By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
June 26, 1997
As U2 comes to Chicago this weekend, the band finds itself in an unusual position: insisting that a tour that has sold 2 million tickets isn’t a failure.
“We’ve already done better in terms of gross than we did on the whole of our (1992) `Zoo TV’ tour,” U2 guitarist the Edge told the Boston Globe this week. “So it’s by no means going wrong. It’s simply that we’re not selling out all the shows, but we’re really happy with how most of them are selling.”
Last Sunday’s show in Los Angeles was 7,000 tickets shy of selling out the 62,000-seat venue. The Irish rockers also failed to fill venues in New York and San Diego.
Concert promoter Michael Cohl told USA Today that “there are a few cities we wish would have done better and some that are much better than the last time.”
The news is largely positive in Chicago, where U2’s three shows at Soldier Field have a potential head count of 135,000 fans. Friday and Saturday are sold out. But tickets still are available for Sunday. Very available.
Brokers are selling upper end zone seats for face value ($52). Tickets within the first 10 rows will cost between $200 to $450. According to a rep from Front and Center, which buys and sells tickets for concerts and special events, “Everyone has U2 tickets. You won’t have problems getting into one of their shows.”
When U2 played the area five years ago at the World Music Theatre (now the New World Music Theatre), the 40,000-seat enormodome sold out almost instantly.
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“This is not the tour that U2 expected,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a concert trade magazine. “People are cautious of spending $50 for a show these days, even if it is U2.”
U2 kicked off its visually spectacular “PopMart” tour April 25 in Las Vegas. The eye candy was superb. An 100-foot yellow arch supported an orange basket-shaped sound system, and a collage of pop art images were projected on a $6 million, 56-by-170-foot LED video screen (which may be sold piecemeal to sports stadiums across the country when the tour is over).
But U2’s 22-song set lacked the impact of previous tours. Part of the problem was the repertory, top-heavy on songs from the band’s current album, “Pop.” The 10 songs are a progression for the creative group, but in concert, they don’t pack the punch of U2’s earlier songs.
The Edge said the group was taking that into consideration.
“It’s like you work really hard to get something absolutely right; then the minute it’s right, you want to change it,” said the guitarist, whose solo vocal cover of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” is one of the show’s highlights. “Now that we’ve hit our stride with this particular running order, we’ll start to look at other songs we can introduce to the set. It keeps us on our toes.
“It’s a difficult thing for us, because we still consider ourselves to be doing our best work now. We’re still in our mid-30s. We’re not in our dotage. So it’s not like we feel we’re ready to go out and do the `greatest hits’ tour.”
