by guitardude

The second of two nights in which many of us who had seen the band rise from auditoriums to arenas now witnessed the band becoming a mega-phenomenon. This was a good energetic show with one of the best sounding P.A.'s the band's ever had for stadiums. There was one particularly unfortunate and hairy moment during "40" which appears on the widely circulated "In U2 I Trust" bootleg, and is also covered in de la Parra's "U2 Live" book. What is not well known is that a fistfight in the audience was occurring during the song, about 20 feet directly in front of me and my friend Megan, and about 30 feet from the front of the stage. The combatants had been chanting "USA,USA,USA" during Bono's talk about Central American "free speech"-causing B to verbally lash out and a brawl to begin. Both my friend and I gestured frantically to Edge who was looking in our direction and pointed to the brawl, at which point Edge immediately walked downstage to Bono and angrily shouted something in his ear-that was when B said "no one gets hurt at a U2 concert" and tried to calm things down. It was a weird, wobbly ending to a show and the only one to date (17 shows as of March 2009) in which I've seen violence break out. While I don't like the part of B's personality that periodically causes him to go off on people, in fairness the whole story needs to be told.

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