Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

  Even a thirty-two-year devotion to the Rolling Stones can fray, under such a bombardment, into irritability, especially when the Canadian mafia in charge of seat allocation bungs you behind a pillar, and it takes a friendly stadium security officer to get you a seat you can actually see the show from. I’ll admit to sharpening a few adjectives while waiting for the dinosaurs to appear.

  Then came dragon-fire, and all carping became instantly redundant. Mark Fisher’s “Cobra” set came to life: the high-tech serpent head in the sky belched flame. Fisher, also responsible for the recent Pink Floyd and Zoo-TV stages, is currently the man to call if you want to spend a fortune turning sports stadia into futureworlds. The show’s promoters like to compare the tour to a military operation, but that misses the mark. What’s more astonishing is to reflect that all this theatrical gigantism—“250 personnel, four days to construct, three different steel crews leapfrogging around the country, 8 miles of cable, the world’s largest mobile Jumbotron video screen, 56 trailers, 9 buses, and a Boeing 727, 3,840,000 watts of power produced by 6,000-horsepower generators,” it says here—is being employed in the cause of mere fun. Only rock ’n’ roll, but I like it. Good to know that pleasure has its armies, too.

  And from the moment the Stones launched into “Not Fade Away” to the single encore of “Jumping Jack Flash,” there was pleasure, two and a half hours of it. The set was a pyrotechnic marvel, cascading with light, erupting into fireworks, and conjuring up, during “Sympathy for the Devil,” those marvelously eerie giant inflatables—Elvis, a snake, a Star Child, a Hindu goddess—who danced like huge voodoo dolls, slaves to the rhythm, above Jagger’s Baron Samedi capers. And the sound was good too, every note rich and clear, every word audible and resonant; and the high-definition video screen was the best I’ve seen. But none of this is the point.

  The point is that the Stones were amazing. Their force, their drive, the sheer quality and freshness of Mick’s singing and the band’s play-ing (Keith Richards, during “Satisfaction,” seemed at one point to be mouthing “I love this song”); Mick’s athleticism and grace of movement (once he would Walk the Dog and do the Funky Chicken the way Tina Turner showed him; now there’s something almost Oriental in his dancing, like a Bharat Natyam dancer with 3,840,000 watts of power coursing through him); and Keith, planted front and center with his feet wide apart, whanging his guitar in classic rock-god style, Keith with his ruined–Mount Rushmore head, effortlessly dominating the stage while Mick skipped, leapt, and zoomed. Keith does not run. He leaves that to his mate. (He should probably leave the singing to Mick, too. At the very least he should not tempt fate and the critics by singing songs called “The Worst.”)

  By their second song, “Tumbling Dice,” it was clear that the new “engine room,” in which Charlie Watts had been joined by the bass guitarist Darryl Jones, was as tight and potent as ever. It was also evident, from her duet with Mick on “Gimme Shelter,” that the backup vocalist Lisa Fischer was a bit of a star herself. Not content with having come onstage in what looked like leather underwear, and fuck-me stilettos with bondage straps all the way up her calves, *9 she also unfurled a rich, sexy voice with sustained high notes that could spear you in the heart.

  The new songs just about held their own against the wonders of the back catalog, but it was the classics that really got us going; inevitably, because this music—the “Satisfaction” riff, the dirty genius of “Honky Tonk Woman”—has sunk so deep into our blood that we may even be able, by now, to pass the knowledge on genetically to our children, who will be born humming “how come you dance so good” and those old satanic verses, “pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.” And how satisfying that the Stones haven’t fallen into the Bob Dylan trap of murdering their old songs. As a result, Wembley was full of kids bopping happily to songs that were older than they were but felt new. This is not a nostalgia show; these songs are not museum pieces. Listen to Keith’s guitar playing on “Wild Horses.” These songs are alive.

  There was a gray-haired geezer in a pink T-shirt and jeans—still crazy after all these years—who got himself frog-marched out by a squad of Meat Loafs. There was a dark-haired girl in an outfit that seemed to have been painted onto her body who stood up in the posh enclosure and danced so voluptuously, during “Sweet Virginia,” that people (men) turned away from the stage to watch her. There was some mutual nipple kissing between Mick and Lisa Fischer that got our attention back. There was an ovation for Charlie Watts. You couldn’t have wished for more. The Rolling Stones may not be dangerous now, they may no longer be a threat to decent, civilized society, but they still know how to let it bleed. Yeah yeah yeah WOO.

  July 1995

  Rock Music—A Sleeve Note

  Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention are playing at the Albert Hall. It’s sometime in the early seventies. (As they say, if you can remember the exact date, you weren’t there.) Halfway through the gig, an enormous black guy in a shiny purple shirt climbs up onto the stage. (Security was lighter in those innocent days.) He’s swaying gently, and insists on playing with the band.

  Zappa, unfazed, asks gravely, “Uh-huh, sir, and what is your instrument of choice?”

  “Horn,” mumbles the Purple Shirt Guy.

  “Give this man a horn,” Frank Zappa commands. But the moment the Purple Shirt Guy blows his first terrible note, it’s clear his horn skills leave much to be desired. Zappa briefly looks lost in contemplation, chin in hand. “Hmm.” Then he moves to the mike. “I wonder,” he muses, “what we can think of to accompany this man on his horn.” He has a flash of mock inspiration. “I know! The mighty Albert Hall pipe organ!”

  The mighty Albert Hall pipe organ has in fact been declared strictly off limits to the band, but now one of the Mothers actually climbs up the face of the great beast, scrambles into the organist’s cubbyhole, pulls out every single stop, and almost brings the grand old hall crashing down with his deafening rendition of “Louie, Louie.”

  Va-va-va / va-voom!

  Meanwhile, down on the stage, the Purple Shirt Guy tootles away, blissfully happy, totally inaudible, while Frank Zappa looks fondly on like the benevolent, subversive wit he is.

  Wit is not the quality most often associated with rock music, and when one listens to the Cro-Magnon grunts of most rock stars, one can readily appreciate why. In spite of the Spice Girls, however, rock ’n’ roll actually has a long history of verbal, musical, and off-the-cuff felicities and dexterities.

  Here is Elvis, claiming to be itchy as a man on a fuzzy tree.

  Here’s John Lennon’s quickness of tongue. (“How do you find America?” “Turn left at Greenland.”)

  Here’s Randy Newman, proving, in “Sail Away,” that a song can be simultaneously anthemic and satirical. (“In America, there’s plenty food to eat / Don’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.”)

  Here are Paul Simon’s surreal-associative lyrics. (“Why am I soft in the middle / when the rest of my life is so hard?”)

  And here is the troubadour beyond categories, Tom Waits, telling his raw wanderer’s tales of alley cats and raindogs. (“I got the cards but not the luck / I got the wheels but not the truck / but heh I’m big in Japan.”)

  In all this there is much for literary folk to study and admire. I don’t subscribe to the lyrics-are-poetry school of rock aficionado over-claiming. But I know I’d have been ridiculously proud to have written anything as good as this. And I’d have loved to have had the talent, the humor and speed of thought of Frank Zappa in the Albert Hall that night.

  May 1999

  U2

  In the summer of 1986 I was traveling in Nicaragua, working on the book of reportage that was published six months later as The Jaguar Smile. It was the seventh anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, and the war against the U.S.-backed Contra forces was intensifying almost daily. I was accompanied by my interpreter Margarita, an improbably glamorous and high-spirited blonde with more than a passing resemblance t
o Jayne Mansfield. Our days were filled with evidence of hardship and struggle: the scarcity of produce in the markets of Managua, the bomb crater on a country road where a school bus had been blown up by a Contra mine. One morning, however, Margarita seemed unusually excited. “Bono’s coming!” she cried, bright-eyed as any fan, and then added, without any change in vocal inflection or dulling of ocular glitter, “Tell me: who is Bono?”

  In a way, the question was as vivid a demonstration of her country’s beleaguered isolation as anything I heard or saw in the front-line villages, the destitute Atlantic Coast bayous, or the quake-ravaged city streets. In July 1986, the release of U2’s monster album The Joshua Tree was still nine months away, but they were already, after all, the masters of War. Who was Bono? He was the fellow who sang “I can’t believe the news today, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.” And Nicaragua was one of the places where the news had become unbelievable, and you couldn’t shut your eyes to it, and so of course he was there.

  I didn’t meet Bono in Nicaragua, but he did read The Jaguar Smile. Five years later, when I was involved in some difficulties of my own, my friend the composer Michael Berkeley asked if I wanted to go to a U2 Achtung Baby gig, with its hanging psychedelic Trabants. In those days it was hard for me to go most places, but I said yes, and was touched by the enthusiasm with which the request was greeted by U2’s people. And so there I was at Earl’s Court, standing in the shadows, listening. Backstage, after the show, I was shown into a mobile home full of sandwiches and children. There were no groupies at U2 gigs; just a nursery. Bono came in and was instantly festooned with daughters. My memory of that first chat is that I wanted to talk about music and he was keen to talk politics—Nicaragua, an upcoming protest against nuclear waste at Sellafield, his support for me and my work. We didn’t spend long together, but we both enjoyed it.

  One year later, when the giant Zooropa tour arrived at Wembley Stadium, Bono called to ask if I’d like to come out onstage. U2 wanted to make a gesture of solidarity and this was the biggest one they could think of. When I told my then fourteen-year-old son about the plan, he said, “Just don’t sing, Dad. If you sing, I’ll have to kill myself.” There was no question of my being allowed to sing—U2 aren’t stupid people—but I did go out there and feel, for a moment, what it’s like to have eighty thousand fans cheering you on. The audience at the average book reading is a little smaller. Girls tend not to climb onto their boyfriends’ shoulders during them, and stage-diving is discouraged. Even at the very best book readings, there are only one or two supermodels dancing by the mixing desk. Anton Corbijn took a photograph that day for which he persuaded Bono and me to exchange glasses. There I am looking godlike in Bono’s Fly shades, while he peers benignly over my uncool literary specs. There could be no more graphic expression of the difference between our worlds.

  It’s inevitable that both U2 and I should be criticized for bringing these two worlds together. They have been accused of trying to acquire some borrowed intellectual “cred,” and I of course am supposedly star-struck. None of this matters very much. I’ve been crossing frontiers all my life—physical, social, intellectual, artistic borderlines—and I spotted, in Bono and Edge, whom I’ve so far come to know better than the others, an equal hunger for the new, for whatever nourishes. I think, too, that the band’s involvement in religion—as inescapable a subject in Ireland as it is in India—gave us, when we first met, a subject, and an enemy (fanaticism) in common.

  An association with U2 is good for one’s anecdote stock. Some of these anecdotes are risibly apocryphal. A couple of years ago, for example, a front-page Irish press report confidently announced that I had been living in “the folly”—the guesthouse with a spectacular view of Killiney Bay that stands in the garden of Bono’s Dublin home—for four whole years! Apparently I arrived and departed at dead of night in a helicopter that landed on the beach below the house. Other stories that sound apocryphal are unfortunately true. It is true, for example, that I once danced—or, to be precise, pogoed—with Van Morrison in Bono’s living room. It is also true that in the small hours of the following morning I was treated to the rough end of the great man’s tongue. (Mr. Morrison has been known to get a little grumpy toward the end of a long evening. It’s possible that my pogoing wasn’t up to his exacting standards.)

  Over the years U2 and I discussed collaborating on various projects. Bono mentioned an idea he had for a stage musical, but my imagination failed to spark. There was another long Dublin night (a bottle of Jameson’s was involved) during which the film director Neil Jordan, Bono, and I conspired to make a film of my novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories. To my great regret, this never came to anything either. Then, in autumn 1999, I published The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which the Orpheus myth winds through a story set in the world of rock music. Orpheus is the defining myth for both singers and writers—for the Greeks, he was the greatest singer as well as the greatest poet—and it was my Orphic tale that finally made a collaboration possible. It happened, like many good things, without being planned. I sent Bono and U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, pre-publication copies of the novel, in typescript, hoping that they would tell me if the thing worked or not. Bono said afterward that he had been very worried on my behalf, believing that I had taken on an impossible task, and that he began reading the book in the spirit of a “policeman”—that is, to save me from my mistakes. Fortunately, the novel passed the test. Deep inside it is the lyric of what Bono called the novel’s “title track,” a sad elegy written by the main male character about the woman he loved, who has been swallowed up in an earthquake: a contemporary Orpheus’s lament for his lost Eurydice.

  Bono called me. “I’ve written this melody for your words, and I think it might be one of the best things I’ve done.” I was astonished. One of the novel’s principal images is that of the permeable frontier between the world of the imagination and the one we inhabit, and here was an imaginary song crossing that frontier. I went to Paul McGuinness’s place near Dublin to hear it. Bono took me away from everyone else and played the demo CD to me in his car. Only when he was sure that I liked it—and I liked it right away—did we go back indoors and play it for the assembled company.

  There wasn’t much, after that, that one would properly call collaboration. There was a long afternoon when Daniel Lanois, who was producing the song, brought his guitar and sat down with me to work out the lyrical structure. And there was the Day of the Lost Words, when I was called urgently by a woman from Principle Management, who look after U2. “They’re in the studio and they can’t find the lyrics. Could you fax them over?” Otherwise, silence, until the song was ready.

  I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I’m proud of it. For U2, too, it was a departure. They haven’t often used anyone’s lyrics but their own, and they don’t usually start with the lyrics; typically, the words come at the very end. But somehow it all worked out. I suggested facetiously that they might consider renaming the band U2 + 1, or, even better, Me2, but I think they’d heard all those gags before.

  During an alfresco lunch in Killiney, the film director Wim Wenders startlingly announced that artists must no longer use irony. Plain speaking, he argued, was necessary now: communication should be direct, and anything that might create confusion should be eschewed. Irony, in the rock world, has acquired a special meaning. The multi-media self-consciousness of U2’s Achtung Baby/Zooropa phase, which simultaneously embraced and debunked the mythology and gobbledygook of rock stardom, capitalism, and power, and of which Bono’s white-faced, gold-lamé-suited, red-velvet-horned MacPhisto incarnation was the emblem, is what Wenders was criticizing. Characteristically, U2 responded by taking this approach even further, pushing it further than it would bear, in the less well received PopMart tour. After that, it seems, they took Wenders’s advice. The new album, and the Elevation tour, is the spare, impressive result.

  There was a lot riding on this album, this tour. If things hadn’t gone well it might ha
ve been the end of U2. They certainly discussed that possibility, and the album was much delayed as they agonized over it. Extra-curricular activities—mainly Bono’s—also slowed them down, but since these included getting David Trimble and John Hume to shake hands on a public stage, and reducing Jesse Helms—Jesse Helms!—to tears, winning his support for the campaign against Third World debt, it’s hard to argue that these were self-indulgent irrelevances. At any event, All That You Can’t Leave Behind turned out to be a strong album, a renewal of creative force, and, as Bono put it, there’s a lot of goodwill flowing toward the band right now. I’ve seen them three times this year: in the “secret” pre-tour gig in London’s little Astoria theater, and then twice in America, in San Diego and Anaheim. They’ve come down out of the giant stadia to play arena-sized venues that seem tiny after the gigantism of their recent past. The act has been stripped bare; essentially, it’s just the four of them out there, playing their instruments and singing their songs. For a person of my age, who remembers when rock music was always like this, the show feels simultaneously nostalgic and innovative. In the age of choreographed, instrument-less little-boy and little-girl bands (yes, I know the Supremes didn’t play guitars, but they were the Supremes!), it’s exhilarating to watch a great, grown-up quartet do the fine, simple things so well. Direct communication, as Wim Wenders said. It works.