technology. The first night was, "Wow, how is this all going to work?" I have to say I was really relieved because with all the things that we tried to pull together for that opening night, I think there was a chance it could all have been too much and too ambitious. But I feel we were able to make it all work, and I was really happy coming off stage from the first show, even knowing that there was a long way to go.
At this point, now that we've got a few shows under our belt, everyone is very comfortable on-stage and the shows are starting to get more, I suppose, confident. The communication with the crowd is there from beginning to end.
GW: How is PopMart different from ZooTV?
Edge:I think the only difference is that the first run of ZooTV shows were in smaller indoor arenas, which meant that there was a kind of a different chemistry to the event. There was built in intimacy and built in communication to those shows because of the size of the venues, whereas with a stadium, you really have to project and have a lot of confidence in what you're projecting.
GW: Is there a theme or a message that you want PopMart to convey?
Edge: I suppose the show is really trying to reinforce the point that commercialism is just part and parcel of the process of being in a big band. It's just part of it. You can't pretend it isn't. That doesn't necessarily mean it should affect the music or the intention of the band or artist involved. I suppose the Pop Art movement really touched on that, pointing out that commercialism is part of this era and that art and music shouldn't see it as the Big Bad Wolf, but to learn that it is possible to have a sense of the commercial world and still be true to your work.
I think the sentiment that has been prevalent for awhile, and which was strengthened by the grunge movement of the last five years, is that commercialism is death. Anybody who accepts the big record deal or uses a big studio or anything that takes you away from the most bare essentials of a rock and roll band is the enemy. I think that's a very ghetto mentality. When rock and roll started out, it was about freedom and refusal to accept the constraints of society. In a bizarre way, it's ended up creating it's own constraints and its own boundaries. I think they're very white, middle class boundaries. If you look at the corresponding artists in black music, they don't have that sense at all; they see that commercial viability is like another skill, another thing that should be learned about and that one should become good at. They don't see any conflict between selling lots of records and being authentic.
GW: Yeah, but they didn't come out shouting about "three chords and the truth" either.
Edge: I know...I'm not sure everyone is ready to hear this (laughs), but in some ways we're sticking out our necks with this tour. What we're really attempting to do is put over some really strong, very personal songs in an arena that attempts to acknowledge the scale of the band's success and the scale of these big shows. In some ways it is kind of a schizophrenic place to be in, where on one the one hand we're singing songs like Mofo, which is a deeply personal song that Bono wrote the words to, and on the other we've got this gigantic production that is like a piece of some fairground from outer space that's landed on planet earth. The show is all about being a show, but the band's songs and performance really come from a different place.
GW: So it's really about that dichotomy.
Edge: Maybe that's why we're drawn to it. There is something bogus about playing to people's expectations. Throughout our career, we've had opportunities to do the safe thing, and some would say that our reasons for not doing so boil down to simple perversity. I think--I know--it's because we're suspicious of doing what's expected of us. You must do what your led to do, and for us that's always been taking risks and looking to debunk notions that have grown up around the band and the work that we've done, and to really look for what's now and what's current, what speaks about this year, and not last year, not two years ago.
I suppose what people are struggling with is their conception of what the band is versus what the show seems to be about. The public's notion of what the band seems to stand for is quite one-dimensional. It denies our humor. It denies a lot of humanity that's there. I suppose we're hanging on to humor because it's important for us. When it really gets down to it, we don't write humorous songs very often. So our shows are our opportunity to fill out some of the gaps that might exist in the albums. It's a chance to have some fun and have a laugh. That's what the show is: as much as anything else, apart from giving us the opportunity to meet our audience and play new songs, it's fun.
GW: You raise an interesting point in that Pop, despite all the hullabaloo about the techno elements in some of the songs, has a lot in common with U2's 80's albums.
Edge: Absolutely! I think anyone who's spent time with the new album will notice that some of those songs could have been on our second record, October, or Unforgettable Fire or The Joshua Tree, in terms of the intention and the idea behind them--the themes and the emotions behind the lyrics. Without it having been an intention at the outset, I see this album almost as being a compendium of musical slices culled from all the different phases of the band's career.
The broad range of songs on this record is consistent with the position we've always taken on certain issues and the kind of songs that we've always written. I think when the album really starts to sink in, fands will understand that, in the end, the show is about the music.
I don't think we would've called the tour PopMart of called the album Pop if it had been a kind of throwaway record of radio-friendly hits. I think it works as a tour concept and as a title for the album because, in fact, the asbum is anything but that. It's some of the most soul-searching music we've released in the last ten years. In some ways it's a very personal and intense record.
GW: So how did Pop develop? Early rumours had it that this would be a real rock and roll record. Later reports suggested that it was all techno.
Edge: First of all, most of the stories that circulated before the album's release were more idle speculation than based on anything we had led people to believe through press releases or interviews. The only thing we were sure of when we went into the studio is that we wanted to produce a vital record. We weren't clear about the kind of music it would be.
We were also interested in experimenting with new production and songwriting techniques. And we did experiment very broadly with a lot of the material. But it soon became evident to us that all our favorite recordings were the ones that we recorded pretty much as a band, with certain embellishments. But it became clear in the studio that the most interesting approach to almost all the songs was the band approach--the band chemistry.
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