Niamh_Saoirse
Rock n' Roll Doggie FOB
I just HAD to post this interview I found today. It's just fantastic!
Chicago Sun-Times, December 25, 2002
Cathleen Falsani, Staff Reporter
Bono has a hole in his sock. Not down by the toes where nobody can see it. Up by the ankle bone, peeking over the top of his black designer shoes with the thick soles.
He also chews his fingernails, is afraid of heights and drinks red wine despite being terribly allergic to it.
Bono may be one of the world's most famous rock stars, but more than anything else, he is a guy.
The kind of guy who might be holding court and a Heineken at the Cork and Kerry in Beverly any given Friday.
The kind who sings to himself and uses funny voices when he talks to children. The kind who kisses acquaintances hello and goodbye, and knows the names of their mothers.
The kind who, three weeks before Christmas with four kids of his own at home in Dublin and a U2 album waiting to be recorded in the studio, would hop on a bus in Nebraska to schlep across the American Midwest talking about the plight of HIV-positive Africans.
"You can't fix every problem, but what you can fix, you must," Bono would say time and again when people would ask why he was stumping for suffering Africans. "I keep waiting for people to go, 'You're Irish. Shut up.' But they haven't. And so while they haven't, I'm going to keep doing it."
While Bono may be one of the richest men in Ireland and one of the most successful entertainers in rock 'n' roll, he hasn't shrugged off his working-class Dublin roots and no-nonsense sensibilities.
His real name is Paul David Hewson.
He's been married to his high-school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, for 20 years.
He says "please" and "thank you" to the people whose salary he pays. He holds doors.
He likes McDonald's breakfasts. He eats meat. He often says grace before meals.
His hair's messed up, he's a champion cusser and he has a devilish sense of humor.
"I never, never really felt loved," Bono says in Nebraska, lying across a leather bench in his touring bus and plopping his head into the lap of an unsuspecting veteran political reporter who looks as if he might jump out of his skin.
"People think performers, that it's all about love me, love me, love me. And they're right!" he says, giggling wildly. "It's not that they want everyone in the crowd to love them. It's usually just one person and the crowd has one face. It could be a lover. It could be somebody who bullied them at school. It could be their teacher. It could be their father. That's my theory. Most great performers are performing for one person."
So who's his person?
"That's why I was just getting comfortable there," Bono chirps, motioning to the still-flummoxed reporter. "I was trying to figure that out."
Typically, people who have never met him want to know two things about Bono:
Is he really that short and is he really that nice?
Well, when we're both wearing our big boots, we stand about eye to eye and I'm 5'5".
And yes, he really is that nice.
But is he cool? They want to know.
Let's put it this way. He's cooler than most reporters I know because HE'S A ROCK STAR. But in the spectrum of general human behavior, he's really kind of a goober.
Case in point: Bono has two adolescent daughters -- Jordan (whom he calls "Jo Jo"), 13, and Eve, 11. They are, of course, the ultimate arbiters of cool.
"I had [hip-hop stars] Jay Z and Beyonce Knowles and some other people that they look up to over to my house in France," Bono tells me as we drive down Fifth Avenue in New York City. "We were all sitting around having a laugh and having a drink and I went into the fridge to get something...and I overheard Eve going, 'He's probably boring their arses off talking about Africa!'
"She just adores Jay Z. He's the man. And the same for Beyonce. They're probably two of her favorites and she was a little concerned I was gonna blow the cool," he says, laughing at himself. "She's cool. She's 11."
It's all about perspective. Even rock stars' children eventually think their parents are embarrassing.
Phoning home to Dublin to check on the kids, he pretends to be a character from Thomas the Tank Engine, putting on a boggy English accent, reminiscent of sometime Thomas narrator Ringo Starr.
"Hey-loooo. Hah-looooh. Is Thomas the Tank Engine in the background," Bono barks into a teeny cell phone. "I'm coming home as the fat conductor. I don't know what happened."
"How are the little boys?" Bono asks the woman minding the children at his Irish home, referring to Elijah, 3, and John, 1. "I'm glad you're there and don't let them torture you too much."
"John is a thug," he tells me, smiling proudly.
Already? At the grand age of 1?
"Mmm, hmmm. He's a thug. Just indestructible. He could walk through plate glass."
Just like his father?
"Yeah. I'm one of those people that, I'll have sort of a nagging sort of pain in my right shoulder for a few days, and then somebody will walk up to me and say, 'What is the knife doing in your back?' Oh? Is that it? Ali says I'm out of touch with my physical self."
Bono is, however, very much in touch with his inner child, at least the one that graduated from rebel to rock star when he was a teenager.
Arriving at Davenport, Iowa's Central High School, one of several supposedly surprise appearances on his Heart of America humanitarian tour, Bono immediately regresses to about age 13.
"WHAMP! WHAMP! WHAAAAMMMPP!"
Someone's laying on the horn of the tour bus and sending Bono's minion handlers into a frenzy.
"It's supposed to be a surprise! What if the kids look out the window and see the tour bus!! Who's honking THAT HORN!!!!"
Um, that would be Bono.
He's sitting behind the wheel of his tour bus, playing with the hydraulic seat, doing an imitation of Billy Bob Thornton's character from the movie Sling Blade.
"Mmm, hmm. Pertaters. Mmm hmm," he says, once again giggling like a madman. "Pertaters. Mmm hmm."
Somehow the rock star wranglers get him off the bus and into the school where the full regression to teenage Bono is staved off until after he, actress Ashley Judd and an HIV-positive Ugandan nurse traveling with him have completed their presentation about AIDS in Africa.
But the rock star cannot help himself. The urge to act out is too strong.
First he doodles a cartoon of himself on the chalkboard. Then he asks Judd to do the same.
She writes "Ashley loves Education + Bono" with a heart around it.
"Can I finish it?" Bono asks.
Taking chalk in hand, he turns the heart into a female figure vaguely resembling the actress. Then he dots the top of an upside-down heart with chalk nipples and the high school class gasps.
"The '80s were responsible for a lot of terrible shit," he says, as they gasp again. "Shoulder pads and the mullet. But also, Live Aid."
("He hasn't sworn this whole tour until now," Judd tells the kids.)
Bono's definitely got their attention. And then he turns deadly serious again.
"The crisis in Africa now is so much worse than it was then, but there's less energy in the air to deal with it. Have we become numb to the pictures on TV?" he asks the rapt teens. "The reason we turn the channel when we see these things is that we think we can't do anything about it. It is exciting to be part of wrestling the world away from this disaster."
"I started my band in high school. I was 16," Bono tells the kids. "I had a conviction at 16 that the world was sort of bendable if you were ready to throw a serious punch at it. I pray that you experience some of that. It's a great feeling."
The rock star poses for pictures, signs autographs and listens to an a capella song by one brave teen who wants to be a singer.
"You've got a beautiful voice and you've got balls of steel, and that will serve you well," Bono tells 15-year-old Jeremy Lee. "It was working there with the womenfolk."
A few nights later, after a languid dinner at a downtown Cincinnati restaurant with a fleet of aides from his humanitarian organization Debt AIDS and Trade in Africa (DATA) and various hangers on, Bono truly surprises a group of pre-Christmas revelers in the hotel ballroom.
He and comedian Chris Tucker, traveling with Bono on the DATA tour, walk in and inconspicuously gravitate to a corner with friends and start dancing until Tucker is noticed well before the rock star.
"They're so into their DJ. Isn't that great?" Bono, dancing with a drink in his hand, says to an acquaintance.
After dancing up a storm and briefly taking the DJ's microphone to say hello to the crowd, Bono and Tucker head back to their hotel rooms. But they are waylaid by the hotel band in an adjacent room.
Bono ends up singing "Lady Marmalade" for about 20 minutes.
Back in New York a few days later, he's riding rock-star style in a big black SUV to a recording studio in midtown Manhattan after appearing at a media event for the Rev. Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child at Kennedy Airport. (Graham's organization was airlifting presents to 80,000 HIV-positive children in Uganda and Senegal.)
Bono checks his voice mail. Twelve messages.
"Only the 12," he jokes.
There are business messages and personal messages. One from the Ghanaian children's choir, the Gateway Ambassadors, who had traveled with him on the DATA tour. They sang him a song and he held up the phone so the other people in the car could hear it. There were calls he'd forgotten to return, that one of his aides had returned for him.
"Oooh. The new Treasury secretary," Bono says, retrieving a message from U.S. Treasury Secretary-designate John Snow, who had just been appointed to replace Bono's friend, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
In a few more days, Bono would head home to reprise his "day job" with U2, recording a new album in their Dublin studio, and to celebrate the holidays with his family.
"Oooh, I'm getting excited. I just had a first Christmas thought," he says. He's already done a little Christmas shopping for Eli at FAO Schwartz. "I found an amazing thing for him. I got some good stuff to bring home."
Pointing to a blocklong line of shoppers waiting to get into the flagship Fifth Avenue toy store, he tells a tale of woe from his shopping excursion.
"Look at that queue! It's mad. I walked around the back and at the back of the store there is no queue. You can walk straight in. I saw all these people in the queue and I thought, 'This is crazy,' " he says passionately. "So I went around and I saw these people -- women with kids. I said, 'There's a back door. You don't have to wait.' And they just looked at me. They wouldn't take the tip."
Bono's no saint. But he's a great guy.
? Chicago Sun-Times, 2002.
Chicago Sun-Times, December 25, 2002
Cathleen Falsani, Staff Reporter
Bono has a hole in his sock. Not down by the toes where nobody can see it. Up by the ankle bone, peeking over the top of his black designer shoes with the thick soles.
He also chews his fingernails, is afraid of heights and drinks red wine despite being terribly allergic to it.
Bono may be one of the world's most famous rock stars, but more than anything else, he is a guy.
The kind of guy who might be holding court and a Heineken at the Cork and Kerry in Beverly any given Friday.
The kind who sings to himself and uses funny voices when he talks to children. The kind who kisses acquaintances hello and goodbye, and knows the names of their mothers.
The kind who, three weeks before Christmas with four kids of his own at home in Dublin and a U2 album waiting to be recorded in the studio, would hop on a bus in Nebraska to schlep across the American Midwest talking about the plight of HIV-positive Africans.
"You can't fix every problem, but what you can fix, you must," Bono would say time and again when people would ask why he was stumping for suffering Africans. "I keep waiting for people to go, 'You're Irish. Shut up.' But they haven't. And so while they haven't, I'm going to keep doing it."
While Bono may be one of the richest men in Ireland and one of the most successful entertainers in rock 'n' roll, he hasn't shrugged off his working-class Dublin roots and no-nonsense sensibilities.
His real name is Paul David Hewson.
He's been married to his high-school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, for 20 years.
He says "please" and "thank you" to the people whose salary he pays. He holds doors.
He likes McDonald's breakfasts. He eats meat. He often says grace before meals.
His hair's messed up, he's a champion cusser and he has a devilish sense of humor.
"I never, never really felt loved," Bono says in Nebraska, lying across a leather bench in his touring bus and plopping his head into the lap of an unsuspecting veteran political reporter who looks as if he might jump out of his skin.
"People think performers, that it's all about love me, love me, love me. And they're right!" he says, giggling wildly. "It's not that they want everyone in the crowd to love them. It's usually just one person and the crowd has one face. It could be a lover. It could be somebody who bullied them at school. It could be their teacher. It could be their father. That's my theory. Most great performers are performing for one person."
So who's his person?
"That's why I was just getting comfortable there," Bono chirps, motioning to the still-flummoxed reporter. "I was trying to figure that out."
Typically, people who have never met him want to know two things about Bono:
Is he really that short and is he really that nice?
Well, when we're both wearing our big boots, we stand about eye to eye and I'm 5'5".
And yes, he really is that nice.
But is he cool? They want to know.
Let's put it this way. He's cooler than most reporters I know because HE'S A ROCK STAR. But in the spectrum of general human behavior, he's really kind of a goober.
Case in point: Bono has two adolescent daughters -- Jordan (whom he calls "Jo Jo"), 13, and Eve, 11. They are, of course, the ultimate arbiters of cool.
"I had [hip-hop stars] Jay Z and Beyonce Knowles and some other people that they look up to over to my house in France," Bono tells me as we drive down Fifth Avenue in New York City. "We were all sitting around having a laugh and having a drink and I went into the fridge to get something...and I overheard Eve going, 'He's probably boring their arses off talking about Africa!'
"She just adores Jay Z. He's the man. And the same for Beyonce. They're probably two of her favorites and she was a little concerned I was gonna blow the cool," he says, laughing at himself. "She's cool. She's 11."
It's all about perspective. Even rock stars' children eventually think their parents are embarrassing.
Phoning home to Dublin to check on the kids, he pretends to be a character from Thomas the Tank Engine, putting on a boggy English accent, reminiscent of sometime Thomas narrator Ringo Starr.
"Hey-loooo. Hah-looooh. Is Thomas the Tank Engine in the background," Bono barks into a teeny cell phone. "I'm coming home as the fat conductor. I don't know what happened."
"How are the little boys?" Bono asks the woman minding the children at his Irish home, referring to Elijah, 3, and John, 1. "I'm glad you're there and don't let them torture you too much."
"John is a thug," he tells me, smiling proudly.
Already? At the grand age of 1?
"Mmm, hmmm. He's a thug. Just indestructible. He could walk through plate glass."
Just like his father?
"Yeah. I'm one of those people that, I'll have sort of a nagging sort of pain in my right shoulder for a few days, and then somebody will walk up to me and say, 'What is the knife doing in your back?' Oh? Is that it? Ali says I'm out of touch with my physical self."
Bono is, however, very much in touch with his inner child, at least the one that graduated from rebel to rock star when he was a teenager.
Arriving at Davenport, Iowa's Central High School, one of several supposedly surprise appearances on his Heart of America humanitarian tour, Bono immediately regresses to about age 13.
"WHAMP! WHAMP! WHAAAAMMMPP!"
Someone's laying on the horn of the tour bus and sending Bono's minion handlers into a frenzy.
"It's supposed to be a surprise! What if the kids look out the window and see the tour bus!! Who's honking THAT HORN!!!!"
Um, that would be Bono.
He's sitting behind the wheel of his tour bus, playing with the hydraulic seat, doing an imitation of Billy Bob Thornton's character from the movie Sling Blade.
"Mmm, hmm. Pertaters. Mmm hmm," he says, once again giggling like a madman. "Pertaters. Mmm hmm."
Somehow the rock star wranglers get him off the bus and into the school where the full regression to teenage Bono is staved off until after he, actress Ashley Judd and an HIV-positive Ugandan nurse traveling with him have completed their presentation about AIDS in Africa.
But the rock star cannot help himself. The urge to act out is too strong.
First he doodles a cartoon of himself on the chalkboard. Then he asks Judd to do the same.
She writes "Ashley loves Education + Bono" with a heart around it.
"Can I finish it?" Bono asks.
Taking chalk in hand, he turns the heart into a female figure vaguely resembling the actress. Then he dots the top of an upside-down heart with chalk nipples and the high school class gasps.
"The '80s were responsible for a lot of terrible shit," he says, as they gasp again. "Shoulder pads and the mullet. But also, Live Aid."
("He hasn't sworn this whole tour until now," Judd tells the kids.)
Bono's definitely got their attention. And then he turns deadly serious again.
"The crisis in Africa now is so much worse than it was then, but there's less energy in the air to deal with it. Have we become numb to the pictures on TV?" he asks the rapt teens. "The reason we turn the channel when we see these things is that we think we can't do anything about it. It is exciting to be part of wrestling the world away from this disaster."
"I started my band in high school. I was 16," Bono tells the kids. "I had a conviction at 16 that the world was sort of bendable if you were ready to throw a serious punch at it. I pray that you experience some of that. It's a great feeling."
The rock star poses for pictures, signs autographs and listens to an a capella song by one brave teen who wants to be a singer.
"You've got a beautiful voice and you've got balls of steel, and that will serve you well," Bono tells 15-year-old Jeremy Lee. "It was working there with the womenfolk."
A few nights later, after a languid dinner at a downtown Cincinnati restaurant with a fleet of aides from his humanitarian organization Debt AIDS and Trade in Africa (DATA) and various hangers on, Bono truly surprises a group of pre-Christmas revelers in the hotel ballroom.
He and comedian Chris Tucker, traveling with Bono on the DATA tour, walk in and inconspicuously gravitate to a corner with friends and start dancing until Tucker is noticed well before the rock star.
"They're so into their DJ. Isn't that great?" Bono, dancing with a drink in his hand, says to an acquaintance.
After dancing up a storm and briefly taking the DJ's microphone to say hello to the crowd, Bono and Tucker head back to their hotel rooms. But they are waylaid by the hotel band in an adjacent room.
Bono ends up singing "Lady Marmalade" for about 20 minutes.
Back in New York a few days later, he's riding rock-star style in a big black SUV to a recording studio in midtown Manhattan after appearing at a media event for the Rev. Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child at Kennedy Airport. (Graham's organization was airlifting presents to 80,000 HIV-positive children in Uganda and Senegal.)
Bono checks his voice mail. Twelve messages.
"Only the 12," he jokes.
There are business messages and personal messages. One from the Ghanaian children's choir, the Gateway Ambassadors, who had traveled with him on the DATA tour. They sang him a song and he held up the phone so the other people in the car could hear it. There were calls he'd forgotten to return, that one of his aides had returned for him.
"Oooh. The new Treasury secretary," Bono says, retrieving a message from U.S. Treasury Secretary-designate John Snow, who had just been appointed to replace Bono's friend, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
In a few more days, Bono would head home to reprise his "day job" with U2, recording a new album in their Dublin studio, and to celebrate the holidays with his family.
"Oooh, I'm getting excited. I just had a first Christmas thought," he says. He's already done a little Christmas shopping for Eli at FAO Schwartz. "I found an amazing thing for him. I got some good stuff to bring home."
Pointing to a blocklong line of shoppers waiting to get into the flagship Fifth Avenue toy store, he tells a tale of woe from his shopping excursion.
"Look at that queue! It's mad. I walked around the back and at the back of the store there is no queue. You can walk straight in. I saw all these people in the queue and I thought, 'This is crazy,' " he says passionately. "So I went around and I saw these people -- women with kids. I said, 'There's a back door. You don't have to wait.' And they just looked at me. They wouldn't take the tip."
Bono's no saint. But he's a great guy.
? Chicago Sun-Times, 2002.
Bono 
that is an awesome article!! 
What a great character. He's so ... human ... in a very cool kind of way. 
