I asked about U2’s popularity in Los Angeles, the first place in the States where the band broke big as a major rock act.
He nodded yes. “When punks and slackers from around these waters would roll their eyes and say, ‘Hollywood?'” he says, “I used to remind them that more people live off their imaginations in that city than anywhere else in the world and that I find people there to be incredibly optimistic about the possibilities of creative life. Even when they’re being darkly cynical-which to me is a relief-I never feel like I’m having my pocket picked. I respect the fact that U2 has not had the garroting that other capable artists have had at the hands of the music business, so I might be a little bit rose-tinted. It’s a community that I feel has been an ally, not an enemy, for years and years.”
With that, Bono is running late, he says, to drive to the Dublin airport and pick up director Richard Curtis, one of his co-conspirators in art and activism. And then, hatching new plots and scheming his schemes, he’s gone.
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