U2 Elevation Tour - In The Name Of Love

from ctnow.com By Roger Catlin / The Hartford Courant MINNEAPOLIS - A cheer goes up at the sold-out Target Center, and the lights don't go down. In the biggest rock tour of the season, the celebrated band does not pop out of a giant glitter-ball lemon, as it did for its encore on the last tour. Nor does it emerge amid a blinding kaleidoscope of video images, as on its previous two tours. Instead, U2 stands unfettered - and equally well-lit as its fans.

On a large, heart-shaped catwalk, Bono and the Edge venture way out into the crowd, which lunges up and touches their legs. Bono has been known to lean over and encourage contact, which resulted in his falling onto the arena floor during the tour opener in Fort Lauderdale. Here in Minneapolis recently, Bono leans into the crowd, which holds him aloft briefly. Then he climbs into a side wall of reserved seats and jumps into the audience, causing a frenzy that can look scary from the rest of the stands. "That's not scary - that's rock 'n' roll," says bassist Adam Clayton a few tour stops later, in Indianapolis. "When we were in the clubs and in the theaters, that was kind of normal." Not that Clayton, whose bass work skips from foundation to melody, ventures out much onto the catwalk. "I don't like the in-ear monitoring that you need to get out there," he says. "There's no bottom end in it. I never even use headphones in the studio, so it's a little tricky for me. I am trying to get into it, because I would like that contact." Contact is the byword for the "Elevation Tour 2001," which comes to Hartford Civic Center for a sold-out show Sunday with PJ Harvey. After a pair of stadium tours that kept many fans at a football field's length, U2 is finding arenas like the Civic Center - where it hadn't played in 10 years - something approaching intimate. "The information that we got back from `PopMart' is that we lost that connection with a lot of our audience," says Clayton, 41. "We'd done three stadium tours and people were confused. They didn't know what U2 was." Going back to arenas - especially at a time when general admission was being allowed on the floors once more, was the right decision for the band, Clayton says. "They feel great for the band," he says. What's more, the general admission crowds "certainly increased the excitement and the energy and contact with band." Not only does the economy of scale allow the band to return to stadium-less markets - including Hartford - but it's provided a bit of nostalgia for the band. "In many ways, you don't expect to get to play as many American tours as we have in our time and still be excited about it. And going into new buildings, whereas the old building that you played 10 years ago has been blown up and replaced with something better. We've outlasted some of these lumps of concrete." And they are doing so from a position of strength. It's not harder to do these tours now that most band members are in their 40s, Clayton says: "I think it gets easier. I think it gets easier when you have 20 years of material that people know. That's a hell of a lot easier than trying to get out there with two or three records that people haven't heard." And arenas are more welcoming to the Irish quartet than they once were. "When we were first moving from theaters into arenas, they were very, very intimidating places. You know, we opened for the J. Geils Band in '82 or something, and they felt like the biggest, hugest, most humongous places ever. Now, they don't feel like that at all. They feel intimate." It may be the band's whole approach, and its catwalk steps into the crowd. But also, Clayton says, "I think it's maybe the songs. I think the songs break down those barriers. People know those songs and that's the value of a U2 show maybe is that those songs are parts of people's psyche." Although their previous two albums, "Pop" and "Zooropa," did not do as well in America as they did in Europe ("At that time in America, electronica and dance music were still really underground," Clayton says), the new "All That You Can't Leave Behind" album, with its Grammy-winning single "Beautiful Day," has attracted a new U2 audience. "Both younger and older," Clayton says, "but noticeably younger." When winning the Grammy, Bono said pointedly that U2 was out to "get its job back," presumably as one of the ranking rock bands of the era. And that was true in many ways, Clayton says. "We felt we were a vital rock 'n' roll band and we weren't ready to be written out and retired. That was our attitude going into this album, and that was our attitude going into this tour: We really want to be viewed as contenders and not people who are planning a comeback." The new album remains in the Top 50 after selling 2 million copies; its latest single, "Elevation," is tied in with "The Tomb Raider" soundtrack. But despite that success, Clayton says, "You still have to do the work, you still have to deliver in the shows. And so far, that's really been happening." Although the stage setting is deceptively fancy, with individual video screens concentrated on each band member - Bono, the Edge, Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen - and extending drapery and special lighting for some songs, generally it's much more simple than those huge stadium tours. "You don't have all these huge logistical difficulties of operating at that level," Clayton says. As a result, "You kind of feel a bit of a weight lifted off you." The current tour is benefiting from the missteps of the last tour, too, when the band went out under-rehearsed in 1997 just as its new album was released. "We hadn't figured out some of the songs at that stage," Clayton says. They are also helped by something beyond the production, or the band. It's the audience, he says, that "in many ways are the energy and the community and the fellowship of the shows. It is amazing when it goes off. You feel in contact with everyone there. And people are singing and dancing and clapping and just being a part of the show." And there is an unexpected poignancy to the show amid all the celebration. U2 takes a moment to memorialize Joey Ramone besides playing "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," which had been written after the death of Michael Hutchence of INXS. "I suppose it does start happening at a certain age," Clayton says. "Your generation, or some of your generation, don't always make it through for whatever reason. I suppose that is life, in a way. That is learning to accept and deal with those things and question your own mortality." In the case of Ramone, who was reportedly listening to U2's "In a Little While" when he died on Easter Sunday, "it definitely changed the meaning of the song," Clayton says. Or as Bono said from the stage in Minneapolis, "He turned a song about a hangover into a gospel tune." "The great thing in the case of Joey was we genuinely had real ties, going back to the days where we first formed the band," Clayton says. The band, then teenagers, snuck into a theater to see a 1977 Ramones show in a Dublin theater and then learned their songs, passing one of them as their own to get them on local TV. The two bands shared bills through the years, Clayton says, "and more recently, when we were doing `Saturday Night Live,' Joey came down to the studios with us." Stopping to honor fallen rockers amid the strident themes like those in "New Year's Day," "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Bad" and "With or Without You" help raise the U2 shows to new levels, almost approaching a spiritual revival. "There is something going on," Clayton says. "And that is pretty amazing." Affairs Of The Heart The stage set for U2's "Elevation Tour 2001" has a long, heart-shaped catwalk that allows the band to venture way out into the audience. But it serves another purpose as well. "When we played stadiums in Europe with general admission, there were a lot of issues about safety because there have been some recent deaths and injuries," says U2 bassist Adam Clayton. "And we felt this heart-shaped thing that would separate the audience and divide them up complied with all those safety standards, and yet it gave us the contact and energy that had been missing from rock `n' roll shows for a while." So how does one get inside the loop, so to speak? You must be among the first 300 with general admission tickets to line up at the venue. Getting inside the heart means a viewer is closer to both the stage and the catwalk, in an area that tends to be less crowded than the rim on the other side of the catwalk, where fans bunch together and move in. On the other hand, Bono plays more to those on the outer rim of the catwalk than he does to those inside the loop. And it appears much more difficult to get out and back in to get a beverage or take a bathroom break. Set List What's on the set list for U2's "Elevation Tour 2001"? A lot of the band's new album, "All That You Can't Leave Behind," to be sure, including the one-two opening punch of "Elevation" and "Beautiful Day." But the band also digs deep into its past earlier in the show than usual with such songs as "New Year's Day," "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "I Will Follow." The band made its reputation with live shows that were built around anthems like "Bad" and "Bullet the Blue Sky," and those are included this time around. And the band's biggest hits, from "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With or Without You" to "Desire" and "One" are among all that the band can't leave behind. (Although "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" seemingly has been). When compiling the set list for the tour, after including the half-dozen or so songs the band wanted to play from the new album, it slotted in "the major tunes from other records," U2 bassist Adam Clayton says. "And without really trying, you end up getting into a kind of greatest-hits situation. Which is not what we wanted to do, but it's kind of the way it ended up. You just can't leave stuff out." Only a few songs survive from the band's previous "Pop" album, including "Gone," and an occasional version of "Discotheque" (a Top 10 single), segueing into "Staring at the Sun." For the most part, the band is trying to be true to the original arrangements, Clayton says. "Over the years they've kind of grown and developed live and turned into different things," he says. "The tempos have changed and keys had changed, whatever. But this time, we're playing them as much as we can figure out, the way they were recorded. "We went back and we listened to the early records, and kind of worked them out," he says. "So in many ways, they've been brought right back to the original recordings." That isn't the case, however, when the band plays "The Fly." "Well, The Edge came up with a bit of a new guitar riff, which got everyone excited," Clayton says. "He got this new guitar riff, which was nice and heavy and it meant we had to change the key. So, once you get used to the fact that it's a slightly different key, it's pretty much all there as is."