(U2’s most bruising and traumatic endeavors tend to be audacious side projects, like “Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark,” the chaos-plagued 2011 Broadway show with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge; it closed in January after reported losses of as much as $60 million and an embarrassing legal contretemps involving fired director Julie Taymor. There also is the saga of Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm Bono co-founded in 2004 that stumbled badly early on, though its major stake in Facebook now is soaring in value.)
All of this was accomplished with one man, Paul McGuinness, in the job of band manager from the birth of U2 until November, when Principle Management Ltd., the company he founded in 1984, was acquired by Live Nation in a reported $30 million deal that also brought Maverick, headed by Madonna manager Guy Oseary, into Live Nation’s artists division. With the deal, McGuinness, 64, assumed an emeritus role in the U2 organization, and Oseary was named U2’s new manager.
McGuinness is an exceptional figure who inspires awe in a profession where continuity exceedingly is rare, hardball tactics are common and wisdom is not what practitioners are renowned for bringing to the table. He was, as the saying goes, “the fifth member of U2,” and made himself and the band very rich (good luck finding out how rich-but The Sunday Times estimates U2’s net worth at $852 million). Noting how often bands split over unequal division of songwriting revenue, he persuaded U2 to embrace an even four-way split from the start. The philosophy and values he devised in collaboration with U2 systematically subtracted the pressures that tend to break up acts and impede emotionally intelligent growth.
“We are designed to survive success,” said Edge in a recent tribute to McGuinness, a statement that is startling when you consider what an unusual strength it is in the music industry. “We’ve never had the attitude that a lot of bands did around our era,” Edge told me, “which was that the record business was the great Babylon and to be a collaborator was to compromise your values. We’ve always wanted to know the people in the label, the people representing what we do.”