The Unforgettable Ring of Fire 

"Our set list is designed. . . to get to that place where everything feels possible."

-- Bono to Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner, Nov. 3, 2005

My love affair with U2 officially began April 23, 1983, on a rain-sodden Chapel Hill afternoon at UNC's Kenan Stadium. The Irish foursome was launching the North American leg of its War tour. The date -- added to the itinerary so last-minute that it didn't appear on the official tour T's -- marked the band's Carolinas debut. Sandwiched on a bill between, improbably enough for the times, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five and Todd Rundgren, U2 stole the show.

Bono displayed tantalizing glimpses of the larger-than-life persona soon to come. Oblivious to the downpour, the frontman debuted his notorious scaffold climb (he'd patent the move a month later at the massive US Festival) -- clambering up the lighting rig and perching 50 feet above the heads of nervous-looking roadies. "I'm singin' in the rain. . ." Bono crooned, and the crowd went absolutely ballistic. You'd have thought it was Jesus himself up there, frying fishcakes, converting H2O to hooch and delivering another Sermon on the Mount.

"U2's positivity. Bono's passion. The Edge's otherworldly guitar sounds -- I don't know how or why, but it's like the Beatles, like R.E.M.," says Santa Monica, CA-based music journalist Denise Sullivan. "Put the four men of U2 specifically together and magic gets created."

It's November of 2005 now and I'm talking to several U2 fans who, like me on that rainy day in Chapel Hill, became converts early on. Since I strayed from our heroes during the '90s and only recently returned to the fold, I'm curious to get their takes on why they've stuck by the band.

"I think U2 keeps the old fans because they remind us that we were young once," continues Sullivan, who first saw U2 in San Francisco in 1981. "They came up during punk rock and, for some of us, punk rock really meant something and it meant something to U2, too. So when they are up there winning, it means we are winning. When Bono is doing great things all over the world, we can say, 'See, that's what a punk rocker is -- we wanted to change the world and now we are!'"

Adds Marianne Sadlow, of Hartford, CT: "Philosophically and intellectually, U2 were and still are challenging. I remember listening to an early interview when Bono said something like, 'Music can change the world because music can change people, and people can change the world.' It's akin to the 'think globally, act locally' ideology. Maybe we all can't go out and accomplish grandiose, large-scale achievements, but we can affect the world by the way we treat the people in our lives."

Twenty years ago, with Live Aid in the air and the members of U2 aligning themselves with humanitarian groups such as Amnesty International, it was easy to believe we could change the world. I'd gone out and started a fanzine, U2/USA, dedicated to the band's music and message, and to giving U2's fans an open forum.

Former U2/USA staffer Susan Duffy-Glynn, of El Segundo, CA, best summarizes our collective experience when she says, "U2's political and spiritual qualities won me over. When I 'got' their lyrics, I was hooked."

Yet winning hearts and minds and keeping them are two different processes. I recall sitting in an arena dressing room in April of '85, passing a bottle of red wine back and forth with Bono, listening to him reflect on the nature of fan worship. "The thing about being a fan," he argued between swigs, "is that when you're into a band, it can be the most important thing in the world to you. The only thing that matters is when you're in your room listening to the records, or waiting for the band to come out onstage. Part of my job is to let them know that they are important to me, to the band."

Nowadays, I might ask Bono what happens when your heroes get so impossibly big that notions of band-fan intimacy become moot. My loss of faith arrived after 1988's patchy Rattle & Hum. U2 seemed too cozy with fame, Bono's messiah complex had turned insufferable ("Come down off the cross, Bono, we need the wood!" cracked one pundit), and coming up was a younger generation of fans who were more into U2's celebrity than the messages in the music. After one such fan played me purloined recordings of a very married Bono leaving lovesick phone messages for a New Orleans-based celebrity groupie (see: Vanity Fair Dec. 1999, "The Miranda Obsession"), I sensed U2/USA's idealist stance was obsolete. It was time to move on.

Other fans no doubt went through their own periods of disenchantment with U2, notably during the overblown, spiritually bereft Zooropa and Popmart tours -- giant lemons, anyone? -- of the mid-90s. ("They started to look ridiculous," quips Sullivan.) Yet beginning with 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind and continuing with last year's How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the band gradually got its mojo back. Jettisoning the gimmicks and focusing again on the music and lyrics were key. Says Duffy-Glynn: "They're back to where they were when I first became a major fan -- back then, they were, 'a new heart is what I need, oh God, make it bleed,' and now it's, 'a heart that hurts is a heart that beats.' They're [touching upon] the same stuff, but with their broader perspective added."

Indeed, while HTDAAB isn't U2's greatest record (that would be 1984's The Unforgettable Fire), its best tracks -- iPod-on-steroids anthem "Vertigo" and the luminous, probing "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" -- rank among U2's greatest songs. The latter tune, in particular -- which on the surface deals with the death of Bono's father -- contains enough universal subtext to make it an extended meditation on losing faith and all the baggage that goes with it. "Sometimes you can't make it," sings Bono, who then practically sighs, "the best you can do is to fake it."

Maybe being a fan, then, means committing yourself for the long haul and overlooking the occasional giant lemon that gets tossed in your path to test that commitment. "After all," says Sadlow, "in the end, U2 is about hope and the triumph of the spirit."

Observes Sullivan of the current Vertigo tour, "I was really stunned by the sheer power -- four guys playing rock & roll in an arena environment and yet making it feel intimate. That sounds like a cliché, but in their case, they succeed. The combination of the production elements and the music caused me to tear up a number of times -- because they are singing about people, and lives and things that matter. They put on a show, that's for sure. But it has such incredible depth, and meaning and elements that elevate it to art; it's not simply to entertain.

"And I guess all that emotion in their sound serves an important function: They help me to feel sad when I need to feel sad and they help me feel joy when I want or need to feel joy. For that, I must thank them."

U2 will be at the Charlotte Bobcats Arena on Monday, Dec. 12. The show is sold out, but hang out around the arena long enough and -- who knows?