Music

Walk Away, Walk Away

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"Immediately after finishing, Adam Clayton jumped off the stage and headed to the back. I found him talking to Chuck and it wasn't an in-your-face type of conversation. It ended with a hug and a handshake and Adam headed backstage. Chuck told me Adam had sought him out and apologized for Bono's behavior. He told Chuck that he wasn't much on spitting either but that he liked public humiliation less. He said Bono sometimes got carried away on stage and he hoped Chuck wouldn't hold it against Bono or the rest of the band.

"It always impressed me as one of the classiest acts ever by a rock star, and as I've watched the U2 dynamic play out on a very public stage for the last 25 years I have thought of it often."

While a student at UT, Jeff Balke of local pop-rock band Orange Is In caught them on the Joshua Tree tour at the Erwin Center in Austin. "The show was great even if we did sit on the top row of the place behind the stage. It was really crazy to hear thousands of students walking back to campus still singing 'How long must we sing this song' over and over.

"The best part came after the show when we tried to figure out where [the band] might go. We decided on Antone's and made our way over to the club. There was the Edge sitting out front reading a book -- seriously. We got inside and it was like a who's who of local musicians -- both Vaughan brothers and both Sexton brothers were there. Double Trouble was the rhythm section for the band that included the Vaughans and a number of well-known and well-respected local musicians.

"A few minutes after arriving, Bono and the Edge were on stage with the band. They did probably a 30-minute set with Bono singing the blues and talking to the crowd like a Southern revival preacher, asking, 'Can I get an "Amen"?' with the crowd happily obliging. Adam and Larry were in the crowd and Adam was dancing to the up-tempo stuff. They were all clearly having a good time.

"I managed to bring a guitar magazine with me that had the Edge on the cover and got him to sign it on the way in. When we left, a van with the band in it was passing and Bono was leaning out signing autographs, so I got his as well. He made some joke about signing his name over the Edge's face and laughed to himself. I found it really endearing that he seemed very concerned about not driving off with someone's pen. He had a Sharpie he had been using and said, 'Where is the girl who gave me this pen? I don't want to take her pen.' The girl popped up in the crowd and said, 'You can keep it.' He just smiled and said, 'Thanks!' and they drove off."

We'll leave on a note of dissent from Linus Pauling Quartet singer-guitarist Ramon Medina. "While I did get a kick out of seeing U2 during the Unforgettable Fire tour, my big U2 experience was watching Rattle and Hum on LSD. Me and some friends had taken some acid and were off to see some Norwegian film called The Navigator at Greenway 3. We mistakenly walked into Rattle and Hum but we were too paralyzed by our fear of the big stinky guy at the end of the row to escape, much less say anything when the film started. Instead, we sat through what seemed an eternity as Bono and crew begged the audience to worship them. Mind you I liked, nay loved, U2 at the time but watching what was basically a filmmaker do nothing more than a 90-minute PR film and sell it as a documentary at the behest of the band was utterly contemptible. Here on celluloid was everything that we had hated about '70s-era arena rock: self-important rockers suckering fans into buying their bloated product and worshiping them as being above the audience. Fuck that! We grew up on playing at the Pick-n-Pack and the Axiom. The whole message of punk rock, post-punk and alternative was that anyone and everyone should do it -- bands were not above their fans but part of a community. U2, in one fell swoop, had become what we had rebelled against; they became a symbol for me of everything wrong with rock music and everything wrong with the corporate music industry. We had a word for self-important bands with illusions of grandeur: Styx!"

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