U2 @ TCF I: The Anticipation

I can sum up being at the U2 concert at TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis in one line: It was like being inside a Don Delillo novel. But so you don’t have to run out and read his twelve or so novels, gentle reader, let me narrow it down: it was like being in Delillo’s novel Underworld. Now all you have to read is 800 or so pages.

“The future belongs to crowds,” Delillo famously wrote in another of his novels, Mao II. That theme, the group magnetism and indelible imprint of crowds upon individuals, shows up again in the opening scene of Underworld: the one game playoff for the National League pennant between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at Polo Grounds in 1951, the game in which Bobby Thomson hit a ninth inning home run off Ralph Branca to win the game for the Giants, a hit that would come to be known as “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Delillo masterfully points his lens around the stadium at this event, showing us the lives of both celebrities and nobodies, but he paints the identity of the crowd that day as something impassioned, desperate, supplicating. In Delillo’s portrayal of the stadium event, of the arena, individuals become both strong and vulnerable, they get swept up in timelessness and are at the mercy of history, they become the targets of both genius and terror.

We arrived at the stadium at 2:15 for the 7:00 show, earlier than my wife wanted, but later than my sister-in-law, an avid concert goer, would have liked. The plan was to grab something to eat at a semi-trendy restaurant in the area, the heart of the University of Minnesota, then stand in line for maybe an hour until the gates opened to general admission fans at 4:30.

In the car on the way up, we began to hear rumors of what we were in for: people who had camped out overnight in order to be the first ones into the arena. Upon arrival, then, we went to check out the length of the line. It extended for perhaps a quarter-mile. Event workers were handing out purple adhesive bracelets upon which they were writing numbers in black Sharpie. Once we realized this, the plan was out the window. I became number 980.

“The future belongs to crowds.”

The CSC Event worker told us that they planned to “move us up” at 2:30. We didn’t really know what “move us up” meant, but we knew it had to be important, so the new plan was to wait until “they moved us up,” then to leave my sister-in-law in line while my wife and I went to get food and brought it back to her.

While we waited, we oriented ourselves to our place in line. Ahead of us were two younger couples, in their early twenties by the looks of it: heavy makeup on one of the young women that said high school was not too far behind her; a buff, young athlete-look to one of the males; rings on one couple but not the other. They were already decked out in U2 garb; one of the young women wore a One t-shirt, the aid organization founded by Bono whose goal it is to wipe out extreme poverty, mainly through marshaling international government aid.

Behind us were two women of an ethnicity not Caucasian, then a Caucasian man; they were not together. However, they were comparing notes about whom had been to what concert, and it turns out the guy was a rock star of U2 concerts—132 shows total in his life, concerts hit on this leg of the tour having included Chicago, two shows in Montreal, Toronto, Denver, Utah, now Minneapolis, and he would be boarding a plane the next morning for the upcoming show in Pittsburgh. I looked over this fan of fans: a somewhat disheveled man in his late forties, graying, sitting in a camping chair with a cooler full of liquid at his feet. I figured he was single until he confessed—lied?—that his wife packed the cooler for him. “You’re gonna just leave the chair?” someone asked him once we were told we couldn’t bring any big items with us.

“It’s like two-fifty at the dollar store, man” he responded.

Moving up happened a little later than promised, about 2:45. We moved about 100 yards, then stopped, recamped, my sister-in-law setting herself up under a small avenue tree to hide from a sun that occasionally peaked through heavy if unfocused clouds and sent the temperatures into the upper eighties. The forecast was for serious storms so I kept searching the sky to the southwest, though that view was blocked by the faux brick of TCF Bank Stadium, the corporate title hierarchically printed above the names of each individual county where tax dollars grow on green stalks of a variety of thicknesses and make their way here—only symbolically, of course—to the crown jewel of the state university: a stadium for a perennially losing football team. (By this time in the afternoon, I’ve already thought and said “TCF Bank Stadium” so much that I’ve begun to subconsciously transfer my funds to said bank, agog at the benefits of their “free checking” program.)

My wife and I marched back around the building to the far side where we had parked, and as we did so we heard the sound checks for the evening, including significant riffs from a number of songs that I assumed would be on the set list that night. To the southwest the stadium is open and we stopped momentarily to get our first look at “the claw,” a huge, arched tripod that is the show. The lights and sound for the show hang primarily from this claw with the stage propped in the middle above which hangs a round video screen that projects what’s happening on stage, creating a 360 degree viewing venue and maximizing arena performances. Thus the tour is called the 360 Tour. It’s supposed to be state of the art and looks space age. Rumor has it that it takes three days to set up. No doubt it’s patented and all that. They also want to sell them now for other tours. Go figure.

Two streets over where we want to get lunch, Washington Avenue, is completely torn up. This information was also what prompted our 2:15 arrival. Multiple media outlets were warning about congestion due to lack of parking and road construction. Get prepaid parking, arrive early, and use public transportation were the three mantras, in descending order, that concert goers were encouraged to consume and regurgitate in order to avoid mass chaos. We opted for the second choice and had our pick of parking at the first lot we tried.

We conquered Washington Avenue on foot and brought back pork lo mein, moo shoo pork, and spring rolls to share with my sister-in-law on the curbside by 3:15. By 4:00, the anticipated “second move,” everyone stood up without prompting.

For nothing. We didn’t move again until 4:30, the official time for the gates to open. In the meantime, though, no one sat. This was time for more people watching. Up ahead, a man in his fifties, balding but with long blond hair hanging down his back, kept up a ruckus about being from Canada. A woman with short blond hair and a U2 tattoo on her upper arm also walked by a couple of times.

My sister-in-law had acquainted herself with one of the women directly behind us. Doris was from New Mexico, had been to shows primarily out west, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and now Minneapolis because she had relatives here. “Where are you from originally?” I asked.

“I’m Santa Fe,” she says, answering questions of place origin and ethnic origin all in one. Doris is a small business owner and a flamenco dancer and was once photographed for a book about the people and places of New Mexico and the picture ended up in the governor’s office where she also ended up lobbying for small business owners—to no avail. She’s also religious. “I grew up Baptist,” she says, but has also volunteered to help the Carmelite Nuns in New Mexico who recommended a Chinese acupuncturist after her father had a stroke. The acupuncturist helped the father immensely. “It was a miracle,” she says, “Praise Jesus.”

I’m from a small town. We have our own colorful people though we’re primarily the same color. But we have no Doris. I am swept away by her narrative, enthralled. Later, I overhear that she’ll be having her fortieth class reunion soon. Doris is ballpark 58.

Doris also characterizes a U2 concert as “a spiritual experience.” She’s not the first to do so; nor will she be the last. In fact, I myself have held onto a quote from a 1987 Time Magazine article in which someone said, “U2 is what church should be.” I flash the quote now for Doris, who’s appreciative.

Later, I’ll watch a piece from KARE 11 news that is full of wonderful, over the top sound bites from my fellow fans who are ahead of me in the line. Several of them react to a set of storms that passed through in the morning. Ann-Marie Lee of Milwaukee, whose name, complexion, and accent suggest that she’s probably Hmong says for the camera, “This is a spiritual pilgrimage and we’ll be here no matter how bad the weather gets” (Tessman). The tattoo lady, though, is Nicole Retzer, a home grown fanatic from St. Paul. “Bono signed my arm and then the Edge signed my arm,” Ratzer says of her run-in with the band at the 2005 concert, “and then the next morning I went and had [the signatures] tattooed over.”

The future belongs to crowds—and to cameras videotaping crowds, or to cameras videotaping individuals trying to stand out from or ride the wave of crowds. Ms. Retzer isn’t done. The next question that reporter Renee Tessman asks must have been something like, “Are you worried about getting rained out tonight?” To which Retzer replies, “Bono has, I think, direct communication with, or is some kind of higher power. So I’m not worried about it.”

Another thing that passes the time is the volunteers coming around signing people up for Bono’s causes. The One people leave us alone, but I’m already a member anyway and so is my sister-in-law, who, she recalls, signed up to free Burma during the last tour. Is Burma free now? We don’t ask. But a young woman wearing an Amnesty International t-shirt does stop and ask if she can talk to us. She prefaces her comments with the typical “I’m-not-here-to-pressure-you, just-give-you-some-information” spiel, but U2 fans are notably supple toward anything that smacks of Bono, and this has Bono written all over it.

I’m wondering what international cause it will be this time. Political prisoners in Sudan? Justice for the Khmer Rouge? Free Mongolia? Surprisingly, this time the cause is maternal health during pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., especially among poor and minority populations where, we’re told, the U.S. ranks fiftieth in the number of maternal deaths or something. They’re aiming for healthcare, I say to myself, and more pointedly, for white suburban guilt, which I’ve got, even though it’s white small town guilt in my case, but okay, we do sign up which just means giving our names and email accounts. The young lady is a student at St. Olaf College in Northfield, studying such a long list of improbably serious topics that I catch my breath and can’t reproduce it in its entirety for you here, but know it includes sociology and women’s studies and something about race relations.

I also see some people walking around in t-shirts proclaiming “U2 green team” and now, I think to myself, this is getting entirely too predictable. I hear from some former high school students of mine ahead of me in line—who admit to being U2 fans for about a month—that the team goes around explaining how green their semi-trucks are. The tour trucks are parked behind us on this closed off street: shiny red ones with pure white trailers. One of the students, now an engineering student at SDSU, says under his breath, “I don’t care how green they are, they still get eight miles to the gallon.”

About this time, after standing for the last forty-five minutes in anticipation of the (false) promised move at 4:00, we do begin to move, and the line cheers. We move through the desolation in front of us: empty water bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, chairs, Styrofoam coolers, umbrellas, blankets, pool floaties, and a tent, all momentary comforts now abandoned like this is the rapture. As we walk by the green team, one of them has the gall to say, “U2 recycles, so should you.”

We’re slowly funneled down toward TCF Bank Stadium (“free checking”) and the mouth marked Gate C. Through the gauntlet of semidarkness, I can see the light of the field ahead. If this is a pilgrimage, that’s the goal, the shrine. But perhaps, as in Canterbury Tales, the real reward has been the stories of my fellow pilgrims. And, I must admit, as in Flannery O’Connor’s, “Revelation,” as I walk toward the goal, I’m firmly one of this crowd: we’re all bearing equal baggage, all caught up in the mass impulse, in the danger of being a collective, in the search for something emotive and human and technologically enhanced, for something momentary yet lasting.

If the future belongs to crowds, the future is upon me as I’m swept by a river of humanity and desire down a tunnel but toward some distant light.

Tessman, Renee. “U2 fans weather the storm waiting for outdoor concert.” Kare 11 News. Online. 23 July 2011.