Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  The Osmonds appear in intermittent cameos, and are great. They’d be even better if “Crazy” Wayne Osmond desisted with his jokes, several of which might even be older than most of the audience, but they seem to amuse him, if nobody else. When the three of them sing together they do so beautifully, especially on a medley of hits by other brothers (Mills Brothers, Everly Brothers, Doobie Brothers, Blues Brothers—though my prayers for something off The Louvin Brothers’ 1950s gothic gospel classic Satan Is Real languish regrettably unanswered). Jimmy is an effortlessly charming host, his exhortation to “Keep this party going”—to a theatre largely populated by a pre-lunchtime crowd of grandparents—conspicuously lacking the laboured, mordant self-mockery of celebrities starring in British pantomimes. He is a man utterly at peace with his place in the world, even if that place is a remote Ozark town where he sells memories at inconvenient hours.

  The same cannot quite be said of the next act we see—Roy Rogers Jr., at the Roy Rogers Museum theatre—but it is a nevertheless compelling spectacle. Roy Rogers Sr. was, during the 1940s and ’50s, perhaps the most famous man in America, the occupants of the White House not excepted. He made movies, television shows and records (most of the latter are interesting only as period kitsch, but a couple, notably the early 70s albums A Man from Duck Run and The Country Side of, aren’t bad at all, the latter featuring jarringly sincere versions of the semi-ironic Merle Haggard redneck anthems “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side Of Me,” which manage to sound both amiable and belligerent: listening to them is like being threatened by your uncle). He lent his image to uncountable items of merchandise, many of which are exhibited in the museum: comic books, toys, breakfast cereals, board games. Also enshrined are Rogers’ clothes, cars and guns. Roy Rogers died in 1998, aged eighty-six. He left his son these display cases of mementoes, his name and some awesomely big—and audaciously embroidered—boots to fill.

  Rogers Jr. does this with a grace, humility and reverence that verges on the weird. The show Rogers Jr. performs is, substantially, a memorial service to his legendary father, to his mother (Grace Arlene Wilkins), and to Rogers Sr.’s second wife and co-star (Dale Evans). In a half-filled, semi-circular theatre adjoining the museum, Rogers Jr. croons cowboy ballads while his backing band make the quietest amplified music I’ve ever heard. In between tunes, he tells stories of his upbringing, which was both blessed by the fortune and fame of his father, and plagued by the death and misfortune that insistently stalked the family. Rogers Jr.’s mother died of an embolism days after he was born. Rogers Sr. and Evans’ first daughter was born with Down’s Syndrome and died in infancy. Two of the children Rogers and Evans subsequently adopted also died young. One, a Korean war orphan, was killed in a road crash at age twelve, when her church bus collided with a car. Another choked to death while serving with the US army in Germany.

  Rogers Jr. discusses these tragedies from the stage in detail that feels all at once forensic and dispassionate, and which leaves us altogether unsure how we’re supposed to react. It’s all rather odd. Rogers owns a pleasant, Jim Reeves-ish baritone, and his a capella version of the ancient spiritual “Wayfaring Stranger” is terrific. But it’s hard to separate from the knowledge that it was, as he has explained at some length, the last thing he sang to Dale Evans before she died in 2001—and that he’s still singing it twice a day, five days a week, in what is essentially his family mausoleum. He wishes his audience a “happy Branson cowboy Christmas” as artificial snow descends from the ceiling, and we leave thinking Jimmy Osmond should take him for a drink.

  Neither the Osmonds nor Rogers would deny that we saved the best for last: indefatigable crooner Andy Williams, at his own Moon River theatre. His timing in comic set-pieces is faultless, his supporting cast brilliant, especially the astonishing mimic Bob Anderson, whose singular genius is for channeling the voices and mannerisms of lounge singers, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Ray Charles—and, for one memorably surreal duet, Andy Williams. Williams looks, sounds and seems five decades short of the eighty years he racked up the previous birthday. When he signs off with a sumptuous “Moon River,” the few hairs remaining on the heads of his audience are thrilled upright, quite rightly.

  WE SPEND SATURDAY at Silver Dollar City theme park, whose attractions include the opportunity to pose for sepia portraits in antique costume (the woman running this operation agrees when I observe that they have a wider range of Confederate costumes than Union uniforms, and confesses that when people ask to dress as Yankees “they tend to kinda whisper”). That night, we attend a show by Kirby VanBurch, a magician with a Dutch pop star’s accent and haircut. VanBurch is a Branson veteran. This theatre is, he notes, with perhaps understandable weariness, the ninth Branson venue he has played in. “I’m the only performer in Branson,” he announces, “who is actually touring Branson.”

  It’s the rest of the world’s loss. VanBurch is fantastic. He produces bottles from empty tubes, cavorts with tigers, teleports a motorcycle and causes a helicopter to appear from thin air. His performance is also noteworthy for two defining moments, one very Branson, one not. The extremely Branson act is VanBurch’s solemn presentation of one young assistant from the crowd with a dogtag inscribed with Isaiah 54:17 (“No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgement thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord”—which is at least more rarefied than “My grandmother went to Branson and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”).

  The jarringly un-Branson thing, which sums Branson up by being everything Branson is not, is a reflexive mis-step into sarcasm. Introducing an escape trick, VanBurch mentions Houdini. The crowd applaud. “Clap all you want, he’s not coming out,” smiles Kirby. “Not at these prices.”

  It’s a good joke, but it dies, crushed by the truth it is bearing: that maybe we’d all rather be in Vegas, but realise that Sin City is just too brash, too cynical, too much, for any of us.

  27

  LEMON ON A JET PLANE

  Around the world with U2

  APRIL 1997-FEBRUARY 1998

  WHICH IS, IF you’ve been reading this book sequentially, where we came in, more or less. By accident and by design, my path crossed with U2’s PopMart tour of 1997-98 fairly frequently. What follows is—if you will—kind of a director’s cut of a sequence of articles written about the tour, largely for The Independent and The Independent on Sunday.

  The PopMart tour was entirely preposterous—which was, of course, at least half the point. There was no doubt that U2 were in on the joke they were playing on themselves, their heritage and their reputation, even from the off. Their road crew certainly bought into the spirit of things early on. The afternoon before opening night, at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas, a few of us journalists covering the show had wandered down to the venue to watch the final pieces of the immense and ludicrous set being erected. As we arrived, some or other prop was being gently lowered on cables from the rigging overhanging the stage. The roadie on the mixing desk beat us all to the punchline. “HEWN!” boomed a voice through the bank of bright orange speakers. “FROM THE LIVING ROCK! OF . . . STONE’ENGE!”

  A few months later, in an irony too perfect to contrive, U2 ended up wearing their most ironic guise as they played what was—at least, perhaps, until their three-night stand at Madison Square Garden in October 2001—their least ironic concert. Their show at Sarajevo’s Kosevo Stadium, on September 23, 1997, remains an absolute highlight of your correspondent’s gig-going experience. On its own merits, it wasn’t a great show, for the fairly fundamental reason that Bono’s voice deserted him more or less completely (at time of writing, a YouTube clip of U2’s performance of “Pride” captures his struggle acutely). But it was a resonant example of what U2 do—and what rock’n’roll does—best: elevates naivete into an inspirational, if wretchedly temporary, reality.

  “THE highest art will b
e that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time.”

  —DADAIST MANIFESTO, BERLIN, 1918

  “WHAT’s Boner’s problem?”

  —Beavis and Butt-Head, USA, 1994

  ABOUT A HUNDRED miles from here, about a decade ago, four young Irishmen stood amid the cacti of Death Valley and gazed grimly towards the dusty horizons while Anton Corbijn took their pictures for the cover of The Joshua Tree, an album that remains a benchmark for ascetic introspection. Tonight, the same four Irishmen will perform songs from an album called Pop on a stage decorated with a fifty-foot-high lemon-shaped mirror ball, an enormous glowing olive atop a towering swizzle stick, and a giant golden arch obviously intended to signal associations with populism and disposability. U2’s reinvention, first flagged with 1991’s Achtung Baby album and subsequent Zoo TV tour, has been an act of total auto-iconoclasm. It’s been like watching a Pope touring the world’s cathedrals with a tin of kerosene and a lighter and has, as such, been well rock’n’roll.

  However, there’s self-destruction and there’s self-destruction, and when U2 open their PopMart world tour tonight in Las Vegas’s 37,000-seater Sam Boyd Stadium, they deliver an excruciating example of the wrong kind. Beset by technical hitches, grappling with material that seems even less familiar to them than it does to the audience, U2 play a shocker. That they make little attempt to disguise their own disappointment is some mitigation, but not much—it’s difficult to extend much sympathy for first-night nerves when tickets are $54.50 a shot. It’s perhaps only this consideration that compels the band to grit their teeth and go the distance. If this had been a fight, it would have been stopped.

  LAS VEGAS, WE press junketeers have been told, is a logistical rather than a conceptual choice for opening night. If this is true, it’s the happiest of coincidences. Las Vegas is the city in which the characteristic American refusal to acknowledge that such a thing as vulgarity exists has reached a triumphantly crass apotheosis. In the arcade leading into Caesar’s Palace, I stop, entranced, in a foyer where a faux-marble Aphrodite stands among the ten-cent slot machines. “Wow,” says a camcorder-encumbered American next to me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Vegas’s casinos are fleetingly amusing but eventually terribly depressing places. At the endless rows of slot machines, people lose and win thousands with a total lack of emotion. I wonder how many of these dead-eyed people feeding in money, pulling a lever, feeding in money, pulling a lever, feeding in money, pulling a lever, are on holiday from repetitive, menial factory jobs. As I sit around the roulette tables, every so often someone will swagger along, throw a ludicrous amount—five hundred, a thousand dollars—on one number and then, when they lose it, shrug and walk away, bearing a strained no-really-itdidn’t-hurt-at-all expression. It seems bizarre to spend so much money to impress total strangers; there again, I’ve come to Vegas to watch U2 do exactly that.

  If U2 have decided to see what happens when you submit to, even revel in, the junk, kitsch and flash of popular culture, they’ve come to ground zero. The only problem is that bringing a fifty-foot lemon-shaped mirror ball to Las Vegas, of all places, and expecting anyone to impressed, is a bit like trying to attract attention in London by driving around in a red double-decker bus. In a short walk along the Las Vegas Strip from my hotel, I see a pirate ship, King Kong, a blue glass pyramid, the New York City skyline, a volcano that erupts every fifteen minutes and marble dolphins frozen in mid-leap above the fountains next to an automatic walkway. To create a stir here on a purely visual level, U2 would have needed to invest in an entire fifty-foot mirror ball fruit salad.

  Of course, for all the gaudy window-dressing of PopMart, it’s the music that’s supposed to carry it. Tonight, it mostly doesn’t, though things start well. In fact, only rarely since the ancients of Babylon finished work on the Ishtar Gate have people made entrances this spectacular.

  To a remixed fanfare of M’s lone hit “Pop Muzik,” U2 enter the arena from under one of the stands along the side. A spotlight tracks their progress through the crowd. Bono, his hair cropped and dyed blonde, is wearing a boxer’s robe and sparring furiously. Edge is clad in a very Las Vegas rhinestone cowboy outfit and looks like an escapee from The Village People. Adam Clayton has drawn the short straw in the outfit department for roughly the thousandth time in U2’s history—he wears an orange boiler suit and a facemask and looks like one of those poor Chernobyl technicians who were given a shovel and ten minutes to shift as much glowing rubble as they could off the roof of the reactor before they started growing extra heads. Larry Mullen Jr., consistent throughout U2’s image rethinks, has come dressed as Larry Mullen Jr. (I’ve always imagined that, stuffed in some Dublin filing cabinet, there must be the dozens of extravagant costume ideas that the band have presented to Mullen over the years, only to be rebuffed every time with, “Well, I thought I’d wear the leather trousers and a t-shirt, again.”)

  At the back of the stage, on the largest LED television screen ever built, the word “Pop” appears in red letters taller than your house, or taller than your house if you’re not a member of U2. They start with “Mofo,” the most explicitly dance-oriented track from the new album. Immense images of the band fill the screen. It looks fantastic, and sounds twice as good.

  The wires start coming loose almost immediately. Having established a giddy forward momentum, U2 stick a pole in the spokes by exhuming their 1980 rabble-rouser “I Will Follow” and follow that with two relatively undemanding newer songs, “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and “Do You Feel Loved.” When they go from those into “Pride” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” there’s an almost audible grinding of gears. These two songs were among the most exciting parts of Zoo TV—the former was graced with a spectacular guest appearance by its subject, Martin Luther King Jr., testifying from the ether on video, and the latter sounded like a raging defiance of the temptation to rest on lucrative laurels. Tonight, they just sound tired, the evening is turning rapidly into a bewilderingly timid exercise in nostalgia, and I’m thinking of that episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which Sir Humphrey is advising Hacker about his address to the nation, counseling that if he’s got nothing new to say, he should wear a bold modern suit and fill his office with abstract art.

  It gets worse still when U2, hamstrung by sound which is killing the bottom end and making everything sound like it’s being played down the phone, move down a catwalk to a smaller stage in the middle of the arena. “If God Will Send His Angels” is lovely, but “Staring at the Sun” is a disaster, lurching to an abrupt halt in the middle of the first chorus. “Talk amongst yourselves,” says Bono. “We’re just having a family row.” They get all the way through at the second attempt. Edge leads the crowd in a karaoke sing-along of “Daydream Believer.”

  Some hope that PopMart is going to be something more than watered-down Warholia is provided by “Miami” and “Bullet The Blue Sky.” Both are played with an intensity that verges on the deranged, and the latter is illustrated with a dazzling animation of Roy Lichtenstein fighter planes, chasing each other across the immense screen while, around the stadium, perpendicular lasers point towards the summit of an immense pyramid of light. It’s an unabashed steal from Albert Speer’s Nuremberg illuminations: that the only lasting cultural legacy of Nazism is stadium rock is an irony U2 underscored during the Zoo TV shows by getting the crowds to clap along with a Hitler Youth drummer boy excerpted from Leni Riefeinstahl’s Triumph Of The Will. Bono has at last found his voice, along with a bowler hat and a stars’n’stripes umbrella, and is goosestepping along the catwalk in the style of Chaplin’s Great Dictator. This is more li
ke it: if Zoo TV marked the first time a band of U2’s stature had acknowledged their own absurdity, this may be the first time such a band has asked its audience to do the same.

  The rest of the set is an inevitable comedown, and the encores are flat enough to putt on. The giant disco lemon putters slowly down the catwalk in a tornado of dry ice fog, and U2 emerge from inside it. On a better night, this might look like endearing self-mockery, but given what has preceded it, it’s a little too close to the pods scene from This Is Spinal Tap for comfort. U2 proceed to make rather a madwoman’s custard of “Discotheque,” follow that with an inconsequental “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” and then engage in an ungainly race with each other to the end of “With or Without You.” They come back on once more, do a shambolic “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and a desultory “Mysterious Ways” before locating some form to close with a beautifully turned-out “One,” illustrated with a touching Keith Haring sequence.

  U2 are about the only famous people on earth who don’t make an appearance at the after-show party at the venue, or the after-after-show party in Vegas’s Hard Rock Café. At both of these gatherings, there is much excitement about the presence of R.E.M., Dennis Hopper, Bruce Willis, Kylie Minogue, Helena Christensen, Winona Ryder, etc., etc., but I’m more interested in the large inflatable PopMart-logo-branded lemons suspended from the Hard Rock’s ceiling. The more daiquiris I drink, the more convinced I become that one of them would look great on top of my fridge. With the help of some passers-by, a table and two chairs, I get up high enough to get a grip on one and, despite the warnings of a bouncer shouting at me from the ground, remove it from its moorings and climb down.