U2 360 Seattle

OK, gotta put up a few pictures of the U2 show from Saturday night..

Jeremiah and I conspired to get tickets about 18 months ago and we lived through the Bono ouchie cancellation last summer and all the social calendar peregrinations that eventually resulted in our selling some of the tickets and reconfiguring our loyal viewing crew. Most importantly, Bradley was able to come up from Portland and treat Ewan to his first U2 concert as a birthday present. Above you can see the Bainbridge travelling party walking from the ferry to the venue -- Bryan and Erin had come up for the show and spent a bit of time visiting the island paradise before the show.

We went in the North gate of Qwest -- not sure any other gates were open -- and the crowd was pretty chunky. I think this is the largest number of people I've seen in that venue. Normally for sold-out soccer and football games there isn't more than 65k people, but with the floor configured as a mosh-pit I think they got another 10k people in the door.

Our seats were decent -- not spectacular. Although, as you can see below Ewan, we lucked out because our row was right up against the tunnel where the production crew and talent came and went..

Here's another view of our seats. You can see Jeremiah with his father-in-law. Notice everyone came equipped with earplugs. Since I'm working on enhancing my tendency to deafness for domestic purposes I of course did not partake of the plugs.

We were seated by 7:30ish and by 8 or so Lenny Kravitz hit the stage. You can see him up there on the video screen. From our seats we couldn't see him much unless he was prancing around the 360-degree catwalk. But the lack of visibility at this point was mostly OK -- I only recognized one of Lenny's songs (American Woman) which is ostensibly about Mr. Kravitz's difficulty in communicating the end of a relationship to a woman, but the whole things comes across like an over-generalized faux-dilemna -- the women are throwing themselves at me! Help, I'm just too slithery and cool!!

One thing I learned from Andrea Griminelli delivered as road-wisdom in some sweaty Malaysian backstage VIP room on a random spur of the perpetual LP world tour was this: A successful opening act will not last long if it even attempts to outshine the headliner. I would say by this criteria Lenny exceeded his role.

From my seat you see His Mirrorshaded Wiggleness on his way back to the dressing room. My favorite image of Lenny Kravitz that evening didn't come until a bit later when U2 were on the stage and he was standing watching from the tunnel -- pretty much where this picture is taken -- all "disguised" in a black feather boa and hoodie, and these two fat people in the stands about about 6 feet above him were making wild gestures pointing at him and trying to get their friends (I guess?) to notice that LENNY KRAVITZ IS STANDING RIGHT HERE!!! OMG!! Of course he couldn't see them, and they kept it up for a few minutes. I would have taken a picture but by then the light was too bad. But their slurpee-fueled gesticu-dancing was hilarious and somewhat tempered The Kravitz macheezmo kool.

In the intermission between the ex-Kravtiz-ganza and Bono's band Bradley nipped off to buy some water and t-shirts. Apparently he was forced to make a somewhat harrowing decision while he was away -- one or the other: commemorative shirts or college educations for his children. This was Ewan's shirt. Ach! College is over-rated.

Before the show started I sat looking over the edge of the tunnel rail re-living my few years in show production. Good Lord. It was cool to see all the overlapping crews and coordinators and production people and recording people and various layers of management. I found the U2 version of myself down there, and watched him running around thinking "hey, that could be me..".  He was actually a pretty old dude (had white hair!). Sigh.

You can tell the show's getting ready to go when the smoke machines start up. And the guitar techs are doing some last minute tuning.

Bradley and Ewan took over my seat to get the best position for pictures and general brush with greatness.

When the lads came out of the tunnel there was a 70,000 person roar. It almost drowned out the "marching to the stage song", which was of course was Ground Control To Major Tom, in keeping with the space-y theme of the show.

And then we were off! The real thing. Or, as it turned out, Even Better Than The Real Thing. Set list here. 

It was a perfect night weather-wise. Early summer evening, not a cloud in the sky. The city in the background.

This is only my second U2 show -- the first was a pair of concerts I attended somewhat reluctantly in Tempe Arizona over Christmas break in '87 -- $6 tickets and a handful of people crashing a single Motel 6 room. It turned out that those shows got turned into Rattle and Hum. If you look closely in the movie during the helicopter pans you can see a sulky dude in the nosebleed section actually reading a book. That was me. This time, however, my attendance was quite voluntary.

In fact, between Jeremiah's steady love of U2 quotes and references and Bradley's love of It Might Get Loud, which features The Edge pretty prominently, I was very much looking forward to seeing Mr. Evans in person. I've come to imagine that if I had been a rock star and had even an ounce of cool I'd have gone a similar direction as The Edge, including a goofy name -- not really going the traditionally musically talented direction  but making the most of some technical futzing. (Check out Bill Bailey's version of the same observation).

But any appreciation of U2 means that I've had to come to terms with Bono. In processing some of my exposure to celebrity types I think I understand something of the hunger for attention and the mechanics of entertaining "at scale". Bono even said last night when he was introducing the band members (fifth graf here..) that all he needs are 70,000 people (and 200 trucks and a spaceship) to make him happy. I totally believe that. He's now inhabiting a persona that for me feels like part part David Bowie, part Scottish Inkeeper, and part Ellen G White. Kind of a nutty hyperbolic messianic ball of screaming attention debt. And where his music bridges personal with corporate (as in a lot of people) politics, I think he's a genius lyricist. Where he's the be-sunglassed leiderhosen me-dancer, umm, not so much.

Of course there are stunts to get the crowd involved. The political appeals and Amnesty International and One, etc. I'm not against any of that stuff but I'm not really into organized religion of any stripe so I tend to take a pass there. The International Space Station stunt, though was cute.

But there's no better crowd integration stunt than actually writing awesome songs that everyone wants to sing along with. They played enough from Zooropa and Ach Tung Baby that I got hoarse shouting along with my mangled memory of the words..

The highlights for me, besides seeing Dave bunny hop around the stage was the acoustic version of Zooropa. And I did like the REM + Ach Tung Baby mix of It's The End Of The World As We Know It and Until The End Of The World..  Would have been even cooler to mix in the Nick Cave song instead -- where Until The End Of The World was a couple tracks down on  from the best ever Cave song I'll Love You Until The End Of The World on the soundtrack of the whack apocalyptic Wenders movie (surprisingly!) called Until The End Of The World.

And then before we knew it we had zipped through the encores and Bono was saying goodbye to Seattle.

We would eventually amble back to the ferry terminal and get on a 12:45a ferry after eating too much McDonald's (i.e. any McDonalds is "too much") and vowing never to eat there again. But my last impression of the show was watching the four guys troop down the tunnel. They walked in tighter formation than I would have expected, certainly with more togetherness than Lenny's band. And it almost looks like after all these years they're really still 'mates'. I guess to do this 110 times in the last couple dozen months and to be working hard together for 35 years they would have to like each other a little bit, eh? Four guys hanging out that long together is a pretty cool thing no matter what you think of their music and commercial ambitions.