Ottofilm
The Fly
Thoughts on a tour's second anniversary...
Okay so I meant to sit down and write a paragraph or two about the tour anniversary, share a snippet of the story behind my many thousands of tour photos, and it got completely out of hand. (Funny, just like my tour.) All these words, and I just barely get TO Miami by the end of it. But if you're bored or need a break from war news, hey, it's something to do. There are some updates about my site at the bottom, if you want to just scroll really fast to the links. (If you're saying "what site?", it's http://www.u2photos.com, with 2,000 original photos from 64 U2 shows over two tours.)
--
Thoughts on a tour's second anniversary...
Someday I need to write down a longer version of the events that led to this day, the beginning of a fifty thousand mile journey on the map and somehow, an even greater distance in my head. I meant to, actually, so that the six people interested in reading this story could do it with the proper background. I spent a couple of nights on a grape farm once, and the farmer liked to take you out amongst the vines and show you the different types of grapes, how this seven foot elevation change makes it just slightly cooler and better for this grape over that, how the composition of the soil gets into the taste of it. You could see bits of this and that in the dirt - this soil here is chemically like a certain part of the south of France, and that soil over there is just like this part of the Napa Valley - and then you could taste bits of this and that when he handed you a grape growing right above it. Back in the house he'd pull out (frequently award-winning) bottles of wine made from his grapes, and then you could taste not just the wine, but the soil and the elevation and the rain and the air in that corner of Pennsylvania and everything. Without the background, all you see in the bottle is some grape juice.
(Okay, so all I see is some grape juice. I'm sure there are Wine People out there who would mock my childlike fascination with that. Yes, I wore out a copy of How Things Work when I was a kid, and yes, I thought the giant grape-picking machine that goes over the entire vine like some sort of alien space ship and moved down the row getting all the grapes. So sue me.)
But a) I didn't get it done before the anniversary came around, and while I have plenty of external reasons I could blame it on the reality is I just didn't get it done; and b) I think we all have a story that's somehow similar and maybe you don't need all that much detail on mine. Unlike the artful crafting of a bottle of wine, I think we're mostly born this way: I think some of a love - no, a NEED - for music is genetic, not just from generation to generation but woven into our fabric from the start. We've got exactly 163 countries, 5,604 cultures and 12,203 languages on this planet, but everyone has music. Okay, I guessed at all those numbers without so much as a Google search for "facts". But you know it's true - we all have a heart, and the beating of that heart leads to a drum, with a drum as a heart a life is created outside the individual, surrounding and embracing all who hear it: the tribe around the campfire, the buddies listening to the bar band, children with their kindergarten teacher, or 18,000 people in an arena.
--
But I get ahead of myself. We do all have a different soil composition around our feet and if you follow the analogy out to a marginally logical extreme, variations in taste are to be expected. I'm still trying to figure out what's in my soil, and maybe that's the reason I'm writing, for me: trying to map how I got here. I know the basic components: about half English, about half German, and a sixteenth or so Irish. (I'd like to say that sixteenth helps me get into trouble and out of boredom, but it's not that easy.) I don't get the feeling that all that much musicnessity (yeah, sure, it's a word NOW) came from my mom's side of things, but dad was from a small west Texas oil town. The sandy soil and roughnecks tuned his internal radio to Bob Wills and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams; the internal smirk that so often means "smartass" (I've got it, I'm sure) brought in the Elvis. It sucked him in so far that when he died his memorial service was held on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, attended by the stars and musicians he wrote about for a living. His card didn't say "writer" or "researcher" or the most apt title, "music historian" - they just said "country music." Reality forced me to sell nearly his entire collection - a good 50,000 albums, 45's, 78's, tapes, CD's - but it wasn't really my music, and I felt someone who heard that in their heart should have it. (A music library foundation ended up with it.)
Proof it's genetic: barring any mishaps, in about a month I'll have a daughter. She kicks inside her mother when there's coffee, when there's sugar, when there's been something good to eat. She kicks hard at scary movies. There's a fair amount of music playing in the house, but she never responded to any of it with anything specific until one night while watching Conan she started moving in motion - dancing, perhaps - to a bluegrass band. Bluegrass! I am my father's son. And she clearly will be my father's granddaughter. The part of that equation after the equal sign - that she will be her father's daughter - hit me for the first time that night. I have no idea who she will grow up to be, what she will do with her life, what beats will move her. Rock and trip hop and a bit of the blues ended up in my dirt, along with about a thousand other things. But I know the core has that bit of west Texas in it - from my father's collection, I did keep everything Johnny Cash has ever recorded. I wonder what 25 or 50 years or whatever from now, she'll keep from mine.
--
Well, that's getting way, way ahead of myself. Back to... Florida. When I went off to film school, I tried to start fresh. I had a miserable time in high school, taunted and mocked for looking and acting weird to the point where I wondered if changing my name when I went to Orlando would help. (Glad now I didn't do it.) I knew I hadn't found my element yet and I was hoping I could find it in the film business, as I love movies as much (but differently) than music. I tried to start fresh, and I mentioned casually to my dad one day that I need new music. Huey Lewis and the News was fine when you were 14, but... I was sensing something missing. Dad didn't have a lot of money (writing about music? hahahahaha) but a few days later a reasonably sizable check arrived in the mail with a note: "This ain't the rent. Don't forget the music. Love, Dad." I thought at the time it was wonderfully extravagant. Today, I realize it was like oxygen. (And that couple of hundred bucks didn't put as much into my musical gas tank as the kids in the generation behind me can get for next to nothing with Napster before and now Kaaza. I know where I got... how far are all of THEM going to go?) I started hitting a used store called "Sell-Trade-Buy" (the order the owner would rather do business in, he said) and experimenting with the drug that is five inch aluminum discs. Frankly, I was a slow learner. I found things I really should have found in high school (Depeche Mode) and things that were perhaps not the most challenging thing in the world even if they're really good (Tom Petty). I completely missed things I should have hit while they were new (took me years to buy Pretty Hate Machine and to be honest I can't remember how long it took me to find Nirvana, which exploded ALL OVER the music world while I was at school... doh!) and things I should never admit to having bought (anyone need a Jane Child CD? It's a collector's item, I swear).
And then one day in the fall "The Fly" came on the radio.
I will pile onto my musical stupidity up to this point by admitting I knew OF all these songs that were on one album by one band and it was Joshua Tree or something, but I'd never bought it. (In my defense, I was mostly buying used CD's to save money, just sort of letting my tastes be guided by what's in the bins, and Joshua Tree for many years never turned up used ANYWHERE I ever was.) But this... this...
As I write this, I just put it on. No, not loud enough. Back up, start over. How did I not melt an amp with this twelve years ago? Listen to that. Listen to the dirt in that guitar. There is bite to it, heft. It's full of rust, the soil this comes from. Bad for grapes, excellent for guitars. And in the singer's voice... you can see with your ears a smirk. Dad's smirk got him Elvis. Mine got me Bono.
--
"Mysterious Ways" was next up, and it just pulled me in more. The lyrics pulled me somewhere good but alien, matching my opinion of Florida after a lifetime significantly further north. The album release was my first midnight onsale experience, and from the first moment of "Zoo Station" I went somewhere new. I don't think I've come back.
Lucky for me, the band decided to start the Zoo TV tour in Florida, about a half an hour from where I lived.
--
Here I need to abbreviate heavily because there's no way to do justice to the next big chunks of the story in the amount of time I've got today. I have no photos from ZooTV to speak for my experiences and telling that part of the story properly will have to come another day. We'll have to sum it up as a bit of legwork and luck helped me into four tickets to the Miami show. Three friends from school went with me, two days early, and we headed for the Keys, figuring it was better than 8am lectures in classes only marginally related to our degree. I learned you can't pick a fight in a tourist bar (one of my friends is a former navy sub engineer and gets bored fast) and that sunsets over water move me so that I knew I had to head to the west coast as soon as I graduated; the fact that the film business was there was just sort of a bonus. And in a decaying old arena in a rough part of downtown Miami I learned the band's dirty little secret: while they've made incredible, life-altering albums, selling many many many millions of copies, winning piles of Grammys ... they're really a live band. We drove back in the night, arriving after five in the morning, all of us with a lecture in three hours. I was dropped off first, the only one in a different apartment complex, and I stood outside for a few minutes. An early March dawn where I come from stings you alive, the briskness of a winter that refuses to let go yet slapping you into the present. In Florida it's warm and alive with a constant lazy breeze and humidity that dances across you, a gentleness that awakens all your senses without assaulting them. Something in my mind was still in the guitar and lights, was still in that crowd in Miami witnessing something unlike anything it has witnessed before. Maybe that sounds like hooey: it's a band on a stage with a hell of a show and that's that. But I was in Florida to learn, to let things mold my impressionable self. This was just a class not on my official schedule.
--
Skip forward: graduation, and Los Angeles as soon as the fires from the riots die down. Outside Broadcast comes around and I hit all three southern California shows. I've never seen anything of that scale in my life. I'd done a little theater tech in high school and a buzz pass at community college, and this to me was theater, a show, of a new magnitude. There's more to tell, but it must wait until another day.
Skip way forward: I thought I had all that silly childish rock and roll stuff out of my system - movies were my future, I was sure - and I planned to go to all of two PopMart shows: Los Angeles, where I was living, and Las Vegas, because that was the start of the tour and it was only four hours away. Las Vegas was not a good time for me for personal reasons - a story for another day, absolutely - and on a whim I went to the San Diego show just a few days later, to try the experience again. I learned why not to buy tickets outside the venue from someone you don't know, and I learned how great U2 fans can be when someone I'd just met let me and my then girlfriend share their space in the 14th row. In June I gave myself a birthday present of going to the Oakland PopMarts because I wanted to see Oasis open. So far, I'd always just been someone in the crowd, frequently far away and in the stands, but never really up close. That changed June 19th; I'd gone to the box office the day before to get a ticket to this show and as it turns out, one more seat fit in each row next to the B-stage than the original sales plan had allowed, so those seats were available. Advantage for going to shows by yourself even if it's not by choice: sometimes awesome tickets like this open up. I took a cheap little plastic camera from Target with me, as I'd seen a lot of people with cameras at the previous shows and nobody seemed to mind. I was right on the rail by the B-stage, and that's when I learned: there were a LOT of people in that space who didn't necessarily have tickets there; it was a strange grey area that somehow managed to fill up with fans. It was like a two foot wide general admission area. At one point I was taking a photo of Bono as he went by on the B-stage and a man in all black with a headset ducked out of the way. I shouted "thank you" and reached out my hand. He smiled and shook my hand, and kept going. I met him after the show in the parking lot waiting for the band to come out, and it turned out he was in charge of security for the band and had been for years. I thanked him again for getting out of the way, and said I wish I'd known so many people had "real" cameras because my tickets for LA weren't nearly as good. He said he was the one that allowed such things, and if I didn't bring a zoom lens and fancy pro gear, he'd be fine with it, and if I'd find him at the show he's help me get up to the b-stage rail and let me shoot. Egads! And I hadn't even told him that the LA show was on my birthday. So I took my SLR and only my fixed 50mm lens to the LA show, managed to get myself to the rail, and as he went running by once before the show started, I showed him the camera. "Is this okay?" I said to the blur, and he nodded at me and said fine and never stopped. When I got the photos back, I knew I had to share my good fortune with others. That whole "internet" thing was just getting going and I had a little bit of web space with my dial-up account. A friend had a scanner...
That handshake in Oakland is why http://u2photos.com exists now.
--
The third and fourth legs of PopMart - a drive across the US, a car breaking my leg into fourteen pieces and nearly killing me in Toronto after the first show, doing shows in wheelchairs and on crutches, how I suddenly found myself in Australia for the shows, all that good stuff - will also have to wait for another day. At least I have pictures to show from it all.
--
Life went and did what it does while you're off making other plans. My father died, too young. My Hollywood dreams - or my ambition - got lost in depression, and a long relationship went along with it. I thought I'd have a California driver's license forever, but eight years to the day of my first arrival in the city, I left Los Angeles by the same road I came in on. I drifted for a while, enjoying the freedom of being able to do things like give an old friend in New York City a ride to church camp - in Michigan. I eventually landed in Idaho, deciding to see if I could start over in a town a tiny fraction the size of where I'd been, to see if whatever woke up in my dad in his small town could wake back up in me.
I kept taking pictures of bands and in the fall of 2000 I had a lot of luck shooting nearly every band that came to town, and while I wasn't making any money I felt I had an eye that was working, if nothing else was. I heard that the Irish band in question would be doing a breakfast performance/interview with the morning DJ's of a Los Angeles radio station. Something in me said: you won't get in, but take some photos, find their manager outside, and ask for a job.
Yes, I've had delusions of grandeur before, why do you ask?
To skip the good parts (you know, the fifteen hour overnight drive, sleeping in my car at a rest stop, stuff like that) I never found the manager but I did get into the breakfast. No camera, sorry. (And trust me, I am sorry.) I ended up not even two feet from Bono when he lunged forward to launch into the first public performance of "Elevation" and he wasn't wearing shades. From up close, without a camera or shades in the way, I could see into his eyes, and there was a fire, a passion, stoked for months and ready to go out and move the world. I was instantly awake again, as I hadn't been in years.
The album came out three days later and I bought it at midnight, playing it over and over as I drove back across the Nevada desert heading home. It was great, but I knew the band's dirty little secret. It's great when it's you and your car stereo and hundreds of miles of Joshua trees and nothing else, but to really go someplace else, you needed to get into the room with 15,000 other people. I knew I had to get out on this tour, to as many shows as I could afford. I had to get to the first show... in Miami.
--
Heavens, it took a long time to get to the start, and now I should probably go do something else with what's left of the day. I didn't even tell everything, and I've gotten to the show that I'm contemplating the anniversary of. For the three of you still reading, I think I'll have to tell about the rehearsals and the first two shows in part two, on Wednesday probably, the date of the second show and the first ever photo pass I had for this band I'd been watching for a decade now. For now, here are the photos from the first show:
http://www.u2photos.com/U2/elevation/fortlauderdale/01mar24.html
Thanks for reading all this...
otto
--
Here are the site updates mentioned about 3,300 words ago. I've reposted the wallpapers that disappeared a little while ago; nearly thirty of them from PopMart and Elevation. The Elevation ones are here and there's a link to the PopMart ones:
http://www.u2photos.com/U2/elevation/galleries/wallpaper.html
The whole site is thumbnailed now, and should be MUCH easier to browse if you're on dial-up.
It's a regrettable part of life that things cost money, and running the site costs money. It's also regrettable that there is no way legally or logistically I can make prints for everyone who wants them. The best compromise for right now I have a handful of museum quality prints available at http://www.kitsinger.com. It's worth dropping by and looking even if aren't looking for anything for your walls, as the display images are made from much higher quality scans than the scans on my main site.
Thanks and have a good day.
Okay so I meant to sit down and write a paragraph or two about the tour anniversary, share a snippet of the story behind my many thousands of tour photos, and it got completely out of hand. (Funny, just like my tour.) All these words, and I just barely get TO Miami by the end of it. But if you're bored or need a break from war news, hey, it's something to do. There are some updates about my site at the bottom, if you want to just scroll really fast to the links. (If you're saying "what site?", it's http://www.u2photos.com, with 2,000 original photos from 64 U2 shows over two tours.)
--
Thoughts on a tour's second anniversary...
Someday I need to write down a longer version of the events that led to this day, the beginning of a fifty thousand mile journey on the map and somehow, an even greater distance in my head. I meant to, actually, so that the six people interested in reading this story could do it with the proper background. I spent a couple of nights on a grape farm once, and the farmer liked to take you out amongst the vines and show you the different types of grapes, how this seven foot elevation change makes it just slightly cooler and better for this grape over that, how the composition of the soil gets into the taste of it. You could see bits of this and that in the dirt - this soil here is chemically like a certain part of the south of France, and that soil over there is just like this part of the Napa Valley - and then you could taste bits of this and that when he handed you a grape growing right above it. Back in the house he'd pull out (frequently award-winning) bottles of wine made from his grapes, and then you could taste not just the wine, but the soil and the elevation and the rain and the air in that corner of Pennsylvania and everything. Without the background, all you see in the bottle is some grape juice.
(Okay, so all I see is some grape juice. I'm sure there are Wine People out there who would mock my childlike fascination with that. Yes, I wore out a copy of How Things Work when I was a kid, and yes, I thought the giant grape-picking machine that goes over the entire vine like some sort of alien space ship and moved down the row getting all the grapes. So sue me.)
But a) I didn't get it done before the anniversary came around, and while I have plenty of external reasons I could blame it on the reality is I just didn't get it done; and b) I think we all have a story that's somehow similar and maybe you don't need all that much detail on mine. Unlike the artful crafting of a bottle of wine, I think we're mostly born this way: I think some of a love - no, a NEED - for music is genetic, not just from generation to generation but woven into our fabric from the start. We've got exactly 163 countries, 5,604 cultures and 12,203 languages on this planet, but everyone has music. Okay, I guessed at all those numbers without so much as a Google search for "facts". But you know it's true - we all have a heart, and the beating of that heart leads to a drum, with a drum as a heart a life is created outside the individual, surrounding and embracing all who hear it: the tribe around the campfire, the buddies listening to the bar band, children with their kindergarten teacher, or 18,000 people in an arena.
--
But I get ahead of myself. We do all have a different soil composition around our feet and if you follow the analogy out to a marginally logical extreme, variations in taste are to be expected. I'm still trying to figure out what's in my soil, and maybe that's the reason I'm writing, for me: trying to map how I got here. I know the basic components: about half English, about half German, and a sixteenth or so Irish. (I'd like to say that sixteenth helps me get into trouble and out of boredom, but it's not that easy.) I don't get the feeling that all that much musicnessity (yeah, sure, it's a word NOW) came from my mom's side of things, but dad was from a small west Texas oil town. The sandy soil and roughnecks tuned his internal radio to Bob Wills and Johnny Cash and Hank Williams; the internal smirk that so often means "smartass" (I've got it, I'm sure) brought in the Elvis. It sucked him in so far that when he died his memorial service was held on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, attended by the stars and musicians he wrote about for a living. His card didn't say "writer" or "researcher" or the most apt title, "music historian" - they just said "country music." Reality forced me to sell nearly his entire collection - a good 50,000 albums, 45's, 78's, tapes, CD's - but it wasn't really my music, and I felt someone who heard that in their heart should have it. (A music library foundation ended up with it.)
Proof it's genetic: barring any mishaps, in about a month I'll have a daughter. She kicks inside her mother when there's coffee, when there's sugar, when there's been something good to eat. She kicks hard at scary movies. There's a fair amount of music playing in the house, but she never responded to any of it with anything specific until one night while watching Conan she started moving in motion - dancing, perhaps - to a bluegrass band. Bluegrass! I am my father's son. And she clearly will be my father's granddaughter. The part of that equation after the equal sign - that she will be her father's daughter - hit me for the first time that night. I have no idea who she will grow up to be, what she will do with her life, what beats will move her. Rock and trip hop and a bit of the blues ended up in my dirt, along with about a thousand other things. But I know the core has that bit of west Texas in it - from my father's collection, I did keep everything Johnny Cash has ever recorded. I wonder what 25 or 50 years or whatever from now, she'll keep from mine.
--
Well, that's getting way, way ahead of myself. Back to... Florida. When I went off to film school, I tried to start fresh. I had a miserable time in high school, taunted and mocked for looking and acting weird to the point where I wondered if changing my name when I went to Orlando would help. (Glad now I didn't do it.) I knew I hadn't found my element yet and I was hoping I could find it in the film business, as I love movies as much (but differently) than music. I tried to start fresh, and I mentioned casually to my dad one day that I need new music. Huey Lewis and the News was fine when you were 14, but... I was sensing something missing. Dad didn't have a lot of money (writing about music? hahahahaha) but a few days later a reasonably sizable check arrived in the mail with a note: "This ain't the rent. Don't forget the music. Love, Dad." I thought at the time it was wonderfully extravagant. Today, I realize it was like oxygen. (And that couple of hundred bucks didn't put as much into my musical gas tank as the kids in the generation behind me can get for next to nothing with Napster before and now Kaaza. I know where I got... how far are all of THEM going to go?) I started hitting a used store called "Sell-Trade-Buy" (the order the owner would rather do business in, he said) and experimenting with the drug that is five inch aluminum discs. Frankly, I was a slow learner. I found things I really should have found in high school (Depeche Mode) and things that were perhaps not the most challenging thing in the world even if they're really good (Tom Petty). I completely missed things I should have hit while they were new (took me years to buy Pretty Hate Machine and to be honest I can't remember how long it took me to find Nirvana, which exploded ALL OVER the music world while I was at school... doh!) and things I should never admit to having bought (anyone need a Jane Child CD? It's a collector's item, I swear).
And then one day in the fall "The Fly" came on the radio.
I will pile onto my musical stupidity up to this point by admitting I knew OF all these songs that were on one album by one band and it was Joshua Tree or something, but I'd never bought it. (In my defense, I was mostly buying used CD's to save money, just sort of letting my tastes be guided by what's in the bins, and Joshua Tree for many years never turned up used ANYWHERE I ever was.) But this... this...
As I write this, I just put it on. No, not loud enough. Back up, start over. How did I not melt an amp with this twelve years ago? Listen to that. Listen to the dirt in that guitar. There is bite to it, heft. It's full of rust, the soil this comes from. Bad for grapes, excellent for guitars. And in the singer's voice... you can see with your ears a smirk. Dad's smirk got him Elvis. Mine got me Bono.
--
"Mysterious Ways" was next up, and it just pulled me in more. The lyrics pulled me somewhere good but alien, matching my opinion of Florida after a lifetime significantly further north. The album release was my first midnight onsale experience, and from the first moment of "Zoo Station" I went somewhere new. I don't think I've come back.
Lucky for me, the band decided to start the Zoo TV tour in Florida, about a half an hour from where I lived.
--
Here I need to abbreviate heavily because there's no way to do justice to the next big chunks of the story in the amount of time I've got today. I have no photos from ZooTV to speak for my experiences and telling that part of the story properly will have to come another day. We'll have to sum it up as a bit of legwork and luck helped me into four tickets to the Miami show. Three friends from school went with me, two days early, and we headed for the Keys, figuring it was better than 8am lectures in classes only marginally related to our degree. I learned you can't pick a fight in a tourist bar (one of my friends is a former navy sub engineer and gets bored fast) and that sunsets over water move me so that I knew I had to head to the west coast as soon as I graduated; the fact that the film business was there was just sort of a bonus. And in a decaying old arena in a rough part of downtown Miami I learned the band's dirty little secret: while they've made incredible, life-altering albums, selling many many many millions of copies, winning piles of Grammys ... they're really a live band. We drove back in the night, arriving after five in the morning, all of us with a lecture in three hours. I was dropped off first, the only one in a different apartment complex, and I stood outside for a few minutes. An early March dawn where I come from stings you alive, the briskness of a winter that refuses to let go yet slapping you into the present. In Florida it's warm and alive with a constant lazy breeze and humidity that dances across you, a gentleness that awakens all your senses without assaulting them. Something in my mind was still in the guitar and lights, was still in that crowd in Miami witnessing something unlike anything it has witnessed before. Maybe that sounds like hooey: it's a band on a stage with a hell of a show and that's that. But I was in Florida to learn, to let things mold my impressionable self. This was just a class not on my official schedule.
--
Skip forward: graduation, and Los Angeles as soon as the fires from the riots die down. Outside Broadcast comes around and I hit all three southern California shows. I've never seen anything of that scale in my life. I'd done a little theater tech in high school and a buzz pass at community college, and this to me was theater, a show, of a new magnitude. There's more to tell, but it must wait until another day.
Skip way forward: I thought I had all that silly childish rock and roll stuff out of my system - movies were my future, I was sure - and I planned to go to all of two PopMart shows: Los Angeles, where I was living, and Las Vegas, because that was the start of the tour and it was only four hours away. Las Vegas was not a good time for me for personal reasons - a story for another day, absolutely - and on a whim I went to the San Diego show just a few days later, to try the experience again. I learned why not to buy tickets outside the venue from someone you don't know, and I learned how great U2 fans can be when someone I'd just met let me and my then girlfriend share their space in the 14th row. In June I gave myself a birthday present of going to the Oakland PopMarts because I wanted to see Oasis open. So far, I'd always just been someone in the crowd, frequently far away and in the stands, but never really up close. That changed June 19th; I'd gone to the box office the day before to get a ticket to this show and as it turns out, one more seat fit in each row next to the B-stage than the original sales plan had allowed, so those seats were available. Advantage for going to shows by yourself even if it's not by choice: sometimes awesome tickets like this open up. I took a cheap little plastic camera from Target with me, as I'd seen a lot of people with cameras at the previous shows and nobody seemed to mind. I was right on the rail by the B-stage, and that's when I learned: there were a LOT of people in that space who didn't necessarily have tickets there; it was a strange grey area that somehow managed to fill up with fans. It was like a two foot wide general admission area. At one point I was taking a photo of Bono as he went by on the B-stage and a man in all black with a headset ducked out of the way. I shouted "thank you" and reached out my hand. He smiled and shook my hand, and kept going. I met him after the show in the parking lot waiting for the band to come out, and it turned out he was in charge of security for the band and had been for years. I thanked him again for getting out of the way, and said I wish I'd known so many people had "real" cameras because my tickets for LA weren't nearly as good. He said he was the one that allowed such things, and if I didn't bring a zoom lens and fancy pro gear, he'd be fine with it, and if I'd find him at the show he's help me get up to the b-stage rail and let me shoot. Egads! And I hadn't even told him that the LA show was on my birthday. So I took my SLR and only my fixed 50mm lens to the LA show, managed to get myself to the rail, and as he went running by once before the show started, I showed him the camera. "Is this okay?" I said to the blur, and he nodded at me and said fine and never stopped. When I got the photos back, I knew I had to share my good fortune with others. That whole "internet" thing was just getting going and I had a little bit of web space with my dial-up account. A friend had a scanner...
That handshake in Oakland is why http://u2photos.com exists now.
--
The third and fourth legs of PopMart - a drive across the US, a car breaking my leg into fourteen pieces and nearly killing me in Toronto after the first show, doing shows in wheelchairs and on crutches, how I suddenly found myself in Australia for the shows, all that good stuff - will also have to wait for another day. At least I have pictures to show from it all.
--
Life went and did what it does while you're off making other plans. My father died, too young. My Hollywood dreams - or my ambition - got lost in depression, and a long relationship went along with it. I thought I'd have a California driver's license forever, but eight years to the day of my first arrival in the city, I left Los Angeles by the same road I came in on. I drifted for a while, enjoying the freedom of being able to do things like give an old friend in New York City a ride to church camp - in Michigan. I eventually landed in Idaho, deciding to see if I could start over in a town a tiny fraction the size of where I'd been, to see if whatever woke up in my dad in his small town could wake back up in me.
I kept taking pictures of bands and in the fall of 2000 I had a lot of luck shooting nearly every band that came to town, and while I wasn't making any money I felt I had an eye that was working, if nothing else was. I heard that the Irish band in question would be doing a breakfast performance/interview with the morning DJ's of a Los Angeles radio station. Something in me said: you won't get in, but take some photos, find their manager outside, and ask for a job.
Yes, I've had delusions of grandeur before, why do you ask?
To skip the good parts (you know, the fifteen hour overnight drive, sleeping in my car at a rest stop, stuff like that) I never found the manager but I did get into the breakfast. No camera, sorry. (And trust me, I am sorry.) I ended up not even two feet from Bono when he lunged forward to launch into the first public performance of "Elevation" and he wasn't wearing shades. From up close, without a camera or shades in the way, I could see into his eyes, and there was a fire, a passion, stoked for months and ready to go out and move the world. I was instantly awake again, as I hadn't been in years.
The album came out three days later and I bought it at midnight, playing it over and over as I drove back across the Nevada desert heading home. It was great, but I knew the band's dirty little secret. It's great when it's you and your car stereo and hundreds of miles of Joshua trees and nothing else, but to really go someplace else, you needed to get into the room with 15,000 other people. I knew I had to get out on this tour, to as many shows as I could afford. I had to get to the first show... in Miami.
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Heavens, it took a long time to get to the start, and now I should probably go do something else with what's left of the day. I didn't even tell everything, and I've gotten to the show that I'm contemplating the anniversary of. For the three of you still reading, I think I'll have to tell about the rehearsals and the first two shows in part two, on Wednesday probably, the date of the second show and the first ever photo pass I had for this band I'd been watching for a decade now. For now, here are the photos from the first show:
http://www.u2photos.com/U2/elevation/fortlauderdale/01mar24.html
Thanks for reading all this...
otto
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Here are the site updates mentioned about 3,300 words ago. I've reposted the wallpapers that disappeared a little while ago; nearly thirty of them from PopMart and Elevation. The Elevation ones are here and there's a link to the PopMart ones:
http://www.u2photos.com/U2/elevation/galleries/wallpaper.html
The whole site is thumbnailed now, and should be MUCH easier to browse if you're on dial-up.
It's a regrettable part of life that things cost money, and running the site costs money. It's also regrettable that there is no way legally or logistically I can make prints for everyone who wants them. The best compromise for right now I have a handful of museum quality prints available at http://www.kitsinger.com. It's worth dropping by and looking even if aren't looking for anything for your walls, as the display images are made from much higher quality scans than the scans on my main site.
Thanks and have a good day.
