NEW ZOO REVIEW
THE EDGE and the PIXIES’ JOEY SANTIAGO revisit U2’s Zoo TV tour
FOR THE EDGE and U2, the October tour and the Zoo TV Tour (which promoted Achtung Baby) couldn’t have been more different. During the former, they were still discovering themselves as a band and even opened many of the dates for the J. Geils Band. “I remember we were very inconsistent during the October period, so we had some great triumphs and some absolute bombs,” the Edge says. “But later on, on the October tour, some of those new songs turned out to be very good live. ‘Gloria,’ particularly. ‘I Threw a Brick Through a Window’ became a big song live.”
By the time the band released Achtung Baby, they had become one of the most popular bands in the world, headlining stadiums and arenas. The Zoo TV tour featured U2’s most elaborate tour stage setup to date.
“Zoo TV was such a liberating creative opportunity because we didn’t have to be serious and earnest,” the Edge says. “We could be super intense and hard hitting thematically but disguise it in an anarchic and ironic mode of presentation. We had so much fun creating the show, and that made the shows more fun for the audience. Once we discovered the show itself had its own reason to exist beyond the album it was designed to promote, we never looked back. Our shows thereafter become something bigger than the sum of the parts… or should I say, on a good night!”
Below are some Zoo TV tour recollections from the Edge and Joey Santiago of the Pixies, who opened for U2. THE EDGE: Bringing Achtung Baby to the Stage
BY THEN WE really had mastered the craft of presenting ourselves to a live audience. Achtung Baby had given us this completely new palette. But from a lyrical point of view, it allowed us to explore lyric forms that weren’t in the classic kind of earnest post-punk political style of everything we’d done before — Boy, Joshua Tree, The Unforgettable Fire.
We quite consciously went, “We need other colors in our lyricwriting pallets.” We were exploring humor, irony and contradictions of, say, a song like “The Fly,” which is sort of inspired by Leonard Cohen, but the ability to talk about things that are obviously not true in a way that communicates something truthful. Those contradictions gave us a freedom to take the tour and really explore those ideas of the modern bombardment of our sensibilities via cable news. It was something we were very affected by. It was the Balkan Wars, the first time that any war in the world had been covered 24/7, and its impact.
We all kind of entered that bunker mentality. We caught a tiny little corner of what it must’ve been like to be in Sarajevo during the siege, just watching this coverage for hours and hours. All of those things got into the Zoo TV tour. And what’s really great about those albums — and why I would be so crazy about recreating the sounds we had achieved in the studio. I knew if I got it to sound right out of the amplifier, I was doing 50 percent of the work for the out-front engineer. He wouldn’t have to worry about anything. He’d just put up the fader and the guitar was set, and he could concentrate on drums and the things that are affected by atmospherics, etc. That was really a challenge — but fun — to meticulously go after these sounds I’d discovered in the studio and recreate them in a live context.
That album toured really well. Those songs really came through live. And it’s the measure of an album, and it’s the measure of the song — when you stand there in front of a live audience, if your song isn’t great, it’s going to be obvious to everybody. We were really thrilled with where those tunes — “Until the End of the World,” “One,” “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “Wild Horses.” There are so many songs on that record that we’ve been playing ever since. So, whatever that process was, I think it sort of beat those pieces of music into kind of indestructible songs by the end of that really lengthy process, because it was like only the very best ideas survived that process. Everything was, right up to the last minute, up for grabs.
I remember when we finished “One,” I was listening to Bono sing the final vocal, and we were just about to dub. It was the last mix on the album, I think. I was just playing the acoustic guitar, and suddenly I hit on this guitar part for the ending, and it’s like, “Wow, do I say anything? It’s such a great part.” So I said, “Look, I know we’re out of time, but I have this part. I just want to put it at the end of the song.” And there was this groan from everyone. And I said, “Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll do it in one take. We’re talking about five more minutes.” So they said, “Okay.”
So that’s exactly what happened. I played the part once, they did one further mix with that guitar at the end — and that was the end of the album. It was like a few days later that we were listening back to the two, and I went, “Wow.” That’s the part I’ve been playing ever since. We were following inspiration. That was always the guiding light. JOEY SANTIAGO: Achtung, Pixies! You’re Touring with U2
OUR MANAGER TOLD us about the offer to tour with U2. He seemed to think it was a good idea, so we did it, and it was a huge tour, one of the biggest tours we’d done at that time. I thought they were at the peak of their game, and my impression of them as a band was that they certainly knew what they were doing. They were huge, one of the biggest bands in the world at that time. The Edge was very professional and impressive [and had a] huge sound.
I’ve never seen a big concert like that. They had that ramp that would go into the middle of the audience. They’d go in the middle of the audience and play, probably, “One.” I thought that was pretty cool.
Years later, during our reunion, Bono and the Edge would show up for our gigs and say hello. We played in Ireland, and we met them — Bono and the Edge — in Dublin. They really, really liked us. I remember one of the videos we had on MTV and some DJ really slammed it, saying, “Well, that’s the last time we’re going to play that,” or something to that effect. Bono went on and defended the video.
Sometimes I wonder if they made Achtung Baby and they just said, “Let’s blow this shit up,” because it sounded like they definitely had the agenda to take over the world. — Joshua M. Miller