win-win,” said Bono, who then began riffing on a Sesame Street tune, singing, “Oh, a rock star is a person in your neighborhood,” as he waved at honking cars passing by.
In Edge’s little guesthouse, the espresso machine was fired up, and we plunged into the new batch of melodies he and Bono had put together. First up was a sound unlike anything in U2’s catalogue. Playing around with the Phrygian mode, they had laid down an otherworldly wall of sound that could have been constructed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. With these harmonics, the audience would be introduced to Arachne. The hubris-infected young woman boasted in her lyrics that anything the gods created, she could make more beautiful, for she was an artist. Julie was thrilled. “Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, eat your heart out.”
But some songs were proving more elusive. There’s a fine line separating the crystalline and the clichéd, the resonant and the cloying. Bono and Edge would sooner impale themselves on sticks than be caught crossing that line, but if you wanted to write the big anthem, you had to dance right up next to it. “Rise Above” was their current concern. Bono stood up—he was getting passionate: “If I’m gonna actually plop something like that onto a fucking page, it better be something that people will sing in football finals in ten years and make everyone cry. I just mean it has to be a classic. In the ‘rising-above-it’-type genre, if you follow me.”
We were following him. The “rise-above-it” genre was a perilous one.
He added, “It better be as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ which is one of the greatest songs ever written.”
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is from Carousel, the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
I need to back up. Between the last summit and this one, David Garfinkle decided Bono and Edge needed a crash course in the Broadway musical. The two lads grew up in a rough-and-tumble section of Dublin; they started the rock band when they were teenagers. Bye Bye Birdie ? A Little Night Music ?
“Em . . . not really on our radar, David.”
So David had the office burn a four-CD compilation. Sixty songs from the last sixty years of musical theatre, divided into the strictest of categories. There were exposition songs, eleven o’clock numbers, Act One closers, charm songs, anti-charm songs, show-stoppers, character-driven songs, torch songs—a fantastic mix, really, if you were into that sort of thing. Bono and Edge would eventually dismiss nearly all the songs as mawkish, dopey, or just “pants.”
But here Bono was extolling “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from one of the more sentimental midcentury musicals. And the song wasn’t even on Garfinkle’s Fabulous Broadway Mix.
“So did you go out and download Carousel from—”
Edge shook his head—the song happened to be one of the most popular football anthems in Ireland. Of course— football anthems . If you were European, and a musician, that was the brass ring you were going to be reaching for, that was the—
“I’ve got to make a few serious calls.”
Suddenly, Bono was heading out of the room.
What?
“I’ll just excuse myself for half an hour. There’s some stuff I just can’t avoid.”
Rats. We were only in town for three days, and we wouldn’t see each other for another three months. Hadn’t we all vowed to stay focused on this musical for eight lousy hours? Surely whatever Bono thought he needed to do could wait—he had assistants, hadn’t he?
Bono returned in a better mood. The U.S. Congress had originally committed to give funds to African AIDS relief but then, just before Christmas, the commitment started to look ropey. So, Bono was in the other room getting assurances from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi— Pelosi herself —that $1.2 billion in AIDS funding would be reinstated. That was how he had spent the last half hour. I spent it polishing off an espresso.
Julie and I killed time