U2 on TV: Even Better Than the Real Thing?

By CHRIS WILLMAN

Nov. 29, 1992 12 AM PT

Chris Willman writes about pop music and television for Calendar

Later tonight he’ll be singing to a sold-out crowd of 65,000 that he’s “held the hand of the devil,” but right now, early on this Halloween evening, the man in black--black leather jeans and black Miles Davis T-shirt, to be exact--is holding court quietly with an audience of one in the darkened back of a limousine wending its way through West Hollywood toward Dodger Stadium.

The streetlit tableau of trick-or-treaters and trick-turners outside on Fountain Avenue is the show for now, while the limo’s star passenger provides the soft-spoken soundtrack, his famous countenance visible primarily in silhouette.

Holding court here in the dark is Bono, frontman of rock’s U2, and the subject is deviltry.

“Eunice Shriver, do you know her?” he asks. It seems that even JFK’s 70-year-old sister is a fan of the Irish super group. “Some said at a different time she would have been president. She’s a very smart lady, very interested in Irish culture and very well-read--poetry, plays, whatever. And she’s interested in U2 obviously from an Irish perspective, sees us as part of a lineage.” Shriver came to one of the shows on the band’s “Zoo TV--Outside Broadcast” stadium tour, and proved as quick as any critic to pick up on the differences between the straightforward idealism that once characterized U2 concerts and the much darker theatricality that now marks the band’s shows. Bono does a good impression of the legendary matriarch.

“She came back afterward and she said, ‘Ohhh, it was interesting out there. Yeah, more devils there on stage tonight ... Still angels, but more devils.’ ” He pauses, as if trying to recapture the playful twinkle in Shriver’s eye as well as her accent. “She said, ‘But you know what? I think it was a fairer fight .’ ”

This prompts Bono into a good, robust laugh, now as it did then. Obviously, he thinks it’s about the best review the band’s gotten lately. “Rock ‘n’ roll is about mystery and mischief,” he proclaims, reiterating his favorite slogan of late. “And I figured, if somebody at her remove from rock ‘n’ roll can get this, I’m just gonna stop explaining myself.”

The devils that populate the “Zoo TV” show are pointedly media-bred ones. Once regarded as the most earnest figure in all of popular music, Bono now spends much of each evening satirically acting out the part of a spoiled, narcissistic rocker--grabbing a camera and aiming it at his much-worshiped visage, even miming a sexual act with it at one point.

Massive big screens dwarf the stage, sometimes replicating images of the band, sometimes bombarding the crowd with mixed messages, sensual imagery and split-second slogans, sometimes just showing what’s on the Home Shopping Network at the moment. “I have a vision ... I have a vision

And now--irony of ironies--they’ve taken a live revue largely about television and, yes, adapted it for TV.

“There is a God,” responds Bono. It’s too dark in the limo to tell for sure, but we think he’s grinning.

The band’s first TV special airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on Fox, but anyone expecting something akin to a typical episode of “In Concert,” be forewarned. Though it’s full of concert footage, “U2: Zoo TV” promises to be no more linear than the live show from which it was birthed. Director Kevin Godley expects to be working on the hour-long show up to the last minute, but, judging from a short advance demo reel, it could prove as avant-garde as anything ever put on prime-time by one of the four commercial broadcast webs.

“I think to get prime-time network time and get to play with it is perfect for us,” Bono enthuses, as the limo passes Scientology headquarters on the way to Elysian Park. “We’ve been playing with all the media channels we can. Everything--TV, phones, anything. I think it was Timothy Leary who, when asked what cyberspace was, said, ‘It’s the place you’re in when you’re on the phone.’ And any kind of signal that can be transferred from one place to another, whether it’s audio or visual, that’s our ammunition. And we’ve been given now a channel for an hour to play with on Thanksgiving (weekend). And thanks very much, Fox.”

Whatever the TV special will be like, it won’t bear the slightest resemblance to “Rattle and Hum,” the very serious U2 concert film that Paramount released to theaters in 1988. Director Godley, for one, is adding his own spin to the already-frantic Zoo TV concept, adding narrative conceits such as a newscaster character named Teli Babel, and a camera team that attempts to interview Bono on stage and gets audience reactions mid-concert.

“Kevin’s got all these ideas about different points of view in rock ‘n’ roll concerts,” says Bono. “When we did ‘Rattle and Hum,’ we followed the ‘Raging Bull’ analogy. We shot the live performance bits like a boxing match--that was the thing that we had in mind, particularly in the black and white sections. This we’re shooting from every kind of perspective, like the way you’d cover a war, an election campaign, a football match, a strip show. Whatever perspectives that TV uses, we’ll try it out and see if we can get an interesting angle.”

And the simulated cross-cutting between stations on the special will recreate those moments in U2’s live show when Bono takes a remote control in hand and literally changes the channel for tens of thousands of fans on the big screen.

“That whole thing came from the Gulf War,” he says, “sitting down like everyone else with the remote control, cutting from the obliteration of human beings in Baghdad, the turning of Baghdad into a car park on TV, and then you’re switching to soap opera or commercials the next minute and then going back. ... Plus the irony that a lot of these (military) people were watching CNN to see if they’d hit their targets or not. These sorties would come back, and I remember a commander getting out, and he was asked what it was like. And he was a bit shaken, and he said, ‘It was very realistic.’ ” Bono laughs. “That’s when Zoo TV started for me.”

The group’s live show and TV special, he says, are intended to be “just kind of anti-didactic. People have to root through it a bit. That’s kind of what we’re doing at the moment: We’re just pulling out of the air whatever’s up there, and we try not to pass comment on it. I suppose our motto has been ‘sliding down the surface of things.’ Some people are confused by what Zoo TV is--and I’m sure one of them. But if you don’t know what it is, it must be art, right?”

Godley (formerly part of the pop world himself, as a member of the group 10cc) sees the sense of confusion as paramount on the way to sorting out the wheat from the chaff in the information age.

“By using the medium, they’re saying certain things about it,” Godley says in a later editing-room interview. “It’s the medium is the massage, the medium is the message--that kind of situation. They’re not afraid any longer, but they seem to be wallowing, in an intellectual sense, in some of the things they previously avoided. They’re starting to look at what rock ‘n’ roll is all about: the dressing up, the posing, the craziness, the zoo -ness of it all. But they’re kind of standing back from it and showing it to us; they’re like sort of waving a TV in front of our faces, and occasionally stepping into the screen and occasionally stepping out from behind it.

“I think their attitude in a sense is summed up by the song ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing,’ where one senses that there are certain elements of 20th Century life--like television, like the pursuit of pleasure--that are very, very seductive. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that we allow ourselves to be seduced by it, but we have to be on our guard. I think that kind of double-edged sword is what this is all about.”

If anything, the “message” from this erstwhile message-band this time around seems to be: Real or fake, earnest or ironic, anything goes ... you sort it out.

Bono admits that the use of massive technology and banks of TVs constitutes embrace as well as satire. “These are expensive toys we’ve got to play with,” he says, “and we’re having some fun with them. More than that, we can turn them on themselves, if you know what I mean.”

He’s also dedicated to turning his own image back upon itself. “People had read reports of egomania post-’Rattle and Hum.’ So I figured to myself, well, if they think I’m an egomaniac at this stage, we might as actually really get into it and dress it up a bit. On this tour, people are genuinely unsure of where we’re coming from. And that’s a great position to be in after 10 years. And if they have to sort through the rubbish a bit, all the better. Most things nowadays are billboard-size, and easy pills to swallow.”

But doesn’t it worry him at all that there’s always that percentage of the audience that will eagerly take all these outsize, ironic, silly show-biz statements at face value, that will think Bono really is that cartoonishly self-impressed rock star he spends part of the show posing as?

“But part of me is . That’s the thing. I’m not saying I’m not those people. But I’m not just those people, either. Actually, I’m a nice bunch of guys,” he quips. “But I think people in the past have picked up on the subject matter of our songs, and confused the songs and the singer a bit. I don’t like to be limited. I didn’t want a ring thrown round me of morality. Because I’ve never seen a righteous man who looked like one.”

The “Achtung Baby” album that came out a year ago is undeniably the group’s most deeply personal, brokenhearted recording, and it’s odd in a way that U2 would choose this album around which to base its most seemingly im personal, ironic and high-tech live show. But Bono says the overwhelming incongruity is no coincidence.

“The importance of not being earnest ... this whole thing in many ways is a con. It’s our most serious work yet; it just doesn’t look like it. And that suits us fine. We’ve found different ways of saying the same thing.

“It’s funny. The (“Achtung Baby”) music is so personal it allows us to use the more impersonal technology at our disposal. There’s a tension there. It’s just one of the contradictions--one of the dialectics, as it were--of Zoo TV. I think that rock ‘n’ roll has more contradictions than any other art form right now--this very private music played on public address systems. It can be everything and it can be nothing--trash and transcendence, white noise or wide-screen, art and commerce, flesh and spirit, Africa and Europe ... I could go on for hours. And I’ve said this before a hundred times, but I like what Sam Shepard said, that the place to be is right at the center of a contradiction.”

As we pull into the backstage area of Dodger Stadium, this seems as good a contradiction center as any to note that the two dominant themes of “Zoo TV” are two formerly paradoxical ones--satellites and sexuality--that in the modern era have become interlinked. By the same contradictory token, given that fans once looked to U2 as some sort of new breed of religious avatars, the question is begged: Can any sort of real spiritual sense dare dig its way through all this technological morass?

This gives him long pause for thought. “I think that people look for God in very lofty terms,” Bono finally says. “They hope to find him in cathedrals and mountaintops. Where I’m looking at the moment is under a pile of trash.” Another long pause. “And I may have more to look.”

He lightens up a bit. “... And speaking of God, I mean, that was some other kind of (stuff) that he came out with. Some pretty interesting stuff came out of the sermon on the mount. ‘Let the dead bury the dead’--you ever thought about that?”

Yes, we admit, there were almost as many seeming non sequiturs in the New Testament as in the “Zoo TV” show.

“So we’re in good company after all,” he laughs, opening the limo door, the stadium on the mount awaiting him.

“U2: Zoo TV” airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on Fox.