What's Playing on Zoo TV?

September 3, 1992

Editor's Note: Music writer Peter Howell caught up with the Zoo TV roadshow last week for a preview of what we can expect from U2 Saturday and Sunday at Exhibition Stadium.

BOSTON - Here in the city where the streets all have names - but nobody knows how to drive them - the U2 Zoo is in full effect.

The 200-strong crowd outside the Four Seasons Hotel has just had its afternoon fix of waves from band members Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr., as they jumped into limos bound for their third Foxboro Stadium show.

"Adam smiled at me at the show last night," says Boston fan Lisa Post, 18, consoling herself that today's impromptu U2 encounter has been shorter than usual.

"But I'd been waiting to see Edge since 5 a.m. Then I left for five minutes, came back, and Edge had already come and gone."

Her friend Suzanne Bodoin, 19, did even better. She was in the front row at last night's concert. "I shook Bono's hand!" she squeals.

Yesterday, Bono had greeted fans outside the hotel for more than 20 minutes, and many of them are back today looking for more.

Dressed in black leather pants, T-shirt and his now standard wraparound shades, he'd worked his way up and down the crowd, autographing everything from copies of U2's new Achtung Baby album to a black guitar held aloft by a decal-festooned teenager.

But today the band has fallen behind in its tight schedule, and it had to get to the stadium pronto, or risk being caught in the traffic jam of 51,000 fans.

This is not a good enough excuse for Mary Terhune, a 26-year-old Irish artist and seeker of psychic truths, who is standing beside Post and Bodoin. She has brought one of her paintings, hoping to share her art with Bono.

Terhune feels U2 has "gone Hollywood" with its high-tech Zoo TV Outside Broadcast Show and its innovative mix of live music and satellite-captured live TV images. She misses the old days when the band would use simple props such as white flags to dramatize its songs about peace and love.

"I'll tell you a secret," she says, drawing closer. "The members of U2 own oil derricks in Texas."

Inside his hotel room earlier, bassist Clayton had been reflecting on his band's growth since it first toured North America in December, 1980, as a young Dublin rock band fuelled by the energy of the late '70s punk movement.

The band used to have trouble reconciling its desire to be as close to fans as possible, with the very basic needs to maintain security and safety.

U2 wants to be as accessible as it can, both to fans and the press, but as its audience has grown compromises have had to be made, and limits set.

"I think we feel more comfortable about it now," Clayton says.

"We've kind of been around the block a few times, and we know what we're doing. There are times when you look at the schedule of what's happening and go, 'Hang on, I'm here to play shows. Why does all this other stuff have to be done?'

"But you can't be a crybaby about it. You've got to deal with it. And sometimes you drop the ball, you make mistakes, and you don't cover all the bases. But you've got to move on."

"Moving on" - both musically and intellectually - was the raison d'etre behind both Achtung Baby and Zoo TV. For their first album and tour of the 1990s, members of U2 - who all have reached age 30 - wanted to embrace rather than flee from the chaos and conflicts of modern life, as the song "Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around The World" suggests.

Achtung Baby stretches the boundaries of U2's classic sound of chiming guitar and plaintive vocals with a funkier, more "alternative" mood that incorporates industrial noises and - in songs like "The Fly" and "Zoo Station" - electronically enhanced Bono vocals.

Most of the songs on the album have a theme of male-female relationships, and its original title was to have been Adam - as in Adam and Eve, not Adam Clayton (although Clayton playfully posed nude for one tiny cover shot that was later censored with a big "X" over his naughty bits).

"In many ways this record symbolizes for us a certain growth period," the bassist continues. "You know, it could have been called Man, because it's the extension of Boy (the band's first album). It's 10 years after Boy, in a way, so the band is different."

The show's a lot different, too.

The old U2 was known for the simplicity of its set design, incorporating symbols such as three white flags of surrender to dramatize anti-war songs including "Sunday Bloody Sunday" from the band's 1983 album, War.

But the Zoo TV event, as Bono explains in an interview backstage at Foxboro Stadium, is intended to be an ironic exercise in "going Hollywood" - an irony that fans like Mary Terhune seem to have missed.

"It's funny, you know. When you're 16 you think you can take on the whole world, and sometimes you're right," Bono says, pouring a glass of red wine for a visitor.

"And all that changed with us was just the amplification - it just got too big. Going out on stage with three white flags, as we did on the War tour, was great when we were underdogs.

"But on that tour we became popular even by those standards, so looking back, people say, 'Aw, those f--king guys with the three white flags.' But at the time we couldn't afford a stage set. Those three white flags were it, and everybody loved the simplicity of it then. So a lot of things are about context."

The Zoo TV Outside Broadcast is so far removed from the days of white flags it almost beggars description.

The show that hits the Ex this weekend is U2's full-blown vision of the Zoo TV premiere last winter and spring, which toured North American indoor arenas (including Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens) for three months.

Zoo TV zaps the audiences with images and messages, much the way Bono uses a hand-held zapper on stage to change the live TV channels that are shown to the audience on huge monitors.

Two main themes surface from the Zoo stew: Safe Sex and "Vote Baby Vote." The latter is a tub-thumping exercise aimed at getting younger Americans to do their civic duty during the current president election.

"Welcome to paradise!" announces Irish deejay B.J. Fallon, who gooses the crowd with old Motown and rock hits before the show, using an old East German Trabant car - another Zoo TV motif - as his mixing station.

Fallon does something unique for a rock concert: he's a member of the show, yet he comes out into the audience to scream for the show to begin.

"I want my Zoo TV!" he cries, urging the audience to chant along with him.

The show begins with a vision of leather-garbed Bono jerkily dancing in front of a TV monitor, as The Edge, Clayton and Mullen slide into a stadium-rousing version of "Zoo Station," the opening cut of Achtung Baby.

The band performs many other tunes from the album and its 1987 hit The Joshua Tree, as well as songs from earlier albums such as "New Year's Day," "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

There's an acoustic set in mid-show and in the middle of the stadium, that begins after a belly-dancer moves into the crowd via a narrow walkway to add visual sensual appeal to the song "Mysterious Ways."

There's also an unlikely cover of "Dancing Queen," the hit by defunct white-bread Swedish pop group ABBA.

It's strange to hear Bono singing it, but its also strange to see him dressed up as the '68 Elvis in leather and as the mirror-shaded Robert Duvall warlord from Apocalypse Now.

By appropriating images of both the sacred and the profane, the serious and the camp, U2 is showing that stadium rock can be a true event instead of just another music show.

"I think that what's been happening before (Zoo TV) is that people were trying to stuff rock 'n' roll into a box, and the rules have to be torn up now," Bono says.

"You can use technology, you can play big stadiums, it doesn't have to be played in a club. We weren't very good when we played in a club; we weren't as close to the music then as we are now.

"We always felt our music didn't have a roof on it, and it seemed to kind of float over the heads of the people . . . we're having a lot of fun with this."

He tells of a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen recently in New York, after The Boss had checked out Zoo TV.

"He said a nice thing to me, which I'm sure he wouldn't mind me repeating. He said it's a hard thing after 10 years to surprise people. I took that as a compliment."

Another big-name fan of the band is Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses. He's become a bit of a U2 groupie, partying with the band every chance he gets.

Bono is very sympathetic with the vocal problems Rose has been experiencing lately. The Gunner's frayed pipes led him to cut short a Montreal show last month after 55 minutes on stage, a move that sparked a audience riot.

"I understand," Bono says of Rose's predicament. "I've been there. It's really hard, and I think he's feeling if he can't give it his all, he's not giving anything.

"He's strung out on the moment (the performance high); he's just going after it in a different way than we are. And if he can't get it, he's out of there. Whereas, I feel we can find our moment in our crowd. I feel they can carry us sometimes, if we're a bit lowdown."

Some critics have accused Bono of taking rock star posing to the limits with his many costume changes for Zoo TV. They say he's acting as if he really believes he is Elvis Presley.

Bono says he's actually sending up his too-serious image, which became overblown after the band's ill-fated Rattle And Hum concert movie of 1988. The show was U2's attempt to celebration American rock and blues heroes, but critics slagged it as a clumsy attempt by four naive Irishmen to elbow their way into an indigenous U.S. musical tradition.

"We've tried to dodge celebrity," Bono says of his band's Zoo TV send-ups. "I think we will always be rock 'n' roll stars as long as we don't become celebrities."

But dodging the silliness celebrity brings isn't easy, especially when it's in your face in the hospitality tent backstage.

There Clayton is patiently talking to a music industry biggie who is trying hard to impress him.

"What did you do yesterday during your day off?" the biggie asks.

"I slept," answers Clayton.

"Did ya? That's cool!"

On the other side of the tent, which is decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting and loaded with goodies such as the appropriately named Achtung Baby condoms, two women guests of U2 management are talking about other big rock shows they've seen.

One of them was at the bigger-than-Woodstock concert headlined by the Grateful Dead and The Band, which attracted 600,000 people to Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973.

"A guy jumped with a parachute from an airplane into the crowd," she says. "But something happened, and when he reached the ground, he was on fire."

"Wow," says the other woman. "Did he do that on purpose?"

After seeing a show like Zoo TV, which so effectively challenges your perception of reality, the question doesn't seem quite so dumb.