APRIL 28, 1997
U2 vocalist Bono looked out on the crowd at the first of his hundred stadiums.
His hair cut to the scalp, Bono saw 38,000 fans filling the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl on Friday for the debut of the PopMart tour, a trek that will take the band around the world in 40 weeks in what has been touted as potentially the biggest rock tour ever.
''It looks like it's going to be one of those years,'' he told the crowd. ''Last night, I went to sleep in a pyramid. I woke up next door to the New York skyline, with the Sphinx around the corner. This is the only town in the world where they're not going to notice a 40-foot lemon. Viva Las Vegas.''
While U2 launches this ambitious assault on the rock-concert marketplace, the group's commercial clout apparently teeters at something less than the high water mark of the sold-out Zoo TV tour. The new album, ''Pop,'' slipped out of the Top 10 after three weeks, and many of the shows on the tour have been slow to sell.
The June 18 Oakland Coliseum Stadium show is now nearly sold out more than two months after first going on sale. A second show June 19 is waiting to go on sale, with the not inconsiderable boost from the yet-to-be-announced opening act, multiplatinum Britpopsters Oasis.
A splashy marriage of high tech, high fashion and high concept, the PopMart show takes U2's fascination with technology, which was so brilliantly mobilized for the 1992 Zoo TV tour, into new realms. In fact, the technology behind the $ 6 million video screen that dominates the concert's stage set didn't even exist a year ago.
Hosting an audience liberally sprinkled with Hollywood celebrities such as Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Dennis Hopper, James Caan, Winona Ryder, Mel Gibson and Pamela Lee Anderson, alongside rock luminaries such as Trent Reznor and Mike Mills and Bill Berry of R.E.M., the tour's inaugural concert took on a slightly unearthly atmosphere under the egg-shaped moon in the balmy desert sky. Vintage aircraft from the huge air show across town buzzed the stadium regularly.
100-FOOT TOOTHPICK
The band took the stage by walking through the crowd across the entire length of the football field, slamming into ''Mofo'' from the new album, a crunching rock number U2 tagged with a truncated version of ''I Will Follow'' from the group's 1980 debut. The four musicians cavorted beneath an illuminated 100-foot yellow arch in front of a giant video screen that must have been a half a city block wide and five stories tall. Beside the stage rested a 100-foot toothpick topped with an electric olive beside a giant disco lemon.
Bono dressed in terrorist chic, his head covered in a black hood, his trademark sunglasses hiding his eyes, while guitarist the Edge sported a cowboy hat and Fu Manchu mustache, and bassist Adam Clayton wore an orange jump suit, white helmet and painter's face mask.
The 130-minute show drew heavily on ''Pop,'' with 11 freshly minted tracks, virtually the entire new album, composing more than half the show. With the enormous video screen flashing a cascade of pop art images from the likes of Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, combined with live footage, the band skipped lightly across touchstones from the 1987 popular breakthrough, ''The Joshua Tree.'' ''I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,'' ''Bullet the Blue Sky,'' ''Where the Streets Have No Name'' and ''With You or Without You'' remain the linchpins of the band's concert repertoire 10 years after the group shot that first song's black-and-white video on nearby Fremont Street downtown. In a show where irony has replaced much of the whimsy that marked the Zoo TV tour, it was the Edge who supplied the evening's light-hearted highlight with a solo rendition of the Monkees chestnut ''Daydream Believer,'' leading the audience in a sing-along as the lyrics scrolled across the video screen. ''This is my favorite Bob Dylan song,'' he said, introducing the number.
S&M NUMBER
Bono tried out a variety of costumes, including one very S&M number featuring a pair of pants decorated with silver half-moons. By the time the band emerged from the giant lemon-shaped disco mirror ball to perform the techno- flavored encore of ''Discotheque,'' he had run through a half dozen different looks.
While hundreds of invited guests hung around after the show backstage and, later, at Island Records' party at the Hard Rock Cafe's casino off the Strip, the band members themselves huddled backstage over last-minute edits to the ABC-TV special that aired the following night. Then they returned to their quarters, the top four floors of the pyramid at the unintentionally campy Luxor, the chintz and glitz of the neon Vegas nightscape lending the perfectly appropriate backdrop to the gala PopMart sendoff.
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