HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
Jim DeRogatis talks with U2's Larry Mullen Jr.
BY JIM DEROGATIS Pop Music Critic
Despite its status as a multi-platinum, arena-filling mega-band, U2 has always maintained a reputation for caring about its fans. But when tickets went on sale in late January for its Vertigo 2005 Tour, something went wrong.
Many of the faithful who paid $40 to join the band's fan club found themselves shut out when tickets went on sale via a system that ignored the special presale privileges and issued random codes instead. As a result, many of the prime tickets wound up with scalpers who have been peddling them for more than 20 times face value.
The group scheduled additional shows to make amends -- U2 performs four nights here beginning Saturday, then will return to Chicago on Sept. 20-21 -- but the band was stung nonetheless by criticism from fans and the press.
Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. seemed especially chagrined, and when the band won a Grammy for best rock performance by a Group with Vocals in February, he edged its always loquacious frontman Bono away from the mike so that he could issue a public and heartfelt apology.
Longtime fans have always considered Mullen the conscience and truest moral compass of the group, as well as one of the most distinctive drummers in rock.
In 1976, inspired by the Sex Pistols and London's punk explosion, a 14-year-old Mullen placed an ad on the bulletin board of Dublin's Mount Temple High School, eliciting responses from bassist Adam Clayton, guitarist Dave Evans (later the Edge), and an outspoken chap named Paul Hewson who, even though he couldn't sing particularly well at the time, brazenly rechristened himself Bono Vox (Latin for "good voice").
The rest, as VH1's "Behind the Music" is fond of saying, is history.
I had a long and wide-ranging conversation Monday with the man many consider the heart of U2 as the band made its way toward Chicago. Here are the highlights.
Q. I was moved by your comments at the Grammys, Larry. What happened with the ticket snafu, and why were you so upset about it?
A. We've always been a band that's depended on its audience to carry it through, and we've put them through a lot. We've experimented on our audience, and they've been incredibly loyal to us, so we're kind of sensitive to our audience -- to what they feel and what they think. We came out of being fans: We were fans of music, and we went to gigs.
The reason we charge $165 [for some seats] is so that we can also sell a ticket for $49.50 [for general admission on the floor] -- that's the point. We're selling the best seats in the house to those who can probably afford them, and those who sit in those seats subsidize the others. I think that's fair and that's the way it should be.
We're very conscious of pricing and the ticketing and how it happens, but this time around, the tour was on and the tour was off because of a family illness that I can't go into the details of. The tour wasn't going to happen for a long period of time, so the only way it could go forward was if we changed it, and it got changed at the last minute because the decision to do it came at the last minute. All the plans we'd made for this leg of the tour were completely canceled and thrown out, and it was turned around in a couple of days.
The rules that applied to the original tour didn't get changed in time, so it meant that when the tickets went on sale, you had complete pandemonium. We ended up with this crisis situation, and people felt that they had been had, because we hadn't explained to them, because we couldn't, why the tour had been changed.
To read the full interview, please visit the Chicago Sun-Times website.
BY JIM DEROGATIS Pop Music Critic
Despite its status as a multi-platinum, arena-filling mega-band, U2 has always maintained a reputation for caring about its fans. But when tickets went on sale in late January for its Vertigo 2005 Tour, something went wrong.
Many of the faithful who paid $40 to join the band's fan club found themselves shut out when tickets went on sale via a system that ignored the special presale privileges and issued random codes instead. As a result, many of the prime tickets wound up with scalpers who have been peddling them for more than 20 times face value.
The group scheduled additional shows to make amends -- U2 performs four nights here beginning Saturday, then will return to Chicago on Sept. 20-21 -- but the band was stung nonetheless by criticism from fans and the press.
Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. seemed especially chagrined, and when the band won a Grammy for best rock performance by a Group with Vocals in February, he edged its always loquacious frontman Bono away from the mike so that he could issue a public and heartfelt apology.
Longtime fans have always considered Mullen the conscience and truest moral compass of the group, as well as one of the most distinctive drummers in rock.
In 1976, inspired by the Sex Pistols and London's punk explosion, a 14-year-old Mullen placed an ad on the bulletin board of Dublin's Mount Temple High School, eliciting responses from bassist Adam Clayton, guitarist Dave Evans (later the Edge), and an outspoken chap named Paul Hewson who, even though he couldn't sing particularly well at the time, brazenly rechristened himself Bono Vox (Latin for "good voice").
The rest, as VH1's "Behind the Music" is fond of saying, is history.
I had a long and wide-ranging conversation Monday with the man many consider the heart of U2 as the band made its way toward Chicago. Here are the highlights.
Q. I was moved by your comments at the Grammys, Larry. What happened with the ticket snafu, and why were you so upset about it?
A. We've always been a band that's depended on its audience to carry it through, and we've put them through a lot. We've experimented on our audience, and they've been incredibly loyal to us, so we're kind of sensitive to our audience -- to what they feel and what they think. We came out of being fans: We were fans of music, and we went to gigs.
The reason we charge $165 [for some seats] is so that we can also sell a ticket for $49.50 [for general admission on the floor] -- that's the point. We're selling the best seats in the house to those who can probably afford them, and those who sit in those seats subsidize the others. I think that's fair and that's the way it should be.
We're very conscious of pricing and the ticketing and how it happens, but this time around, the tour was on and the tour was off because of a family illness that I can't go into the details of. The tour wasn't going to happen for a long period of time, so the only way it could go forward was if we changed it, and it got changed at the last minute because the decision to do it came at the last minute. All the plans we'd made for this leg of the tour were completely canceled and thrown out, and it was turned around in a couple of days.
The rules that applied to the original tour didn't get changed in time, so it meant that when the tickets went on sale, you had complete pandemonium. We ended up with this crisis situation, and people felt that they had been had, because we hadn't explained to them, because we couldn't, why the tour had been changed.
To read the full interview, please visit the Chicago Sun-Times website.
I draw the line at N'Sync, although Justin's solo album was pretty good. 
to 
)
