Excerpts from
U2 AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Bill Flanagan

pp. 272-276

On the highway to U2's concert in Verona the band's local bus driver pulls up to the wooden barrier the policia have stuck in front of the highway entrance to control the traffic to the U2 concert, sticks his head out the window, and exchanges shouts, curses, and hand gestures with the local cops, who finally move the barrier and let us drive through. When we get to the next barrier the whole routine is repeated. This goes on at regular intervals all the way to the show. As we drive parallel to the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main road, we see that many concert-goers have pulled over on the side of the highway or along the median, locked their cars, and left them there, a Watkins Glen approach to concert-going quite unusual on a major highway in a big city. But then, this is Italy, where it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

It is the afternoon of July third. It is very hot in Verona. People in the stadium are wearing as few clothes as possible. Onstage Pearl jam, who have with their first album become very big stars in America, are trying to connect to a large audience who don't know who they are. Eddie Vedder, the band's passionate lead singer, is not going to go down without a fight. He is telling the crowd, "This is a big place for such a little thing like music. I can't wait till we can come back and play in a place where we can see you."

The band then plays a new song called "Daughter," a slow tune with a powerful lyric - "she holds the hand that holds her down" - that like many of Vedder's songs seems to be about the grief children suffer at the hands of incompetent or oblivious parents. It means nothing to most of the chatting, laughing, drinking crowd, but it clearly means a lot to Eddie. When it's done he stands at the edge of the stage looking out at the disinterested audience and sings, quietly, the first lines of U2's "I Will Follow." It is hard to tell if he is trying to mock the public's hunger for the headliners or make a connection. In a lot of ways Vedder seems like a fan who has found his way onto U2's stage by mistake and figures that as long as he's up there he'll see what singing their song feels like. Behind him the band starts playing a very slow version of "Sympathy for the Devil" and Vedder makes up new lyrics to fit his circumstance: "I got here through twenty-nine stadiums." He holds up a devil mask and the crowd is mildly amused. Vedder tries on his devil mask, then tries on a fly-head mask ' I wonder if he's mocking Bono's onstage personas - devilish Macphisto and the Fly.

"I got a question," Vedder says softly, taking off the mask. "How do you spell 1-2-3-4!" and with that Pearl Jam rips into a screaming version of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Vedder charges down the ramp to U2's B stage and throws himself off, into the pogoing part of the audience. I don't think Verona has ever seen stage-diving before. The crowd in the grandstands is still fairly disinterested, but the people on the ground in front of the stage go nuts. I see Vedder bobbing up on the arms of the crowd, then disappearing under them, then popping up, like a swimmer fighting an undertow. Finally he scampers back up onto the ramp, most of his clothes torn to rags. He has made contact with the audience with the same sort of recklessness that almost got Bono kicked out of U2 a decade ago.

Pearl Jam, like their Seattle rivals Nirvana, has dominated the imagination of American rock for the last year and a half U2 has been guarded in their reaction to grunge, the nickname the media has given to the music these bands make, a sort of postmainstream rock influenced by both punk and heavy metal, those opposite poles of seventies rock culture. Both Pearl Jam and Nirvana tend toward lyrics about the inarticulate anger of kids growing up feeling abandoned and abused. That merciless rock critic Elvis Costello refers to the style as "Mummy, I've wet myself again" music. Nirvana works hard at being alternative, in spite of the Beatles-like melodic gifts of songwriter Kurt Cobain. Pearl Jam is much more open about its debt to mainstream rock-as Vedder's quick evocation of U2, the Rolling Stones, and Neil Young demonstrates.

U2 has been vaguely supportive of the new movement, though it's not hard to sense in Bono and company a subtle resentment that Seattle bands who are essentially re-creating styles of the 1970s are being hailed by critics as progressive, while U2-wh6 has worked so hard on their last two albums to take rock into fresh territories often lumped in with the established superstar acts against whom the grunge bands are supposed to be rebelling.

In my conversations with them, Bono and Edge have both expressed enthusiasm for the experimental industrial pop of Nine Inch Nails, while maintaining a sort of polite skepticism about the Seattle bands. Bono often repeats his observation that poor black kids have no trouble staying on the cutting edge of technology and art, figuring out ways to make new music with computers and samplers, abandoning one style to innovate another, while middle-class white kids regurgitate the same musical dich6s over and over and think they've discovered the lightbulb.

David Grohl, Nirvana's drummer, came to a U2 show during the first leg of the Zoo tour to visit the opening act, the Pixies. Bono invited him in for a talk. Bono mimicks Grohl chewing gum and saying, "Hey, man, nothing against you, but I don't know why the Pixies would do this." Bono asked if Grohl didn't think it was brave of the Pixies to try opening for U2 in arenas. Grohl didn't buy it. "We'll never play big places," he said of Nirvana. "We're Just a punk band. All this success is a fluke. Tomorrow I could be somewhere else."

Bono told him to never say never: "You don't know what you'll want to do in five or ten years. It was all new to us, we had to learn it too. Why paint yourself into a corner?"

"Nah, man," Grohl said. "We're just a punk band." The next thing Bono knew Grohl was quoted in NME saying that Bono tried to convince Nirvana to change but they wouldn't do it. "Definitely not the brains of the group," Bono mutters.

"Recently I saw them on TV. Now they're playing big places. And the interviewer said, 'You told me a year ago you'd never do that,' and Kurt Cobain said, 'I changed my mind.' " Bono laughs. "See, that's the gift Kurt has, Sinead has. To declare one thing one day and the next day announce the exact opposite with no self-consciousness at all. I think Eddie Vedder is a bit more honest than that. He can remember what he 'd the day before. He's a very soulful guy and very troubled by it. He talks about how he only wants to play clubs." Bono thinks about it and then adds, "But he's not actually playing clubs, is he?"

What he really wants, I say, is to be as happy and excited as he was when he was playing clubs, when he'd just quit his job in the gas station to join Pearl jam and was suddenly singing to packed bars and the audience loved it and the record companies were coming around. That's what he really misses - not the clubs but the happiness.

"It's a terrible thing," Bono says, "to get something before you desire it. We've been lucky. We've generally desired something just before we got it. But then, it's also a mind-fuck to get everything you want."

"Rather than what you need," Edge says.

Anyway, all these media-hyped notions of Us vs. Them, Mainstream vs. Underground, Hip vs. Square are a vestige of Cold War "generation gap" thinking. Cultural polarities were important to the World War 11 generation and to their baby boom offspring, who in middle age have become their parents' mirror image. One of the big confusions for the baby boomers is that the next generation doesn't want to play that game. ("Okay, now I'll say how much better things were twenty years ago and you rebel. Okay? All right? Hey, where are you going?") These days such polarities are projected as marketing hooks. The publisher of an alternative rock magazine told me recently that he had cracked the Detroit auto market and now Madison Avenue advertising would be rolling into his bank account. I asked how he did it and he said by hiring "the marketing woman who discovered Generation X."

Zooropa is being released this weekend and the early reviews are ecstatic, the best of U2's career. That goes a way toward assuaging any sore feelings that U2 might have about being lumped on the wrong side of musical progress.

"The scene that they come out of has a lot of rules, actually," Bono says of Pearl jam. "There's quite a code. Like with a lot of dubs, that can be quite rigid. If you try to break out of it, even if you just want to see what's across the road or around the corner, you can't do it. I do think that Pearl jam are transcendent of their scene, but their scene is to me incredibly old-fashioned. It's an aftertaste of the sixties counterculture, which suits a certain white middle-class collegiate lifestyle. But I don't want to dis it because in Pearl jam's case it's a place of conviction and a place where they put the music first. Who am I to comment on it? As a fan of rock & roll I have to say what I think, but in the end if the music's great it doesn't matter."

Of Vedder, Bono says, "He's not a rock & roll animal, he's come up from a different place, a place that I prefer. But he's in a rock & roll band and has to protect himself. He probably doesn't think he's got a mask, and so he might not have figured the various masks of Zoo TV. But he has a mask, and that's okay, because the important place not to be wearing masks is in the songs. That's where I live, and I think that's where he lives. Maybe they're going through what we went through in the eighties, which is running away from the bullshit. I'm sure they'll find their own way of doing it. Exactly what I didn't like about our position in the eighties was that we were running away rather than Just kind of laughing in its face, which is more where we're at right now." Bono thinks about it and decides, "He [Eddie] is an odd character. I like him a lot, actually."

pp. 280-281

There is a blue Olympic-size pool glistening in the Verona moonlight,lit while corks pop and steaks sizzle and waiters run up and down balancing trays. U2 sits around the pool while their guests emerge from between the high hedges. Here comes Tom Freston, the head of MTV and the picture of the tall, laughing American cowboy entrepreneur. Here comes Jeff Pollack, quiet, almost melancholy, a superpower consultant behind radio playlists from the USA to the Far East. Here comes Pearl Jam, the hottest American band, followed by An Emotional Fish, an Irish group several notches further down the concert poster. Here comes Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and several more fashion models from the high end of the gene pool.

And here, strangest of all, come our two visitors from Sarajevo. Bill Carter and Jason Aplon wander into the arty tentatively and hang back from the buffet table like Siberians in a supermarket. Having completed their unlikely mission of getting out of Bosnia, making it to Italy, conning their way past security, and interviewing Bono, Carter and Jason have been invited to join the superstar revels tonight, before going back into the war zone tomorrow. They both look a little shell-shocked at the luxury laid out before them, but that may have less to do with the opulence than with the fact that they have, until two days ago, been dodging shells.

In the spacious two-room pool house sits a serving table laden with delicacies. Pearl jam take up pool cues and begin the billiards. Larry comes over and asks how their show went tonight. "A lot better than yesterday," they say, "because today we got a half-song sound check. Of course, the arena was half full at the time, but still . . ."

"That should never happen!" Larry says, putting on his sheriffs hat. In Rome Pearl jam will get a full sound check before the doors open! Larry guarantees it! He will personally make sure that U2 gets to the venue early, finishes their sound check promptly, and leaves Pearl Jam plenty of time! Leave it to Larry to walk into paradise and search out an injustice to battle.

pp. 296-299

U2 plays an early soundcheck - 1 P.M. - so that Pearl Jam will have plenty of time to get their levels set before the audience comes in...

The crowd is in a rotten mood from having to stand outside so long and they take it out on Pearl Jam, who play a roaring set (they thanked Larry excessively for their sound check) that is greeted with a bevy of plastic bottles and "Fuck you"s.

"Fuck me?" Eddie Vedder says. "Okay, you fuck me and then Bono will come out and fuck you." That gets some more boos. The funny thing is, Pearl jam sounds great. I don't doubt that in five years the same people who are heckling them today will be bragging that they saw them way back when.

Backstage I run into Cameron Crowe, a legend among rock critics. Cameron was writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen, was made a contributing editor for his eighteenth birthday, quit to pose as a high school student for a year so he could write the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, parlayed that into a job writing the script for the successful film of his book, which he in turn used as a launch pad for writing and directing his own movies. His films include the critically lauded Say Anything and the new Singles, a movie set in Seattle that features members of Pearl Jam in supporting roles and on the soundtrack. Aside from being distinguished from most of his rock critic peers by his ability to become a successful artist in his own right, Crowe is also freakish among the fraternity because (1) in a field full of sniping egomaniacs he is always gracious and generous and (2) because he married musician and video heartthrob Nancy Wilson of Heart. I don't know of any music critic who has inspired as much petty jealousy as Cameron, or in whom such pettiness is so absent.

Rolling Stone has hornswoggled Crowe into returning to his teenage vocation to write a cover story about Pearl Jam. He introduces me to Eddie Vedder and we fall into a conversation about songwriting. Eddie, who has a reputation for being touchy and reclusive, is warm and friendly as all get-out. Cameron is warm and friendly as all get-out. I can fake being warm and friendly with the best of them. We all stand around being convivial until Eddie suggests we go out to the soundboard and watch U2. When we get there Naomi and Christy are in their spots, as are Freston and Pollack. Edge's family have folding chairs set up and whenever the Zoo TV walls cut to a shot of Daddy his little girls wave at the screens. Perhaps because his kids are in the house, Edge does a rare solo song, an acoustic guitar version of "Van Diemen's Land" from Rattle and Hum. (Because "Numb" is now all over MTV a lot of people think it's Edge's first lead vocal on a U2 song. It's not, nor was "Van Diemen's Land." Edge sang "Seconds" on War, which always sent a shock through the house when U2 did it live. People assumed from the record that it was Bono.) On the side of the stage, Adam is watching Edge and Bono is trying to give Adam a hot foot.

There is a cool breeze and a magnificent moon. U2 are playing great. During an uproarious "New Year's Day" Bono, walking toward the B stage through a field of outstretched arms, turns and shouts, "I love you, Adam Clayton!"

Tom Freston says, "This is the best show I've ever seen; it should never end." He asks Christy and Naomi if they don't agree that this is the best concert they've ever seen. Yep, it is. Jeff Pollack says it might be the best concert he's ever seen too. Tom asks Eddie Vedder, who is unreconciled to all the technology and stage gimmicks, if it's the best concert he's ever seen. Eddie says he'd prefer Henry Rollins in a small club.

Some of the guards are chasing a blond woman through the crowd, trying to confiscate a video camera. She's pretty quick. She's giving them a good run for their money. Uh-oh, she is also Cameron Crowe's wife. I go tell the bouncers that the woman they just chased and shook down is Nancy Wilson of Heart, a real rock star in her own right and a legitimate laminated all-access part of the Pearl Jam's entourage.

"I guess we should give back her camera then," says one of the bouncers.

"Can we keep her film?" says another.

pp. 357, 358, 360-1, 365

(at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards)

Edge is given a trailer Just outside the theater's back gate, in a long row of celebrity mobile homes. His next door neighbor is Pearl jam. Eddie Vedder and his girlfriend Beth Liebling come out and wave like the folks down the block sayin' howdy. Actually the whole setup is a sort of Superstar Trailer Park. The longest limousine in the world pulls up in front of us - one of those comically extended Cadillacs you'd see in a movie parodying Texas - and Eddie says, "Who could that be? Who would come to this in a car like that?" We wait anxiously for the door to open and out hobbles Milton Berle, the ancient comedian who was America's first TV superstar forty years ago.

As soon as Uncle Miltie is ushered inside, along comes the Universal Studio tour, a train of oversize golf carts loaded with families in short pants who have just seen the shark from jaws and the Jurassic Park display and are now being shown the freaks of rock & roll. Edge waves at the tourists, who stare blankly. at him as they pass.

"They get to see you right after the dinosaurs," I observe.

"You mean Steven Tyler?" Eddie asks. Then he smiles and waves to the vacant tourists. When they are almost out of sight Eddie hurls the orange he's been eating at the trailer. Hits it too.

Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers comes running up in a baseball cap and an agitated state. "You gotta be honest with me," he says. "I just got a haircut and you gotta tell me how it looks." Flea pulls off his cap to reveal a new crew cut and a high forehead. "Nah, it looks fine," Eddie assures him. Flea seems relieved - he's about to go on TV. Then Eddie, smiling, adds, "Makes you look like Sting." Flea rushes off to get a mohawk-but not before Eddie's reminded him to wave to the next tour bus.

Pearl Jam goes in to rehearse just after R.E.M. finishes. Peter Buck watches from the empty auditorium and says, "If their new album is good, they're going to be the biggest band in the world."

..................

Neil Young joins Pearl Jam for a version of "Rockin' in the Free World" that runs overtime, wins the night's only standing ovation from the jaded industry crowd, and is - by wide acclaim - the high point of the show. (It is also the low point of the TV ratings.) Pearl jam cleans up the awards portion of the evening, winning four trophies, including Video of the Year for "Jeremy." Eddie is not joking when he tells the audience that without music, he might have ended up like Jeremy in the video, shooting himself in front of the classroom. On a lighter note, he weighs MTV's moon-man trophy in his hand and observes, "It looks like Bono."

Bono is watching on his TV in Dublin, talking to Edge on the trailer phone. "What do you make of that?" he asks. Eddie is suddenly wondering the same thing. Coming backstage Eddie worries that he might have hurt Bono's feelings. He finds Edge and apologizes, asking if he can have Bono's phone number so he can call and make amends and telling Edge to look into his eyes and know how sincere he is.

"I just hung up with Bono," Edge replies, deadpan. "And, Eddie, he was crying."

Eddie and Edge stare intently into each other's eyes for a few moments - then they both start laughing.

.................

The day after the MTV awards everybody sleeps late and then limps around the Sunset Marquis like wounded soldiers. Well, almost everyone. The Irish actor Richard Harris is smiling and greeting all comers while strolling about in some kind of powder-blue pajamas (or lightweight leisure suit), cradling a white toy poodle and looking for a volunteer to Join him at the bar. Eddie Vedder gives me two cassettes of Pearl jam's unreleased second album-one for me and one for Edge, with hand-customized covers and personal notes. If Pearl Jam is about to ascend to the Biggest Band throne, they are doing it in a remarkably human way.

I bring Edge's tape to him at a breakfast table by the pool, where he and Morleigh are looking at maps and talking about driving out to the desert. I hope he's not planning to propose to her under the Joshua tree. The members of Nirvana wander by the pool, gather their belongings, and load them into a single car-a big old dad sedan, a Caprice or Impala. They drive off together looking like a high school band going to play at the big dance. There are a lot of different ways to be a rock star.

pp. 431-433

Adam arrives along with Eric, Bono's long-suffering security man, and Bret Alexander, the tour's travel coordinator, and surveys the orchard. Willie is wandering the groves, looking as if it's his last day on Earth. Eventually U2 pull themselves away from the winery, and continue down the coast in a little caravan, stopping around dusk in a seaside village called Akoroa Harbor. They get coffee in a restaurant on a pier and talk about what everybody's going to do when the tour is over. Bret says he and his family are going to build a house in Seattle and he may go to work for Pearl Jam.

More than a few of the job-hunting Zoo crew are hoping Pearl Jam tours next year, but Eddie Vedder is wavering. With the release of Pearl Jam's second album his face was plastered on the cover of Time magazine (without his cooperation - he would not give Time an interview) and his fame continued to explode in spite of his refusal to do any videos for the new album, which debuted at number one. Eddie is threatening, if people don't give him some room, to quit the superstar sweepstakes altogether and sell homemade tapes out of his house.

Something has really changed in the culture that is ripping apart the people who become rock stars. The last four singers raised to the pantheon - Axl Rose, Sinead O'Connor, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie - have all been made publicly miserable by the process. Maybe it's the fact that there's been an explosion of celebrity media in the last ten years - People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Entertainment Tonight, MTV, and all the talk shows - that either was not there before or ignored rock before. Or maybe it's the spread of the notion that any rock musician who gets popular must be doing something wrong, must be a sellout. That's a complete reversal of the ethic that ruled from Elvis to the Beatles to U2 - that you wanted your band to be the biggest thing in the world and reach as many people as possible.

Some fans come up looking for photos and autographs. Bono, Edge, and Adam oblige, but it's a signal to start heading back to Christchurch. It's getting dark out.

As we ride through the twilight with Willie and Eric, Bono continues to brood about the nature of celebrity. The writer Charles M. Young has a theory, I tell him, that the reason rock stars get so obsessed with critics is because unlike most people, rock stars control 99 percent of what happens in their lives. So they become obsessed with the I percent they can't control. It infuriates them that some little gnat in the newspaper is allowed to mock them or say they stink. They want to respond to the gnat with a cannon.

"I think that's a very smart insight," Bono says. "I've felt that in myself Ali recently went through it for the first time with her Chernobyl film. She got some good reviews and some bad reviews, she felt she wasn't quoted quite accurately once or twice, and now she won't have anything to do with it. She's been nominated for Irish Woman of the Year but she refuses to take part, refuses even to have her photo taken for it."

We ride along in silence and then Bono says, "It's too bad that comedian is making fun of Eddie Vedder now." Bono's referring to Howard Stern, an American disk jockey and TV personality who's been doing a routine about how when Pearl Jam first appeared Eddie Vedder was a happy, smiley guy and now that he's a big star he's morose and doesn't want to be famous. "I know what Eddie's going through," Bono says.

"Sure," I say. "He's shocked to realize that everything he says is being written down, recorded, and held up for dissection."

"When that happens," Bono says, "it makes you very self-conscious and serious. That's what happened to us in the mid-eighties. You become the Serious Men. Now we've spent three years confusing the issue so much that hopefully people won't be sure who we are."

>>>back to The Pearl Jam Articles Page

Dan's Pearl Jam Page
Group pics: page 1 / page 2 / page 3 / page 4 / B&W 1 / B&W 2
Stone pics / Jeff pics / Mike pics / Jack pics
Ed pics: page 1 / page 2 / page 3 / page 4 / page 5 / page 6 / page 7
page 8 / page 9 / B&W 1 / B&W 2 / B&W 3 / B&W 4
exclusive pics: index / 1996: Toronto & Toledo / Cork & Dublin / 1998: Maui / Denver
Alpine Valley / Chicago / St. Louis / Kansas City / Portland / Vancouver / Seattle / Indy / East Lansing
Toronto / Detroit / Pittsburgh / Cleveland / West Palm Beach / 1999: TFC / Bridge / HoB
2000: London2 / Dublin / Glasgow / Manchester / Cardiff / Poland / Berlin / Oslo / Stockholm
VA Beach / Charlotte / Greensboro / Atlanta / Tampa / Nashville / Indy / Cincinnati
Columbus / Philly / Wash DC / Pittsburgh / Montreal / Detroit / Alpine Valley / Chicago / Nader
St. Louis / Kansas City / Lubbock / Phoenix / Las Vegas / Greek / Fresno / Sacto
Portland / Boise / Seattle 1 / Seattle 2 / 2002: Showbox 1 / Showbox 2 / Seattle
2003: Yokohama / Tokyo / Nagoya / San Antonio / Houston / New Orleans / Birmingham
West Palm Beach / Tampa / Charlotte / Nashville / Atlanta / Lexington / Champaign / State College
Santa Barbara
other pics: Memorabilia & Albums / No Code Cards / submitted / submitted2 / other pics
calendar pics: 1994 / 1996 / 1997 / 1998 / 1999 / 2000a / 2000b
Art /Articles / Captured Video Images / MP3 Songs & Ed Quotes / Links
my CD-R list / CD art / 1996 Tour Dates / 1998 Tour Dates / 2000 Tour Dates

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, complaints, etc.,
or own the copyright to any of these pictures and want them removed,
please e-mail me. Thanks -- Dan Grenough