U2's Serious Fun

This is definitely the most surreal night of my life!" Bono exclaims halfway through the show, with all the sincerity a guy in pelvis-hugging black leather and space-pimp sunglasses can muster. Coming from someone decked out like a futuristic-sleazeball version of the Lizard King, it still sounds like a standard-issue rockstar snake-oil pitch. But in fact, it's a king-size understatement. Even on a tour remarkable for its giddy spirit of postmodern pranksterism, tonight's edition of U2's traveling Zoo TV party in Stockholm, Sweden, is prize-winning weird.

The competition has been stiff. There was the night in Detroit when Bono, using his special onstage phone hookup, called a local pizzeria and ordered a thousand pies to go. There was the night when Bono, merrily zapping his way through the satellite-TV menu with his remote control, unexpectedly treated the audience to a live broadcast of Paul Tsongas's announcing his withdrawal from the Democratic presidential race. And there were the nights--quite a few, actually--when during the encore, Bono picked up the phone and dialed the White House (202-456-1414, in case you're interested). Although he never got through to George Bush, he did get chummy with the puzzled White House operator. "Who are you?" she'd ask. "Why do you keep calling at night? Sounds like there are a lot of people with you."

At the Globe arena, in Stockholm, through, the techno-clowning of Zoo TV mutates into interactive Zoo theater. The usual show is a dizzying feast of video high jinks and high-definitions irony (Bono kissing a mirror, pumping his crotch into the camera) set to most of Achtung Baby and the requisite hits from The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. But tonight, Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. are supplementing their regularly scheduled programming with a live TV feed to and from the home of John Harris of Nottinghamshire, England. Harris, an ardent U2 fan who works for the Pretty Polly lingerie company, won an MTV Europe contest, the prize being a private simulcast of the Stockholm gig, complete with an ample supply of champagne.

Except Harris isn't just watching the show; he's in it, popping up in the hyperactive Zoo video mix with big, boozy grins and exchanging quips with the host via satellite, like Nightline gone nutty.

"So, John, you work in a knickers factory?" Bono say with a mock snicker. "Well, we don't wear underwear in Sweden."

"Prove it!" Harris retorts, emboldened by drink. Bono actually goes for his zipper but punks out to an arenawide chorus of female Swedish groans. Those groans soon turn to cheers when, as a consolation prize, U2 brings out Swedish pop gods Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of the late, great ABBA for a genial romp through its 1977 hit "Dancing Queen."

Later, during the melancholy sway of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World," from Achtung Baby, Harris and Bono are caught on adjacent video screens in a moment of sweet serendipity: Harris slow dancing with his girlfriend, Bono giving the Edge a loving choke hold during the latter's guitar solo. The most genuinely surreal moment of the show, however, comes at the end, when Harris and his inebriated pals in Nottinghamshire appear on the video screens doing the Wayne's World bow--"We are not worthy! We are worthy!" The Swedes, already in hysterics, respond in kind, bowing and cheering in sync.

"You can't plan stuff like that," the Edge marvels later, stroking his thin, monkish beard. "Sometimes in amongst all the trash, these moments of incredible poignancy happen. In 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' there were shots of the band and shots of the people in the house and all these TV ads superimposed over that. It was beautiful, this Nike ad with the big shoe coming down. And it was the perfect image and message for the song, sliding down the surface of things.

"That's the thing, I suppose," the Edge continues. "The jokes and the fun aspect, the props, the weird suits and all--they are making a joke of rock & roll stardom. But they do work."

"There is a lot of soul--I think it shines even brighter amidst the trash and the junk," Bono insists after the show. "Sam Shepard said, 'Right in the center of contradiction, that's the place to be.' And rock & roll has more contradictions than any art form. U2 spent the Eighties trying to resolve some of them. Now we've started the Nineties celebrating them.

"Rock & roll is ridiculous," Bono states emphatically. "It's absurd." He is, appropriately, still wearing his leathers and shades. "In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss. It's like I say onstage--'Some of this bullshit is pretty cool.' I think it is the missing scene from Spinal Tap--four guys in a police escort, asking themselves, 'Should we be enjoying this?' The answer is, fucking right. It's a trip. It's part of the current of rock & roll that just drags you along--and you can feed off it.

"Mock the devil," Bono adds with a conspiratorial smile, "and he will flee from thee."

Backstage at the globe, a couple hours before show time, B.P. Fallon is talking about the difference between U2's brand of rock spectacle and the way it really was in the good old Seventies--when excess was king and the stars talked about social and moral responsibility with a small r. It is a subject Fallon knows well. An elfin, animated Irishman billed in the Zoo TV Tour program as "guru, viber and disc jockey" (he spins records before U2's set and warms up the crowd with hippie chatter), Fallon has been a writer, radio personality and publicist since the Sixties and has worked for and with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

"With Zeppelin, it was just more of everything--more drugs, more sex," he says with just a faint hint of nostalgia. "Now there's less drugs, less casualness about sex. And the recession is being felt the world over, not jut in America. So there's more to worry about.

"But this is also a different U2 in a way, not knights in armor," Fallon continues. "It's warmer, funnier, more human. They go out there trying to give the audience something to take home with them--the idea that for all of the things that are wrong, you don't have to feel mortally wounded all the time. Here's a bandage, some hope and some fun. It's like if you walk around with an umbrella over your head all the time. Sure, you won't get rained on. But you won't get any sun, either. U2's out there saying: 'Fuck the umbrella. So what if you get a little wet?' "