Them too?

U2 wrestle with success

by Matt Ashare

"This is where we spent the cash you gave us," explained an earnest Bono as he motioned toward the giant golden arch and enormous flashing screen constructed for U2's "Pop Mart" tour in front of nearly 60,000 fans at the first of two sold-out Foxboro stadium shows last week. "You turned us into a great big rock group," he continued after pausing to collect his thoughts. "And sometimes great big rock groups get kind of scary . . . they get eaten up by the corporate monster. Our plan was to eat the monster before the monster could eat us."

In the two nights U2 spent winding up the first US leg of the "Pop Mart" tour at Foxboro, that was a surprisingly rare display of the kind of soul-searching candor Bono was once famous for peppering U2's sets with. But you could sense in the tone of it that, though they're keeping their chins up, U2 realize that this time they may have bitten off more than they can chew.

By most accounts it has been an ego-bruising year for the Irish superstars, one that's seen their uncharacteristically aloof, techno-inflected new Pop (Island) perform disappointingly, Pop Mart tickets sell sluggishly, a pre-tour ABC Saturday-night TV special bomb, and even a few major canceled shows. In fact, it's widely known that U2 were originally aiming to end the US leg of the tour (which began, fittingly enough, in Las Vegas on April 25 and now heads to Europe for five months before returning to North America in October) with three shows in Foxboro. But when tickets to the first two didn't move as quickly as had been expected, plans for a July 4 show were aborted. Meanwhile, after only 14 weeks on the charts, Pop dropped out of the Top 40 by late June. So Bono and his cohort have probably been a little too busy swallowing their own pride of late to dine on any corporate monsters

Although it's hard to fault a band for challenging themselves and their audience as U2 have, it was easy to see how hungry fans were for the classics during U2's two-night stand in Foxboro. The loudest cheers were for old favorites like the 1980 single "I Will Follow," which followed the opening "Mofo" (from Pop) at both shows and is reported to have held that position in the set for most of Pop Mart. In stark contrast to '92's forward-looking "Zoo TV" tour, the band have become increasingly willing to accommodate nostalgic crowds by reaching back into their catalogue of arena-ready anthems like 1983's "New Year's Day," '84's "Pride (In the Name of Love)," '87's "Where the Streets Have No Name," and '91's "Even Better Than the Real Thing." More important, the Pop Mart sets seem to be structured to take the emphasis off Pop material, with new tunes scattered among older ones rather than concentrated into a conceptually focused Pop segment of the show. The sense you come away with is of a band retrenching -- the mask of postmodern irony U2 put on at the start of this decade is falling away to reveal the earnest face of idealism that's worked so well for them in the past.

But enough of this close analysis. Music critics probably shouldn't be allowed to review stadium rock shows in the first place. Concerts of Pop Mart's proportion usually have very little to do with music -- how much of the estimated $1.5 million it takes to keep Pop Mart on the road each week do you think goes toward actually making music? As well as U2 play, a stadium show depends more on staging, set list, and general theatrics than musical execution. (You could easily read the Edge's tongue-in-cheek karaoke routine, which yielded a fine version of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" on July 1 and Elvis's "Suspicious Minds" on the 2nd, as a sly acknowledgment on the band's part that Pop Mart is not about rock, but that would just be more close analysis.) Stadium concerts are publicity events, social rituals, quasi-religious celebrations of fandom in which music is a backdrop (much in the same way that politics are the backdrop for a political rally, or farming is a backdrop for a giant county fair) for drinking and grilling in the parking lot, the buying and selling of merchandise, hanging out with friends, going on a date, and participating in a communal act of faith and commerce that's bigger and more powerful than anything most people experience in their daily lives.

Bono and U2 know this better, or at least are more self-conscious about it, than most. In the Bono-logue the singer delivered on July 2 -- a different, less emotionally resonant speech that came at the same strategic midset break before "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" -- he went so far as to refer to the million-dollar stage behind him as "our church." Coming from a guy who time and again has professed strong, Christian religious beliefs, that's not something to scoff at. The Bono of the Zoo TV tour was perhaps too in character, too wrapped up in a rubbery suit of winks and nudges ever to admit as much, but U2 have been on a mission to turn secular rock venues into nondenominational sacred spaces since day one. The Pop Mart set, with its 35-foot lemon/space pod/disco ball, looming golden McDonald's arch, and skyscraping martini olive/antenna, is just their latest and most literal attempt to create a traveling temple of rock for fans to worship at.

If Bono's "church" reference said more about U2's current state of mind than any of the songs on Pop, it's because U2 are a band who let their audiences in on their self-explorations -- that's part of their emotional connection with their fans. How else could one explain the humorlessly self-righteous-verging-on-authoritarian atmosphere of Rattle and Hum, the 1988 U2 tour documentary? In its wake, with self-realization setting in, the group switched gears and reinvented themselves with the industrialized clamor of Achtung Baby, setting the course that's led to Pop Mart. So there's a strong possibility that Bono, the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. didn't even realize that Pop Mart would end up as a search to recover the spirituality of their youth until after the tour got rolling.

It's that kind of soul-searching, reflected in their music and earnest attitude, that inspires fans to sympathetic devotion. Hell, you're not going to get any of that from the Rolling Stones. And the Stones are one of the few rock bands around still capable of mounting a giant stadium tour like Pop Mart. U2 stand alone as the one band from their generation with the will, the desire, and the ability to fill 60,000 seats a night. (That they also aim to fill the 60,000 people in those seats with a sense of hope, instead of just offering a good show, is a something else altogether.) But if even the mighty U2 are now having trouble filling seats, the question is will anybody be able to follow in their footsteps in this era of fragmented demographics and narrowcasting.

One has to wonder whether U2 themselves will ever mount a tour as ambitious as Pop Mart or Zoo TV again. The band spent the first half of their career making music built for giant arenas -- sweeping choruses, thundering martial beats, propulsive bass lines, operatic vocals, big echoing guitars, and chant-along songs of hope and awakening. But Pop and 1993's Zooropa are discs that deconstruct all of the above and seem best suited for the headphones or the dance floor. Earnest performers -- most recently Bruce Springsteen -- have a habit of scaling back to recapture the integrity of their early days. And those contemporaries of U2 who have arguably been in a position to jump from large arenas to giant stadiums -- R.E.M. and Pearl Jam come to mind -- have, for the most part, opted to stick with the 20,000-to-30,000-seaters.

Watching Bono work the crowd at Foxboro, you could tell how physically demanding it must be to reach out to 60,000 fans, even with the aid of 833 square yards of LED video screen behind you. And you could maybe imagine how crushing it would feel to fail when, after ranting about the corporate monster, he launched into the fittingly introspective "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Maybe U2 already found what they were looking for, back in the late '80s, after The Joshua Tree put them on the top of the charts and just before their uplifting message was tainted by the touch of the corporate monster. Maybe for a night, or an hour, or even just a song, their purity survived the corrupting influence of the business they'd come to represent. Or, it could be that the kind of temporal church Bono dreams of building isn't possible anymore, that U2 are looking for something that simply doesn't exist.

Either way, Pop Mart is turning out to be every bit as interesting to watch from afar as it is up close, perhaps even more so. After years of acting as if the weight of the world were upon his shoulders, Bono now has something bigger to worry about -- lugging the massive Pop Mart around the world for yet another year.