Bringing Up Baby

Cool, the definitive Eighties compliment, sums up just about everything that U2 isn't. The band is positive where cool is cynical, involved where it is detached, open where it is evasive. When you think about it, in fact, cool isn't a notion that you'd often want to apply to the Irish, a people who easily and brilliantly satirize, elaborate and haggle and generally make short stories very long but who rarely exhibit the appetite for cultivated disdain — deliberate noninvolvement — for which the English pride themselves. The Irish are storytellers, pattern makers, great salesmen and inspired fantasists, and they remake their world by describing it — several times a day. Temperamentally, they aren't inclined to remain spectators to someone else's idea of how things are: They'll jump right in and make it up for themselves. Reality, that arid bottleneck of European thought, comes to seem much more relative and negotiable — something to be continually reinvented, even at the cost of occasionally losing touch with it completely. It is this reckless involvement that makes the Irish terminally uncool: Cool people stay 'round the edges and observe the mistakes and triumphs of uncool people (and then write about them).

So here I am, writing about this record with which I had a tangential involvement, still hopefully warm from the experience. U2 had asked Dan [Lanois] and myself to produce this album with them, but I'd already made plans for much of the period. The role I thus ended up with was luxurious: I came in now and again for a week at a time, listened to what had been going on and made comments and suggestions. I could point to something and say, "This doesn't do much for me," and suggest how it could be done otherwise without being made aware that I was casually dismissing three weeks' work. On the other hand, I could come in and try to reexcite everyone about something that had, for whatever reasons, fallen out of favor. I can think of worse jobs than hearing something you like and then telling the people who made it why they ought to like it, too. But the solid backbone of the producing work was down to Dan and [engineer] Flood, who stayed with it through months of ups and downs and twists and turns and maintained their concentration and good humor. And, of course, the band members themselves, whose dogged optimism and good-natured perseverance infect everyone who works with them.

Which is just as well, for working on a U2 record is a long and demanding process. The pattern seems to go like this: A couple of weeks of recording throws up dozens of promising beginnings. A big list goes up on the blackboard, songs with strange names that no one can remember ("Is that the one with the slidy bass or the sheet-of-ice guitar?"). These are wheeled out, looked at, replayed, worked on, sung to, put away, bootlegged and wheeled out again, until they start to either consolidate into something or fall away into oblivion. The list on the blackboard begins to thin down, although Bono, the Mother Teresa of abandoned songs, compassionately continues arguing the case for every single idea that has ever experienced even the most transitory existence: "We have to have a song like this on the record." "This will be fantastic live." "Imagine this coming out of your car radio." But as the weeks pass, and the seasons turn outside the studio windows, some things seem to start holding a shape while others get passed over.