Decided to flip through the pages of "U2 At The End Of The World" again for the first time in a while. It's still the best book ever written about the band. The part of the book documenting the Zooropa sessions is perhaps my favorite. So many great passages, I wanted to share a few to maybe get a discussion going(FYI, I lucked out and found a version of the book typed out online, so I didn't have to type all this out).
First, these passages describing the overall approach to Zooropa:
"Edge spoke to me a couple of times on the tour last year about doing an album very quickly," Flood says. "There was the assumption that we'd come into the studio, they'd have the songs ready, and we'd just record it with no overdubs. Anyway, they came in here to make not a throwaway album, but a quick album. And by their nature they are now finding it hard to make something that is ultimately disposable. Which is good. I think it's good that they're pushing themselves.
"One of the things that appeals to me about U2 is the fact that they never rest on their laurels," Flood says. "It's brilliant that a band in their position are prepared to try anything, but on the other hand I think people now expect change. People's threshold of boredom is getting smaller and smaller. It's very strange times. So I can see it being hard if they can't do a record that's just a throwaway."
We often think of how quick and off-the-cuff and without-second-guessing Zooropa was and bemoan the drawn-out, laborious process they've gone through to make albums in recent years, but maybe their combination of perfectionism and insecurity was always there, and the set of circumstances in 1993 - the tour going on, the creative vein they'd hit, career-high confidence levels - was just right to make the stars align and make the album happen quickly despite themselves.
Next, take this, about The Wanderer:
Neither, if Flood and Eno have anything to say about it, will the version of a song called "The Wanderer" that Bono wants to use. Flood has put on this tape the version he prefers, with Bono singing his song about a man who turns his back on his family and goes off to search for God amid the worldly and sinful. Bono's version of the song is, the producers feel, the centerpiece of the album, a new direction for U2 still rooted in their past.
The trouble is that Bono wants to use a version of the song sung by Johnny Cash, recorded here when the Man in Black passed through Dublin two weeks ago. The argument has been going on ever since. Eno and Flood feel that, the merits of the track by itself aside, Johnny Cash's presence and persona is so strong and full of such vivid associations for listeners that it throws the whole album off balance. As soon as that baritone comes booming in, all the ambience and ambiguity U2 have achieved goes out the window. The Bono version of the song, in contrast, ties all the other themes together.
Bono argues strongly the other way; that hearing Johnny Cash sing over a trippy, distorted track about wandering through a wasteland 'under an atomic sky" is as bizarre as it gets, and far more appropriate for this song, which is about a sort of Wise Blood character, a self-righteous pilgrim who reveals himself, over the course of the lyric, to be pretty much deranged.
There's a lot of merit in both arguments, but I suspect that neither one tells the real story. I think that the real reason Bono does not want to sing "The Wanderer" (the title is a conscious shot at the macho swagger of Dion's "The Wanderer") is because when Bono sings the song it comes off as a mea culpa for all the glitz and surface that U2 has spent the last two years creating. When Bono sings "The Wanderer" it seems like a public confession that beneath the fly shades he is hoping to find God by searching through the glitter and trash.
The character in the song has used Jesus' exhortation to leave your wife and children and follow Him as an excuse to skip out on his responsibilities. He is playing with the ancient antinomian heresy that you can sin your way to salvation ("I went out there in search of experience/ To taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can before he repents"). By having Johnny Cash sing the song, Bono erects another false face. The part of the audience that shares his spiritual side (as well as the part that understands how serious a figure Johnny Cash really is) will understand the deeper message, and those who want to think it's camp will just get a kick out of U2 casting Johnny Cash as Hazel Motes.
So Flood and Eno can argue all day about how disruptive it is to have the Boy Named Sue come strolling into the finale of U2's most Euro-pean, most avant-garde, most systematically disordered album. They're not going to win this one. Bono has another agenda.
I find this so interesting. The "Bono" version of The Wanderer has long been a holy grail of sorts for die-hards like us, and who knows if it will ever see the light of day, but it's so fascinating to know there were big disagreements over which album to use, and I suspect that in here, some of you might agree with with Eno/Flood, while some of you may agree with Bono.
On Lemon:
The looming deadline imposed by the start of the European tour is giving U2's creativity a solid kick. Bono has been unable to finish the lyrics for a track called "Lemon," his attempt to write a Prince song. Faced with such a block, Eno and Edge dig up and sing an alternative melody and lyric ("A man makes a picture/ a moving picture/ through light projected he can see himself up close") that had been rejected for being too much like the Talking Heads. This second lyric is about filmmaking and quotes the director John Boorman, who once employed the young Paul McGuinness as a production manager and who used to say he made his living "turning money into light." Edge and Eno put the movie song together with Bono's Prince tribute and the result sounds nothing like Prince, Talking Heads, or U2.
Knowing that the "man makes..." parts were originally a different song makes Lemon seem even greater, for the way the two things were melded together and yet sound as if they are of one piece.
This is a tidbit about the video shoot for Numb, where people were coming up with ideas about what could be done to Edge's face/head in said video:
Bono, assuming a certain directorial prerogative, walks around the set making suggestions and vetoing ideas like Cecile B. DeMille. A man leads a poodle into the room; Bono has it sent back. I whisper to him that it would be funny if someone lifted Edge's ever-present hat off- and he had another one underneath. Bono's eyes light up and he goes over and whispers the idea to Godley, who laughs. They call over Edge, who shoots it down faster than a slow duck on the first day of hunting season. Edge keeps his lid on.
For some reason, I find it sort of revealing that Edge shot the idea down so fast. It makes him seem pretty sensitive about the hat, his hair or lack thereof, the whole thing.
Finally, I wanted to share this passage, which isn't about music, but rather about how the contract they negotiated with Island before Zooropa was released foresaw the changing world, because it's kind of amazing how on-point Bill Flanagan was, writing in, at the latest, 1995, perhaps earlier than that:
As was the case in the renegotiation with Island seven years ago, the provisions of this deal may mean more to U2 than the money. Because although virtually no one outside the music business understands it in the spring of '93, the rapid changes going on in technology will, within the next decade, completely redefine how music is delivered to the public and what record companies do.
The end of the old world is as apparent in the entertainment indus-try as it is on the map of Europe. The technology for delivering music -and indeed television, films, computer information, mail, and tele-phone services-is all coalescing into a single home delivery system that will revolutionize the information industries, and perhaps a big chunk of the international economy along with them.
Articles being written in popular magazines about the coming "In-formation Superhighway" focus on what it will be like from a consumer standpoint to have all sorts of home entertainment options at your fingertips. But no one is talking about how such a revolution will shake the companies that are now in the business of delivering information and entertainment the old-fashioned ways. The record labels are scared that the effect on them of the new methods of home delivery will be like the effect the rise of the automobile had on the buggy business.
Record stores could become obsolete as music is delivered over cable, telephone wires, or satellite transmission directly into consumers' homes. This raises amazing possibilities. One is that in the next century top acts such as U2 will no longer need record companies; they will be able to make their albums and sell them directly to their audience by direct transmission. Both Bellcore (the Bell Telephone research company in Livingston, New Jersey) and Philips (the company that owns Polygram, U2's label) have set up crude working prototypes of home music delivery systems by hooking up recordable CD players to fiber-optic telephone lines. Imagine a future in which U2 finishes making an album at the Factory, and then just walks over to the computer, puts it on-line, and waits for their fans to punch in credit-card numbers and download it into their homes. No record store, no record company, no one to grab that other 80 percent of the profit.
Everything he says is 100% on the money, and in particular the underlined sentence is basically describing smartphones and the internet of the 2010s, in 1993.
It's also worth noting that for a band that was so forward-thinking back then, they're ironically stuck in relatively archaic modes of music promotion today. Even when they were trying to embrace new forms of promotion and delivery with the SOI release, it backfired spectacularly.
I could go on, but I guess I'll stop here. If you haven't read the book, you really should.
