Five and a half years ago, Bono stood in a backstage hallway at the Kodak Theater and wrestled with the idea of being big and grandiose.
“I f---ing hate the room,” said U2’s front man, an hour after finishing what had been a tense, rough rehearsal of “The Hands That Built America,” a song from Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” that had won the band an Oscar nomination and a spot performing on the show.
It wasn’t just the Kodak itself he hated; it was also the Oscar set, with a giant, fluted shape that lit up behind the band as they performed. “We’re singing a song about poverty underneath a huge f---ing Waterford crystal,” he told me, visibly uncomfortable with the swanky surroundings. “I just have to forget the room and let it go.” (Photo of U2 at Oscar rehearsal, 2003, by Art Streiber)
That encounter came to mind Sunday night when I watched U2 perform at the Rose Bowl beneath a set that out-glitzed the Kodak and dwarfed that huge f---ing Waterford crystal.
Now, I realize this is a bit off-topic for an Oscar blog. But U2 were, in fact, Oscar nominees once upon a time. And since I wrote about the troublesome business side of the tour in theWrap before the Rose Bowl show, I figure a few words about the creative side might be warranted here.
I’m not exactly coming to this show in a vacuum. I’ve seen U2 about 25 times over the last three decades, spoken to them on at least a dozen occasions, and watched them struggle and triumph and fail.
I saw them do their first L.A. show in early 1981 at the Country Club, a 1000-seat nightclub in Reseda, where Bono wore a ruffled, long-sleeved white shirt and they had so little material that their encore consisted of three songs they’d already done earlier in the set.
I saw them open for the J. Geils Band at the Sports Arena the following year, when before the show it seemed logical to ask if this little band could possibly come across effectively in a 15,000-seat arena.
I saw Bono leap off the loge level of the Sports Arena in the middle of a 1984 concert, and then after the show tried to answer his intense, serious questions about whether he’d been nuts to undertake such a foolhardy gesture in an attempt to forge a connection with the audience he felt he’d lost earlier in the show.
I watched him slip and cut his chin open during rehearsals the day before the “Joshua Tree” tour started in Phoenix in 1987, and then saw the opening concert the next night, when his chin had been stitched up but his voice was completely shot, forcing the audience to cover for him by singing along to songs both old and new.
I saw U2 grow from clubs to theaters to arenas to stadiums, grappling along the way with self-importance, with the scale of their fame and the demands it made, with the greatness they desperately wanted to achieve and the compromises their ambition forced upon them.
