by Ned NoName

The stadium was only about two thirds full, giving this concert the same sort of feeling as the closing scenes of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where a crowd gathers for the arrival of a tremendous blinking space ship out in the wilderness of a mountain valley.

I can remember looking up occasionally at the upper deck of the stadium which was completely empty and thinking of how much it semed as though we'd all crowded around a neon spectacle in basin of a grand canyon.

There at one end of the canyon was the amazing towering, sparkling PopMart stage.

Turn your head away, and there in the farthest highest seats, there was no one there watching.

It was strangely intimate in spite of the scale, like staying up with a color TV on at two in the morning after everyone has gone to bed.

I've seen U2 on three tours, and I was in the audience for their first Elevation show after 9/11. That show was incredible, because it was the first time any of us had really gone out of the house to do something since the events of that date.

At that show everyone NEEDED to be alive. Everyone needed to reconnect with being alive. The band were, well, it looks as though those shows are becomming part of U2 lore as some of their best.

The band was very fine in the performance I saw after 9/11 at MSG, but they were at the eye of the hurricane, rather than the cause of the storm. What made those shows special was an audience of people who had all just weathered a trauma together, comming out for their first night out.

That crowd just needed an excuse to scream and shout. U2 was just the excuse to do the screaming and shouting.

This PopMart show was something different. I have to say this show was better, way better than the MSG post 9/11 show.

This show was added late following two sold out shows in the NYC area, but as I've mentioned, this one was under sold. The result was a late night U2. They seemed less on point, less certain of the need to live up to the event that was the first show in New York after 9/11.

On this night, with a less than full house, I got to see U2 hang out, put on a show, enjoy the night, whatever.

It was a great show, and here is why.

There was a moment in this show that at the time I just thought was great fun, but which I've come to realize with the benefit of hindsight (I'm writing in 2005) was one of the more interesting moments of my life. It was a moment of genunine U2 magic, the kind I was looking for at MSG after 9/11, the kind I've read about that surfaces, unpredictably as magic would, every now and again at a U2 show.

Wouldn't you know it, I was looking for "That amazing Live U2 Experience" and like magicians the pulled it off right under my nose. They made something special happen that has only grown more meaningful in memory.

It happened during "With or Without You." I supposed at the time what took place was just part of the set, but it's not on the "Live from Mexico" tape, and I haven't seen them do something like this in Elevation, or the Joshua Tree tour.

At the end of the song, Bono coaxed the crowd to sing out the ending melody which he sings on the record as a sort of cathartic wail. Ok... the "Ah-ah-ah-ahs" ... "Ah-ah-ah-ahhas" Hopefully you know what I mean.

Well, at any rate... the crowd sang along, and swayed back and forth. Now, I've mentioned the staduim was not full, but it wasn't empty either. This is / was a major football stadium with room for 60,000 people. Ok, so it was about two thirds full, empty enough to help set the scene of being someplace a bit haunted at night out in an open wilderness, but full enough so that it was still 40,000 people.

40,000 people who, in my section anyway, had started holding hands without giving it a second thought. 40,000 people who were all remembering high school, or their first love, or who were comming to terms with something special they were hearing in the song while being in love. It's hard to know.

All I know is that I hadn't really noticed it. I was just sort of there, in the canyon, singing along, when suddenly I heard the words "Do you like that?" boom through the PA.

That's when I noticed Bono was sitting with his legs crossed out at the tip of the B stage like a shaman.

That's when I came back to the moment. Then Bono said simply "This is what we do." And with that, he got up, he walked back to the main stage, and the show went on, and I went along with it.

It wasn't until later, years later actually, after reading about other shows on other tours that I realized fully what had taken place.

By the time Bono had said "Do you like that?" the band was no longer playing, and I hadn't noticed when they had stoped.

The momentum of the song had been handed off to the crowd, and the crowd had been singing along together on a stary night in the basin of a great canyon to participate in a 40,000 person sing along.

This sing along had gone on for quite some time by the time Bono brought it to a close. It had been amazing enough for him to sit down and marvel at it. It was just an incredible moment. 40,000 people singing and reliving some deeply personal moments in their lives all lived seperately spent listenning to that song.

When Bono said "This is what we do." and then stood up to return to the show and the set list, we all just applauded the band, ourselves, for this amazing, simply amazing moment of community and release.

I realize that things of this sort have happened at lots of other U2 shows, but again, I was at a least one other that has been heralded as one of their greatest, and this one for me, was more amazing still.

An incredible, wonderful show.

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