Zoo TV Tour

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Zoo TV Tour
World tour by U2
Locations	America, Europe, Oceania, Asia
Supporting album	Achtung Baby, Zooropa
Start date	February 29, 1992
End date	December 10, 1993
Legs	5
Shows	157
U2 tour chronology
Lovetown Tour (1989–1990)	Zoo TV Tour (1992–1993)	PopMart Tour (1997–1998)

The Zoo TV Tour (also written as ZooTV, ZOO TV or ZOOTV) was a worldwide concert tour by Irish rock band U2. Launched in support of the album Achtung Baby, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 1992 through 1993. To mirror the new musical direction that the band took with Achtung Baby, the tour was intended as an unequivocal break with the band's past. In contrast to the previous tours' austere stage setups, the Zoo TV Tour was an elaborately-staged multimedia event. It satirised television and the viewing public's over-stimulation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience.^[1][2]

The tour's concept was inspired by dichotomous television programming, the desensitising effect of mass media, and "morning zoo" radio shows. The stage featured dozens of large video screens that showed visual effects, random video clips from pop culture, and flashing subliminal messages. Live satellite link-ups, channel surfing, crank calls, and video confessionals were incorporated into the shows.^[3] Whereas the group was known for its earnest performances in the 1980s, the group's Zoo TV performances were intentionally ironic and self-deprecating;^[1] on stage, Bono performed in-character as several personas he had conceived, including "The Fly", "Mirror Ball Man", and "Mr. MacPhisto". Differing from other U2 tours, the Zoo TV shows opened with six to eight consecutive new songs before playing older material.

The initial legs of the tour took place in arenas. Subsequent legs were mostly in stadiums and were branded as "Outside Broadcast", "Zooropa", and "Zoomerang/New Zooland". The tour began in Lakeland, Florida on February 29, 1992 and ended in Tokyo, Japan on December 10, 1993. It comprised five legs and 157 shows, was seen by about 5.4 million people,^[4] and was the highest-grossing tour in North America of 1992.^[5] The band's 1993 album Zooropa was recorded during a break in the tour, and its songs were played during the 1993 legs of the tour. The tour was depicted in the Grammy Award-winning concert film Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. In 2002, Q magazine called it "still the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band".^[6]

[edit] Conception

The seeds for Zoo TV were sown during U2's 1989 Lovetown Tour, when the band's Dublin shows were broadcast via radio to approximately 50 million Europeans^[8] and many more worldwide.^[9] They were intrigued by the audience the broadcast and its bootlegs acquired in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where the fall of Communism was underway.^[9] The group were also taking interest in the wild antics of "morning zoo" radio programs, which gave them the idea of creating a pirate radio station and taking it on tour.^[7] They were also interested in using video as a way of making themselves less accessible to their audiences.^[8] These ideas further developed in late 1990, when they recorded in Berlin at Hansa Studios for Achtung Baby. They watched television coverage of the Gulf War on Sky News, which was the only English programming available. When tired of hearing about the conflict, they tuned into local programming to see "bad German soap operas" and automobile advertisements.^[7] The band believed that cable TV had blurred the lines between news, entertainment and home shopping over the previous decade, and they wanted to represent this on their next tour.^[10]

The juxtaposition of such dichotomous programming fascinated the group, and it eventually inspired them and co-producer Brian Eno to conceive an "audio-visual show" that would display a rapidly-changing mix of live and pre-recorded footage on video monitors.^[7][11] The idea was intended to mock the desensitising effect of mass media.^[1] Eno is credited in the tour programme for the "Video Staging Concept".^[12] Eno clarified, "...the idea to make a stage set with a lot of different video sources was mine, to make a chaos of uncoordinated material happening together... The idea of getting away from video being a way of helping people to see the band more easily...this is video as a way of obscuring them, losing them sometimes in just a network of material."^[13]

Trabants from the Zoo TV Tour now adorn the lobby of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The band invited production designer Willie Williams to join them in Tenerife in February 1991, where they took part in the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Williams had recently worked on David Bowie's Sound+Vision Tour, which used film projection and video content, and he was keen to "take rock show video to a level as yet undreamed of."^[14] The band played Williams some of their new music and told him about the "Zoo TV" phrase that lead vocalist Bono liked.^[8] Williams also learned about the band's affection for the Trabant, a German automobile that derisively became a symbol for the fall of Communism, an example of which they had air-freighted to the island.^[8][14] Williams thought their fondness for the Trabant was "deeply, deeply bizarre",^[8] but nonetheless, he incorporated the car into his ideas for the tour. In May, he brainstormed the idea to construct a lighting system using Trabants by hanging the cars from the ceiling and hollowing them to carry spotlights, such that it looked like the cars' headlights were lighting the stage.^[15]

On 14 June, the first tour production meeting was held, with Williams, the band, manager Paul McGuinness, artist Catherine Owens, and production managers Steve Iredale and Jake Kennedy in attendance. Williams presented his ideas, which included the Trabant lighting system and the placement of video monitors all over the stage; both notions were well-received.^[8][15] Eno's original idea was to have the video screens on wheels and constantly in motion, although this was impractical.^[13] Williams and the group proposed many ideas that did not make it to the final stage design. One such idea, dubbed "Motorway Madness", would have placed billboards advertising real products across the stage, similar to their placement beside highways.^[16] The idea was intended to be ironic, but soon questions were raised why U2 would not just ask the corporations to pay them for the advertising. Ultimately, they scrapped the idea out of fear of selling out, since "if they ironically put up the logos, and then ironically take the money, it's not ironic anymore".^[16] Another rejected idea involved building a giant doll of an "achtung baby", complete with an inflatable penis that would spray on the audience. The notion was decided to be too expensive.^[17]

By August, a prototype of a single Trabant for the lighting system was completed, with the innards gutted and retrofitted with lighting equipment, and a paint job on the exterior.^[15] Williams spent most of the second half of 1991 designing the set.^[12][15] Owens was insistent that her ideas be given priority, as she felt that men had been making all of U2's creative decisions and were using male-centred designs.^[16] With bassist Adam Clayton's support, she recruited visual artists from Europe and the United States to arrange images for use on the display screens. These people included video artist Mark Pellington, photo/conceptual artist David Wojnarowicz, and satirical group Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN), who digiially manipulate sampled image and sound.^[18] Williams and Eno were also involved in arranging visual imagery for the tour.^[15] Pellington envisaged a collection of text phrases into the visual displays, inspired by his working with artist Jenny Holzer.^[19] Bono devised and collected numerous phrases during development of the album and the tour. The idea was first put into practice in the video for Achtung Baby's lead single, "The Fly".^[20]

Paul McGuinness led a trip to East Germany to buy Trabants from a recently closed factory in Chemnitz.^[16] In January 1992, Owens began to paint the Trabants.^[8] As she described, "The basic idea was that the imagery on the cars should have nothing to do with the car itself."^[8] One such design was the "fertility car" which sported blown-up newspaper personal ads and a drawing of a woman giving birth while holding string tied to her husband's testicles.^[16] Williams and Rene Castro also provided artwork on the cars.^[21] The band spent the final weeks rehearsing for the tour, and during this time, Eno consulted the band on the visual aspects of the show.^[12]

To realise the group's ideas, the equivalent of a television studio was built for the tour.^[12] Despite the complexity of the show's concept, the group decided that flexibility in the shows' length and content was a priority. The Edge said, "That was one of the more important decisions we made early on, that we wouldn't sacrifice flexibility, so we designed a system that is both extremely complicated and high-tech but also incredibly simple and hands-on, controlled by human beings...in that sense, it's still a live performance."^[2] This flexibility allowed for improvisations and deviations from the planned program.^[22] Eno recommended that the band film its own video tapes so that they could be edited and looped into the shows' video displays more easily, instead of relying on pre-sequenced footage. Eno explained, "...their show depends on some kind of response to what's happening at the moment in that place. So if it turns out they want to do a song for five minutes longer, they can actually loop through the material again so that you're not suddenly stuck with black screens halfway through the fifth verse."^[11] The band shot new footage for the video displays over the course of the tour.^[23]

[edit] Stage and set

The Zoo TV Outside Broadcast stage

The Zoo TV stages were designed by Willie Williams, U2's stage designer since the War Tour. He collaborated with stage designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, both of whom had worked on The Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels Tour stage set. In place of U2's austere and minimalist productions of the 1980s, the Zoo TV stage was a very a complex setup, designed to instill "sensory overload" in its audience.^[24] The set's giant video screens showed not only close-ups of the band members performing, but also pre-recorded footage, live television transmissions (intercepted by a satellite the group brought on tour), and text phrases.^[25] Electronic, tabloid-style headlines ran on scrawls at the ends of the stage, adding further to the constant stimulation.^[26] The pre-recorded video content was created by artists such as Kevin Godley, Brian Eno, Mark Pellington, Carol Dodds, Philip Owens, David Wojnarowicz, and multimedia performance artists Emergency Broadcast Network.^[27] The band's use of and apparent embracing of such technology was meant as a radical departure in form, their use of it analogous to another musical instrument, and it was meant as a knowing commentary on its pervasive nature.^[1][28] This commentary led many critics to describe the show as "ironic".^[1]

Several versions of the stage and set were used over the tour. The first two legs were indoors and used the smallest of the sets, which included four Philips Vidiwalls, 6 painted Trabant cars suspended from the lighting rig and used as spotlights, 36 TV monitors laid out across the stage, and a small remote stage connected by a ramp from the main stage.^[29] Williams, Fisher, and Park redesigned the set for the North American outdoor stadium sets of the "Outside Broadcast" leg. It was expanded to include a 248 by 80-foot stage, and the Vidiwalls were supplemented by 4 larger mega-video screens.^[30] The spires of the stage were tall enough to need blinking warning lights required by the Federal Aviation Administration.^[24] The "B-stage" was located at the end of a 150 foot catwalk.^[21] The larger set used 176 speaker enclosures, 312 18" subwoofers, 592 10" mid-range speakers, 18 projectors, 26 on-stage microphones, 2 Betacam and 2 Video-8 handicam video cameras, and 11 Trabant cars suspended over the stage.^[21] The concert crew used 12 directors, 5 broadcast cameras, 19 video crew members, 12 Laser Disc players, 1 satellite dish, and two separate mix positions.^[21] For the stadium shows, 52 trucks were required to transport the 1,200 tons of equipment, 3 miles of cabling, 200 local labourers, 12 forklifts and a 40-ton crane, which were required to construct the million-dollar stage in a 40-hour process.^[31][24] The sound system used over 1 million watts and weighed 30 tons.^[21] The 180-strong crew traveled in 12 buses and a 40-seat chartered jet.^[24] The stage used for the 1993 Zooropa and Zoomerang legs of the tour was smaller, utilising 3 Trabants which were hung behind the drum kit.^[32]

[edit] Itinerary

Ticket from Zooropa leg of Zoo TV Tour

Rehearsals for the tour started in December 1991 and the band found it challenging to recreate all the sounds of the new album.^[33] They considered using additional musicians but their sentimental attachment to a four piece prevailed.^[34] They left Dublin on 19 February to set up in Lakeland Civic Center in Florida for two weeks of rehearsals.^[35]

Unlike many of the group's tours, which began ahead or coincident with the release of a new album, Zoo TV started four months after Achtung Baby was released, giving fans time to become familiar with its material. By the tour's first show in February 1992, the album had already sold three million copies in the U.S. and seven million worldwide.^[9][28] The first two legs of the tour, 32 shows in North America and 25 in Europe, were indoor arena shows rather than the outdoor stadium shows that made up the majority of the latter legs. While the band had toured North America in every year between 1980 and 1987, they were subsequently absent from the North America tour circuit for over four years before the Zoo TV Tour.^[36] With the exception of six cities that had two shows, the routing of the first two legs allowed one show per city, which intended to announce the band's return to major cities, and to play it safe so as to gauge demand for ticket sales.^[36] Tickets for the opening show in Florida sold out over the phone in four minutes.^[37] Demand exceeded supply by a factor of 10 to 1.^[36][38] In Europe, ticketing details were kept secret until radio advertisements announced that tickets has gone at sale at box offices. Due to the cost of production and the relatively small arena crowds, the 1992 European leg lost money. McGuinness had planned larger outdoor concerts in Berlin, Turin, Poland, and Vienna to help the tour break even, but only the Vienna concert took place.^[39]

Both the American stadium tour in the second half of 1992, dubbed "Outside Broadcast", and the European tour in 1993, were tentatively planned and dependent on the success of the arena tour.^[28][40] As Bono said on Zoo Radio, "So you play outdoors, you play in a stadium. You've got to deal with it, if you don't want to be on the road for ten years to promote an album. So, you look at it and you think, well, this is an interesting space. Why be afraid of this? What would Salvador Dalí make of a space like this? What would Andy Warhol make of a space like this? He wouldn't be afraid of it; he'd take it on. He wouldn't be frightened of the turnstiles and the cheeseburger stands and the merchandising and the security. That wouldn't bother him at all, he'd get into it."^[41]

By the time Outside Broadcast began, Achtung Baby had sold four million copies in the U.S.^[42] Rehearsals began in Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania in early August 1992; a public rehearsal show was held on 7 August.^[24] Technical problems and pacing issues forced refinement to the show.^[24] The difficulty of assembling the large outdoor production caused a change to the itinerary, when the official leg-opening Giants Stadium show was rescheduled for a day later just six days beforehand^[43] (thus creating a conflict for fans who held Lollapalooza tickets for the same date).^[44]

Although the tour was listed as co-sponsored by MTV,^[45] the group decided against explicit corporate sponsorship; band members, especially Larry Mullen, expressed some uncertainty about whether the tour would make money for them.^[24] The tour's 73 shows in North America during 1992 grossed $67 million, easily the highest amount for any touring artist that year.^[5] At the time, it was the third-highest such total ever, behind The Rolling Stones's 1989 Steel Wheels Tour and New Kids on the Block's 1990 Magic Summer Tour.^[5]

The 1993 European stadium leg, dubbed "Zooropa '93", played to more than 2.1 million people over 43 dates between 9 May and 28 August.^[46]

[edit] Show overview

Between the support acts and U2's performance, Irish rock journalist and radio presenter BP Fallon acted as a disc jockey. He had been hired the previous year to write the Zoo TV tour program.^[48] He played from inside of a Trabant on the B-stage, playing records and providing commentary while wearing a cape and top hat.^[49] His official title was "Guru, Viber and DJ"^[48] He hosted Zoo Radio, a distributed radio special airing in November 1992 that showcased select performances, audio oddities, and half-serious interviews with members of U2 and the opening acts.^[41] At the group's suggestion, Fallon eventually published a book about the tour entitled BP Fallon - U2 Faraway So Close.^[50] Paul Oakenfold, who become one of the world's most prominent club DJs by the decade's end, replaced him on the 1993 legs.

"Television, the Drug of the Nation" by hip-hop artists The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who opened some of the North American Outside Broadcast shows,^[51] was one of the last songs played by the tour DJ before the venue darkened. The Disposable Heroes' frontman Michael Franti labeled himself an "artist of conscious",^[51] and U2 considered "Television" as encapsulating some of the principle themes of the tour.^[41] One of several audio-video pieces by Emergency Broadcast Network was then played to accompany the group taking the stage. During the tour's first few legs, the piece was one that reorganised video clips of American President George H. W. Bush to make him sing Queen's "We Will Rock You". A different piece was used on the 1993 Zooropa and Zoomerang legs, this one a seven-minute piece that wove looped video from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will with various clips of war and news footage.

The show began with a fixed sequence of between six and eight Achtung Baby songs in a row, a further sign that they were no longer the U2 of the 1980s.^[52] For the opening song, "Zoo Station", Bono appeared onstage silhouetted against a giant screen of blue and white video noise. The imagery used for the song was created by blending video noise with stop motion animation sequences of the band members "filmed" on a photocopier. In an interview on the Zoo Radio program, The Edge described the visual material that went with the first three of them:^[41]

Some of "The Fly's" meltdown messages included "Taste is the enemy of art", "Religion is a club", "Ignorance is bliss", "Rebellion is packaged", "Believe" with letters fading out to leave "lie", and "Everything you know is wrong", and real media footage borrowed from mass media.

"Mysterious Ways" featured a belly dancer on-stage. Earlier shows featured Florida resident Christina Pedro, but later tour choreographer Morleigh Steinberg assumed the role; Steinberg subsequently began dating The Edge during the tour.^[52][53] "One" was accompanied by the title word shown in many languages, as well as Mark Pellington-directed video clips of buffalos leading to a still image of David Wojnarowicz's "Falling Buffalo" photograph. People found in the song, as they did with the tour, many levels of meaning; released as a single as the tour began,^{[citation needed]} "One" quickly became one of U2's most popular songs. During "Until the End of the World", Bono unleashed a series of egotistical rock star poses with the chaotic visual approach, this time created from a rapid-fire jumble of numbers, many of which reflected topics close to the video artist's and band's heart,^{[citation needed]} including production crew members' birthdays, the date of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, the date of release of U2's first 12-inch single in Ireland, the date of 'Bloody Sunday'. More video montage led into "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World", during which Bono would continue his long practice of dancing with a young female fan pulled from the crowd, only now spraying themselves with champagne and captured each other with a consumer camcorder video feed shown live to the audience.

The band plays from the B stage during the middle portion of the show.

U2 had used backing tracks in live performance before (such as the synthesized backdrops to "Bad" and "Where the Streets Have No Name") but, with the need to synch live performance to the high-tech visuals of Zoo TV, almost the entire show was synched and sequenced, with most numbers featuring pre-recorded or offstage percussion, keyboard, or guitar elements underlying the U2 members' live instrumentals and vocals.^[54][55] This practice has continued on their subsequent tours.^{[citation needed]}

Zoo TV was one of the first large-scale concerts to feature the B stage, a smaller stage in the middle of the floor, intended "to be the antidote to Zoo TV".^[41] Here, the four members played quieter numbers such as acoustic arrangements of "Angel of Harlem" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". After that it was back to the main stage for some U2 classics played straight,^[45] but when the encores began, Bono's alter-egos returned.

The tour also had a Confessional Booth where concert-goers could record a personal confession on camera.^[56] These confessions were often displayed on the stage's video monitors in the intervals between the main show and encores. On almost a nightly basis, Bono made a crank call from the stage.^[56][57] These included dialing a phone sex line, calling a taxi cab, and ordering 10,000 pizzas.^[56] Bono regularly called the White House in an attempt to contact President Bush.^[56] Though Bono never reached the President, Bush did acknowledge the calls during a press conference.

The concerts usually ended with Achtung Baby's gentler "Love Is Blindness", although later in the tour, it was followed by a cover of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love". The show ended with a single video message being displayed: "Thanks for shopping at Zoo TV".^[58]

According to VH1's Legends: "Zoo TV saw U2 mocking the excesses of rock and roll by ironically embracing greed and decadence. However, some missed the point of the tour and thought that U2 had 'lost it', and that Bono had become an egomaniac."^[59]

[edit] Guests

Side view of the Zoo TV set at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia after a concert in September 1992

On June 11, 1992, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA appeared for the first time in years to perform "Dancing Queen" with the band, which U2 had frequently performed on the tour up to that point. Other guest performers on the tour included Axl Rose, Jo Shankar and Daniel Lanois.

Most later shows included a nightly duet between Bono and a pre-recorded video of Lou Reed singing his song "Satellite of Love". Reed made a real appearance to perform the song during the August 12, 1992, show at Giants Stadium; he and Bono dueted using their completely different vocal styles.^[42] Bono concluded by saying that "Every song we write is a rip-off of Lou Reed."^[26]

The novelist Salman Rushdie joined the band on stage in London's Wembley Stadium on August 11, 1993 despite the author's well-publicized fear of violence from Islamic extremists, due to the controversy over his novel The Satanic Verses. When confronted by Bono's MacPhisto character, the author observed that "real devils don't wear horns."

[edit] Sarajevo satellite link-ups

A number of European shows featured live satellite link-ups with people living in war-torn Sarajevo during the Siege of Sarajevo/Bosnian War. The transmissions were arranged with help from American aid worker Bill Carter. Before the group's 3 July show in Verona, Italy, the band met with Carter.^[60] He described his experiences helping Sarajevo citizens while surviving the dangerous living conditions. Bono was unnerved to learn that those living in the city played music, including U2's, at loud volumes to drown out the sound of explosions.^[60][61] While in Sarajevo, Carter had seen a television interview on MTV in which Bono mentioned the theme of the Zooropa tour leg was a unified Europe. Feeling that such an aim was empty if ignoring the Bosnians' plight, Carter sought Bono's help.^[62] Carter requested that the group do an interview for Sarajevo Television to bring attention to the war and break the "media fatigue" that had occurred from covering the conflict.^[60] Bono wanted the band to play a concert there, but their Zoo TV schedule prevented this, and McGuinness suggested that a concert in Sarajevo would make them and their audience targets for the Serbian aggressors.^[60]

Instead, the group agreed to use the tour's satellite dish to conduct live video transmissions from their concerts to Carter in Sarajevo, with Bono interviewing Bosnians that Carter came across.^[60] The band had to purchase a satellite dish to be sent to Sarajevo and had to pay a £100,000 fee to join the European Broadcasting Union. Once set up, the band began these satellite link-ups on nearly a nightly basis. The grim interviews Bono conducted with the Bosnians starkly contrasted with the rest of the multimedia-intensive show; most of the concert was scripted to a degree, but the link-ups to Sarajevo were not, leaving the group unsure about who would be speaking or what they would say.^[60]

Reactions to the transmissions were mixed. The Edge said, "Some nights it felt like it was part of the concert but a lot of nights it felt like quite an abrupt interruption that was probably not particularly welcomed by a lot of people in the audience. You were grabbed out of a rock concert and given a really strong dose of reality and it was quite hard sometimes to get back to something as frivolous as a show having watched five or ten minutes of real human suffering."^[60] Mullen worried that the band were exploiting the Bosnians' suffering for entertainment.^[60] In 2002, he said, "I can't remember anything more excruciating than those Sarajevo link-ups. It was like throwing a bucket of cold water over everybody. You could see your audience going, 'What the fuck are these guys doing?' But I'm proud to have been a part of a group who were trying to do something."^[6] During a transmission from the band's concert at Wembley Stadium, three woman in Sarajevo told Bono, "We know you're not going to do anything for us. You're going to go back to a rock show. You're going to forget that we even exist. And we're all going to die."^[60] Some people were upset by the circumstances of Sarajevo and inspired to join the War Child charity project, including Brian Eno the day after the Wembley concert.^[60] Despite U2's obligation to the tour and their inability to play in Sarajevo during the war, they vowed to perform there someday, eventually fulfilling this commitment on 1997's PopMart Tour.^[63]

[edit] Bono's stage personas

Two of Bono's on-stage personas, The Fly and Mr. MacPhisto

Bono wore various costumes and assumed a number of alter-egos during Zoo TV performances. In contrast to the Eighties when they had "...tried to be ourselves", during Zoo TV they "...decided to have some fun being other people, or at least other versions of ourselves."^[7] Three main personas used on stage were The Fly, the Mirror Ball Man, and Mr. MacPhisto. During performances of Bullet The Blue Sky Bono wore a military utility vest, a military cap and headmike, and ranted and raved across the stage in an act he said was set in the Vietnam War.^[64]

[edit] The Fly

Bono conceived the alternate persona, The Fly, during the writing of the song of the same name. The character began with Bono wearing an oversized pair of blaxploitation sunglasses, given to him by wardrobe manager Fintan Fitzgerald, to lighten the mood in the studio.^[65][66] Bono wrote the song's lyrics as this character, composing a sequence of "single-line aphorisms".^[67] Bono described The Fly's outfit as having Lou Reed's glasses, Elvis Presley's jacket, and Jim Morrison's leather pants.^[59] Offering him a greater freedom of speech,^[1] Bono explained "...that rather cracked character could say things that I couldn't."^[66] His and the group's facetious nature and egomanical mannerisms was an attempt to escape their past reputation as being overly serious, something for which they were chastised by critics.^[1] Bono explained, "Humor was the only response. I knew we had to find different ways of saying the same thing. Writing and approaching [the tour] head-on just would not work."^[68]

In discussing the tour as it began, Bono explained "The Fly"'s erratic, bogus aphorisms and the deconstruction of the group's image: "The whole thing means don't trust us. We're rock 'n' roll stars, we'll let you down, we'll mess you around."^[9] He referred to himself as a "licensed egomaniac" on the Zoo Radio program^[41] and saying he had no intention of resisting the overload of fame: "Oh, but it's fun to be carried away by the hype. Where would you be without the hype? I mean, you've got to play some of this thing out. Rock is The Big Music, in bold type. You can't pretend all the promotion and all the fanfare is not happening."^[9] The Edge said at the time, "We were quite thrilled at the prospect of smashing U2 and starting all over again."^[28]

[edit] Mirror Ball Man

Mirror Ball Man appeared during the encores for the first three legs of the tour. The Mirror Ball Man dressed in a suit of shining silver with matching shoes and cowboy hat. The character was meant as a parody of a greedy evangelist. Bono said of the character, "On the first American leg, we created a character called the Mirror Ball Man, a kind of showman America. He had the confidence and charm to pick up a mirror and look at himself and give the glass a big kiss. He loved cash and in his mind success was God's blessing. If he's made money, he can't have made any mistakes." Mirror Ball Man made the nightly prank calls, often to the White House. Bono traded in his Mirror Ball Man persona for Mr. MacPhisto after the Outside Broadcast Leg.

One speech of his is a clear parody of televangelism:^[69]

[edit] MacPhisto

MacPhisto was created to parody the devil,^{[citation needed]} and he was named after Mephistopheles of the Faust legend.^{[citation needed]} The character was used in place of the Mirrorball Man during the 1993 shows. The initial inspiration for the character came from the stage musical The Black Rider, a theatrical collaboration between William S. Burroughs, musician Tom Waits, and director Robert Wilson. Bono and The Edge attended the performance in early January 1993 during the break between the North American and European stadium legs.^[71] But realisation of the character did not come about until rehearsal the night before the first of the shows.^[72] According to Bono, "We came up with a sort of old English Devil, a pop star long past his prime returning regularly from sessions on The Strip in Vegas and regaling anyone who would listen to him at cocktail hour with stories from the good old, bad old days." Initially called "Mr Gold", MacPhisto wore a gold suit with gold platform shoes, wore pale make-up and lipstick, and wore devil's horns atop his head.^[73] The idea of the horns came from Gavin Friday, according to Bono. He spoke with an exaggerated upper-class English accent, not unlike that of a down-on-his-luck character actor. He would make telephone calls nightly, like the Mirror Ball Man, but the targets would change with the location of the concert. Bono enjoyed making these calls, saying, "When you're dressed as the Devil, your conversation is immediately loaded, so if you tell somebody you really like what they're doing, you know it's not a compliment." The band intended for MacPhisto to add humor while making a point. Said The Edge, "That character was a great device for saying the opposite of what you meant. It made the point so easily and with real humor."

This character later appeared in the animated 1995 music video for "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" from the soundtrack of the Joel Schumacher movie Batman Forever. Bono had originally indicated an interest in appearing in the film, and his friend Schumacher considered various possibilities, viewing Bono as "a wonderful performer, a very dramatic, emotional singer."^[74] Possible ideas included having Bono sing a song as MacPhisto atop a piano in a party scene, but eventually Schumacher decided there was no role for Bono in the film.^[74][75]

[edit] Recording and release of Zooropa

U2 recorded their next album, Zooropa, during a break at the end of the third leg of the tour. The album was intended as an additional EP to Achtung Baby, but soon expanded into a full LP and was released in July 1993. Influenced by both tour life and the ideas of media barrage and irony on the Zoo TV tour, Zooropa was an even greater departure from the style of their earlier recordings, incorporating techno influences and electronic effects into the band's sound. A number of songs from Zooropa were incorporated into the subsequent Zooropa and Zoomerang tour legs, most frequently "Numb" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)",^[76] with "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" and "Lemon" worked into the MacPhisto persona during Zoomerang, and "Dirty Day" in the main set during the same.

[edit] Broadcasts and recordings

The Zoo Radio special included live selections from 1992 Toronto, Dallas, Tempe, Arizona, and New York shows.^[41] Portions of another 1992 show were taped and later broadcast in the United States as a one-hour Fox network television special on 29 November 1992.^[77] The 27 November 1993 Zoomerang show in Sydney was broadcast in the United States on tape-delayed pay-per-view and then aired later as a regular broadcast in other countries,^[78] and was subsequently released as the Grammy Award-winning concert video Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. Shows including the concerts on June 11 in Stockholm and October 27 in El Paso were broadcast into the homes of fans who had won contests.

On 9 September 1992, a portion of U2's performance at the Pontiac Silverdome was broadcast live to the MTV Video Music Awards. The band performed "Even Better Than the Real Thing" while Video Music Award host Dana Carvey, dressed as his Wayne's World Garth persona, accompanied the band on drums in Los Angeles.

In 2006, the double CD Zoo TV Live was released exclusively to subscribing members of U2's official site, featuring the same material as is on the Zoo TV: Live from Sydney as well as one bonus track from the Zoo TV special, "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World."^[79][80]

[edit] Reception

The Zoo TV Tour was well-received by most critics. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times said, "Zoo TV is the yardstick by which all other stadium shows will be measured."^[15] In a feature on the tour, Hot Press' Bill Graham said of the show, "U2 don't so much use every trick in the book as invent a whole new style of rock performance art." Graham explained that the tour resolved any doubts that he had about the band, particularly Bono, following their reinvention with Achtung Baby.^[2] David Fricke of Rolling Stone commented that the band had "regained critical and commercial favor by negotiating an inspired balance between rock's cheap thrills and its own sense of moral burden". He praised the band for "retool[ing] themselves as wiseacres with heart and elephant bucks to burn on the hallucinatory video sport of Zoo TV". Fricke noted that the increased visual effects for the Outside Broadcast leg of the tour increased the "mind-fuck" factor.^[68] The Independent gave a positive review of the Zooropa leg of the tour, with the reviewer stating, "I came as a sceptic, and left believing I had witnessed the most sophisticated meeting of technical wizardry and mojo priestcraft ever mounted."^[81] The San Francisco Chronicle published a very favourable review of the tour, praising the special effects for supplementing the music. The reviewer wrote, "The often-surrealistic effects always served the songs, not the other way around." The review concluded, "this magnificent multimedia production will serve as a pinnacle in rock's onstage history for sometime to come".^[82] Following the completion of the first year of the tour, the readers of Q voted U2 "The Best Act in the World Today".^[83] Many critics described the tour as "post-modern".^{[1][68][84][85][86][87]}

Reviews of the early first leg shows of the tour often reflected the dramatic change in U2's approach and sometimes indicated befuddlement as to U2's purpose. The Asbury Park Press wrote that the long string of Achtung Baby song presentations that opened the show made one forget about the band's past, and that "almost everything you knew about U2 a couple years ago is, in fact, wrong now".^[55] The Star-Ledger complained that the band shortchanged its music with its video presentations and that especially during the opening sequence, "one was only aware of the music as a soundtrack to the real 'show'".^[88] It concluded by saying that U2 had lost the sense of mystery and yearning that made it great and had succumbed to the style of music videos.^[88] Jon Pareles of The New York Times acknowledged that U2 was trying to break its former earnest image, but suggested that the group was pushed by external forces into "accept[ing] some artifice" for its stage production; he concluded that "U2 wants to have its artifice and its sincerity at the same time – no easy thing - and it hasn't yet made the breakthrough that will unite them."^[54] Edna Gundersen of USA Today more fully understood that U2 was dismantling its myth and wrote that the show was "a trippy and decadent concert of bedazzling visuals and adventurous music drawn primarily from the darkly charming Achtung."^[9]

Comparing the stadium dates with the earlier arena ones, critics noted that while the show and its setlist was largely the same as before, it clearly benefited from the increased scale.^[26][42][45] The New York Daily News said that the stage "looked like a city made of television sets – an electronic Oz" and that "glitz was used not as a mere distraction (as it has been by so many video-age artists), but as a determined conceit."^[26] The comparison to Oz was also made by Gundersen, who said that even though the band was dwarfed by the setting, their adventurous musicianship still shone through.^[58] She concluded that the group had "deliver[ed] a brilliant high-wire act" between mock and exploiting rock music clichés^[58] (the same comparison in tension was also made by stage designer Williams).^[72]

Fan reaction was also something the group was not sure of when the tour began; Bono said, "This show is a real roller coaster ride, and some people will want to get off, I'm sure."^[9] He remained optimistic, adding, "Our audience seems to follow us, no matter how difficult we make it for them. They're smart; we don't need to play down to them."^[9] By the outdoor legs, many fans knew what to expect, and Pareles observed that Bono's admonitions to never cheer a rock star were greeted with idolatrous applause; he concluded that the show's message of skepticism was somewhat lost on the audience and that, "No matter what Bono tells his fans, they seem likely to trust him anyway."^[45]

[edit] Legacy

The Zoo TV Tour is regarded as one of the most memorable rock tours in recent history. In 1997, critic Robert Hilburn wrote that "It's not unreasonable to think of it as the 'Sgt. Pepper's' of rock tours."^[72] In 2002, Q magazine called it "still the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band".^[6] In 2009, critic and writer Greg Kot said "Zoo TV remains the finest supersized tour mounted by any band in the last two decades."^[89]

With the tour, U2 embraced the "rock star" identity they had struggled with and were reluctant to accept throughout the 1980s.^[1][19] Following the tour, Bono began to wear goggle-shaped tinted glasses, similar to the sunglasses he wore as "The Fly", in most public appearances. The glasses have become a stylistic trademark in both his singer and activist roles.^[90]

In 1997, MTV ran a brief mini-series called Zoo-TV, which featured the Emergency Broadcast Network reprising and extending their tour role in creating contemporary surrealist satirical video.^[91] U2 endorsed the effort as a representation of what the tour would be like as a news magazine,^[92] but their direct role was limited to providing half-financing and outtakes from the Zooropa album.^[91] Wired magazine said the series "pushes the edge of commercial – even comprehensible – television."^[91]

As a homage to the Zoo TV Tour, during the group's 2005 Vertigo Tour, they often played a mini-Zoo TV set - "Zoo Station", "The Fly", and "Mysterious Ways" - as part of the first encore, using some of the original Zoo TV video effects. Performances of "Zoo Station" included the interference in background visual effects and "The Fly" used the flashing words on the screen, with new phrases and words added later in the tour. As the Vertigo Tour progressed, "Until the End of the World" also appeared with countdown timers that were very similar to the images used on Zoo TV.

[edit] Tour dates

[edit] Leg 1: North America

[edit] Leg 2: Europe

[edit] Leg 3: North America ("Outside Broadcast")

[edit] Leg 4: Europe ("Zooropa")

[edit] Leg 5: Oceania and Asia ("Zoomerang/New Zooland")

[edit] See also

• List of highest grossing concert tours
• Timeline of U2

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Carter, Bill (2005). Fools Rush In (first ed.). Wenner Books. ISBN 978-1-93295-850-8. 
• Fallon, BP (1994). U2, Faraway So Close. London: Virgin Publishing Ltd. ISBN ISBN 0-86369-885-9. 
• Flanagan, Bill (1996). U2 at the End of the World. Bantam Press. ISBN 0-593-03626-3. 
• Gittins. U2 - The Best of Propaganda: 20 Years of the Official U2 Magazine. Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1560254874. 
• McCormick, Neil, ed (2006). U2 by U2. HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-00-719668-7. 
• de la Parra, Pimm Jal (2003). U2 Live: A Concert Documentary. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-9198-7. 
• Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. [DVD]. Special Edition: Island / UMG. 2006. 

[edit] External links

• U2 official website
• Mark Fisher's Zoo TV Gallery