Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview
”Darling, I would love to take you by the hand, take you to some twilight land,” sings the country songwriter, his voice wistful and cracked. He struggles through the verses, faltering a bit, forgetting, humming here and there, just pickin’ his guitar and tappin’ his foot gently in the corner of the darkened room. Finally, in a mood of wizened woe, he finishes the last chorus, ”Am I left to burn and burn eternally? She’s a mystery to me.”
Now, what makes this particular moment in the history of tearful country ballads (a man, a guitar and Pain!) a bit more fetching is that the lonesome critter over there in the corner, the sad-eyed young man who done wrote the song, who is sitting quietly at home in his modest castle – which is, in fact, an ancient seaside watchtower built with seven-foot-thick walls of granite and oxblood mortar to withstand shelling from hostile navies – happens to be the same fellow who usually spends his time fronting the world’s most popular rock & roll band.
And when done crooning ”She’s a Mystery to Me,” the strange and lovely song he’s writing for Roy Orbison, he launches into ”When Love Comes to Town,” an uptempo chugger he figures might fit B.B. King. Barely pausing, he plunges into ”Prisoner of Love,” which features a handy doo-wop break in the chorus, and then assays his beloved ballad ”Lucille,” his first-ever country song, written way, way back in the spring of 1987. And so here we have Bono, at home outside Dublin, during a short break on a long tour. Well, shucks!
We met a few days earlier in Cardiff, Wales, where U2 gave a spirited outdoor sing-along for 55,000. (Angst ridden and angst driven, the band’s shows have become – for its fans – forceful, friendly rituals: sort of like Up with People, with an edge.) Immediately thereafter, a police escort whisked the band members away from the exiting mob toward the little white jet – the one with OUT OF OUR TREE TOUR painted on its fuselage – waiting at the airport to bring them home. And there, over the course of two days in late July, first in my hotel room, with the gulls wheeling and crying outside the window, and then in his watchtower, with John Coltrane’s recording ”A Love Supreme” snaking up the spiral staircase, Bono and I talked.
He often spoke in little more than a whisper, his voice strained from recording B sides of singles until early-morning hours on nights offstage. What he revealed beneath his well defined and carefully controlled surface was an enthusiast in the grips of reason; a wishful idealist stimulated and confused by his own contradictions; and a young man who quite honestly has not found what he’s looking for – and may never. Chances are if he ever does find it, he’ll know it when he sees it, stop briefly to enjoy the view, and move on.
Let’s do a radical thing and go back to before the beginning. Your grandparents.
My grandfather – my dad’s dad – was a comedian at Saint Francis Xavier Hall, in the center of the city. He was a morose man. So I think this idea of laughing a lot and then biting one’s own tongue is something that runs in the family.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was a really big laugh. Which disguised the fact that beneath her dress, she had a big stick with which she reared, I think, eight kids. She used to joke that the contraceptives, which were banned in Ireland, were intercepted at the post office, and – too late! – another kid was born, another mouth to feed.
My mother was the oldest of her family and quite petite. Really a delicate flower, but she took on the responsibility of bringing up the younger kids.
Both my mother and my father were from the center of the city, what they call Dubs. My mother was a Protestant, and my father was a Catholic, and they grew up on the same street. Their love affair was illicit at the time. Ireland was just being born as a country, and the Protestant-Catholic rivalry – the bigotry – was at a pitch. But it didn’t mean anything to them. They faced the flak and got married.
It was a bit of a difficult thing to do.
In a mixed marriage the children had to be brought up Catholic. The Protestants made up only about ten percent of the population at that time, and it was an anathema to them. My mother decided to bring us up in the Protestant church, and my old man went along with this. So my old man would drop us off at one place of worship and go on to another one. And I really resented that. I was always fighting with him. Always fighting. We were too alike.
Was he a disciplinarian?
He attempted to be. He was a very strict man. But I was one of those kids who was almost impossible to tie down, from the very beginning. People used to – and family people still sort of– put up the cross [crosses index fingers] whenever I come in. They used to call me the Antichrist [laughs]. How many kids on your block were nicknamed the Antichrist?
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