You're falling off sidewalks...

The Vertigo Tour Hangover Ratings

One Star Hangover (*): No pain. You are on top of the world, after having shared the same breathing space with the greatest band in the world. Your throat is a little scratchy from singing too loudly during The Electric Co. and you have a mild headache from the three beers you chugged on your beer run during Pride. You remember the whole evening and are pleased you did nothing more than wink at Guyer when he swanned by. You're craving a Grand Slam Breakfast from Denny's, if only in the hopes that the grease will drown any alcohol lingering in your system. You've peed about 4 times since you got home.

Two Star Hangover (**): Something just might be amiss. You look mostly okay but you have the mental capacity of a ticket stub. The coffee you sip is burning a bigger whole in your already abused gut, which is sadistically craving a large order of french fries with gravy, a cheesesteak sub, and a supersized coke, lots of ice. It must be lava flowing through your veins that has you moving so sluggishly. You only yelled, "Kiss me, I'm not Irish" to Meltzer twice as he walked by. You made 5 beer runs, double-fisting, during the show but you didn't want to hear those songs anyway. It was more enjoyable flirting with the beer vendor, who was young enough to be your son. You have a hazy memory of groping some cute guy beside you in the ellipse during Bad. At least you hope it was the cute guy you were groping, and not your friend.

Three Star Hangover (***): Somebody's been a bad girl. Your head hurts and you can't breathe. It feels like some Hobbits have started a party in your intestines. You yelled "play Out Of Control!" about 5 seconds after they finished playing it. You grabbed Dallas' ass when he walked through the ellipse but he didn't seem to mind, so you're mildly relieved. And mildly aggrieved. You can't look at water because it reminds you of the three vodka shots your friends forced you to do during One. The idea of having to get up in 9 hours to get in line again makes you wish you were into opera music instead. Or knitting. You're sharing a hotel room with friends and are busy cussing out the one who's been in the bathroom for at least 40 minutes. Yo do not smell like the top of a newborn baby's head. And you haven't peed once.

Four Star Hangover (****): Somebody's been a stupid girl. Life is an endless stretch of unendurable pain, in every part of your body. You drank a twelve-pack before walking into the venue, then had at least 8 more inside. Your skull is putting on its own concert, percussion section only. Your lips move but you can't talk. You grabbed Guyer and Meltzer together in a headlock and told them you loved them. Your mascara has seeped from your eyelashes to your chin, and your lipstick is in the crevices between your teeth. Guyer only had to push you back once when you tried to belly dance with Bono during Yahweh. Various friends are passed out on various pieces of furniture in the hotel room. You think one friend might have slept in the hallway outside, actually. You have to pee but the bathroom's too far away and you're afraid of the immense pain that will ensue if you move.

Five Star Hangover (*****) aka "I feel numb": You are too stupid to live. You snuck three bottles of vodka into the ellipse. And still went on four beer runs during the show. You're ready to cough up a lung from the four packs of cigarettes you smoked after the show. You have toothpaste in your hair from your attempts to brush your teeth before you passed out. Your body has lost the ability to generate saliva, so your tongue is slowly suffocating you. It's apparently no secret at all that you propositioned McGuinness. Something about you, him, and Larry's drum kit. Blissfully you have no memory of it. You look like Gollum. Smell like him too. During the encore, you kept screaming at Bono to play "Speed Of Sound!" as your friends tried to wrestle you to the ground to shut you up. That, unfortunately, you remember. You've peed about 20 times and your bowels are making ominous sounds.

Six Star Hangover (******), You are a dirty girl. You wake up on the floor of the hotel bathroom. You wanted to sleep in the tub, but somebody else beat you to it. The 42 beers you consumed last night was a record, even for you. You spent most of the night on beer runs and knocking over people in the ellipse. You recall little about the show but you're feeling a little superior because at least YOU made it back to the hotel room. Unlike the friend who made it as far as the hotel sidewalk before passing out. The peculiar feeling in your bowels convinces you that somehow you contracted the Ebola virus during the show. You wrapped yourself like a snake around Scottie and wouldn't let go, loudly hissing, "He's mine, my Precious!" whenever someone tried to pull you off of him. You're feeling smug that it took Guyer, Meltzer, and your friends to pull you off; those gym workouts are really working! You lurched onstage during Into the Heart, knocking the 8-year-old who was already on stage with Bono back into the crowd. Fucker didn't belong up there anyway! The friends you're sharing the room with, minus the one sleeping on the sidewalk outside, have already died from the alcoholic poisoning they inhaled as your body vented booze fumes. At least now you have the bathroom to yourself.

You love this town....

May 2005. New York. Madison Square Garden. U2. All is right in the world.

I've decided that the location of our so-called "fan club" tickets for MSG indicate we've for some reason been put on the you-totally-suck list. Are we being punished in some way? :) There was a big ticket drop before Saturday's show. Mostly Golden Circle-type seats. Not the shitty seats we got through the FAN CLUB. And I talked to dozens of people around where we were sitting, and they mostly all had fan club tickets too. I'm sorry, but someone, somewhere, really deserves a violent kick in the shins. We were in the topmost section, the last row of that section too. In other words, we were barely in the arena. Any higher and we'd have been part of the rafters. Or in New Jersey. Oh, and there's this bulkhead above the last 4 rows of those sections, so if you're taller than a smurf, you're screwed. You can't stand up to watch the show because then your eyes are dead level with the CEILING. However, if you pretend you're in the Cirque de Soleil you can contort your body in such fashion that you can see everything happening on stage quite perfectly. I chose to sit down, not bother watching so much, and just absorb the show through my ears.

It was glorious.

When you're on the floor, particularly if in the ellipse, you share the band's oxygen. They breathe in, you breathe out. Heady stuff. So the show from the stands (particularly waaaaay up in the stands) is obviously a different one. Not as distracted by physical proximity to the band, I just let my ears feast. And it was good feeding. I was sooo content. This band still kicks the ass off any band on the planet. These are guys now in their mid-forties, for pete's sake. They shouldn't still be this good! They shouldn't still be able to whip 20,000+ people into mindless frenzy, show after show. But they do. God, they do.

As I was saying, New York. I just don't think U2 can play a bad show here. New York crowds are unlike any other, anywhere. They give attitude and the band gives it right back. It's a jacked-up vibe with everyone hangin' on to the power cord to share the current. Even with a standard setlist with no surprises, the show jammed. Best crowd I've been a part of out of the 8 shows I've been to on this leg. They sang along to the old and new songs. I was really surprised at the crowd participation during Original of the Species and Yahweh. They were insanely loud. As an opening song, I think I prefer City of Blinding Lights. It gives the show from the start a sense of a child's wonder and awe (I can go back/I can stay awhile...), of "what next?" anticipation. Love And Peace is THE showpiece, and as such is better toward the middle of the set. That song makes people RESTLESS, it's got so much underlying urgency and menace to it. It's ridiculous any band can write songs like this!

Sunday Bloody Sunday really got to me. Memories from 9/11 started invading my mind from the moment I walked into the building. But they really hit during SBS. Took me back to 2001, sitting in the same building and hearing the same song, but knowing that there was this smoldering, reeking giant hole in the ground in lower Manhattan. So yeah, this show had layers to it, and especially this song. I knew it wouldn't be as intense. No way would there be that same intensity and grief that permeated the post-September tour. Anyway, I'm really enjoying the 'heart of darkness' part of the set, though I think Bullet ends too awkwardly still, and I just am not fond of this tour's version of Running. I even like Vertigo being played twice. That song is just raunchy sex :) I wish it was the opening song, actually... I *love* the imagery for the "ZooTV" segment. Zoo Baby returneth! It's fabulous. The imagery & lighting for the show itself is really cool too. Anyone not enjoying this tour, or hugely disappointed in it, I really think you must be off your head :)

I'm destined NOT to hear Gloria on this leg, sigh. And am still surprised they didn't pull out SOMETHING new for this particular show... But while I still think this tour's pacing is a touch off, and they should swap in/out certain songs, overall it's a GREAT tour. The moodiness of U2's music, the way they mezmerize the crowd, is still so captivating. More so for me, now, than when I was younger because now I'm old enough to appreciate how rare an experience this is. So put me anywhere in the building, really. Just so I'm in the same airspace as U2, it's all right, it's all right...

Some days have bouncers that won't let you in...

Stumbled across the following when I was cleaning out some folders on my computer, written back when the whole ticket fiasco started.

How you know you take the ticket-buying process too seriously:
1) When you click on "Search for Tickets," instead of the hourglass icon (telling you a search is in progress) you swear you instead see the face of Satan. And he's laughing.
2) There's a fire in your building but when the firefighters knock on your door to tell you to exit the building immediately, you snarl "Get the fuck out of here! Can't you see I'm trying to get concert tickets here?! Leave me to burn!"
3) The telephone rings and without thinking you stick your foot out and drop-kick the phone into the next hemisphere. You don't have time to take phone calls! Besides, your friends should KNOW BETTER.
4) You fantasize about walking into the offices of u2.com and Ticketmaster and bitch-slapping the hell out of everyone you encounter.
5) A friend instant messages you, excitedly exclaiming, "I got tickets!" and you instantly type back "Congratulations!" but at the same time you're muttering "I hate you, asshole!" and flipping them off.
6) If you had to choose between having a leg amputated, without anesthesia, or going online to order concert tickets, for a few minutes you seriously consider amputation.
7) You have 15 browser windows open, all of them trying for tickets for different shows.
8) Your Internet connection goes out while you're trying to purchase tickets and you decide, as soon you calm down and are thinking more rationally, that you're going to kidnap the owner of your cable company and impale him on a steak knife. Then disembowel him.
9) You realized 4 hours have gone by, but you don't really know how. All you have is a hazy memory of sweating profusely, hands shaking, a ringing in your ears, and somehow the mouse has become embedded in the palm of your hand.
10) The area around you is a disaster site and you're a wreck of a human being. The ashtray is overflowing with smoldering butts, empty beer bottles litter the floor, you've gone through three boxes of kleenex during several frustrated crying jags. Even your credit card looks crestfallen. Windows are broken because you keep hurling objects at them to vent your range. You curl up into a fetal position under your desk and whimper.
and YOU STILL HAVE NO TICKETS.

And it's you that makes it hard to let go...

There really are times that I just want to hang with people really into U2. Sounds mad, doesn't it? But God, it's the truth. If I'm hangin' around having a good time, the people I want to be doin' that with are U2 people. If something unbelievably intense happens in my life, I want to share it with the friends I've made from years of seeing U2 live. After all, for how many years have we shared one of the ultimate in unbelievably intense experiences, that holy communion known as a U2 show. Show after show. Tour after tour. I think about that often. I have many good friends who don't particularly like U2, or just aren't "into" them. I have great times with them, but it's different. That emotional intensity, that lovely upheaval, just isn't usually part of the equation outside of a U2 show. At a U2 show, you're with your own tribe...

One Step Closer...

72 hours, more or less, until my first Vertigo show, and my impatience settles on me like a hairshirt. Itchy, scratchy. Uncomfortable. Though I missed the opening show -- a first for me since The Joshua Tree -- I shared it vicariously through posts on the Internet and marvelous friends who called me throughout the first night. And even through a cell phone, static and all, I got goosebumps when I retrieved one voicemail and the sounds (loud, jarring, marvelous) of The Electric Co. came blaring through the earpiece. The Electric Co. I can't imagine it. 3,000 miles away U2 was belting away a song that first came to my ears some, what, 24 years ago? Time flies when the music stays great. And time stands still when you're hearing that music, that magical, insane, ridiculously poetic music, live and raw and in your face.

72 hours and counting...

A wrinkled face and a brand new heart...

That's how I'm summing up this new tour in advance. I was 16 when I first fell in love with U2's studio work (when I heard I Will Follow), 18 when I first fell in love with their live performances (the War tour), and 19 when I knew this was going to be a life-long musical love affair (the unforgettable Unforgettable Fire tour, mullets notwithstanding). Suddenly it's 2005. Someone hit the fast-forward button whilst I had my back turned. Dimples have turned into more permanent creases. I have crow's toes that I know will soon turn into crow's feet around my eyes. But I have a brand new heart with each and every new U2 album and tour. Everytime I think they can't top the previous album, the previous tour, they go and do it. My favorite tour is still the UF tour. The most amazing, brilliant, ridiculously stupendous tour is still ZooTV. But I find something unique and special about every tour, build new memories, make new friends, learn to love old songs in new ways and new songs for the first time. I love watching the band play new material for the first time, watching them learn to inhabit the songs, make themselves comfortable in them.

Starting a landslide in my ego...

So anyone who knows me knows I love to talk. Even if no one is listening. (Especially if no one is listening. ) And I especially love to talk about U2. They've been one of my favorite conversational topics for nigh on 24 years. (And old habits die hard.) I particularly love to talk about U2 tours. They are magical. Not just the music, not just the musicians, but the places, the people, the atmosphere. The flight delays, the pavement arse, the food deprivation, the sleep deprivation. The sensory overload. (The dwindling bank accounts.) Because as soon as the houselights go out, and the thrum of anticipation from the crowd fills the air, and the band takes the stage to the first ecstatic cheers, it's all worth it.