Bono's "Surrender" is hardly that

U2 singer's one-man memoir comes to life on stage

Idealism seems to piss people off. The old half/empty, half/full glass of water debate. Are things getting better or worse? Are people inherently good or selfish? Are all politicians crooked…“Ah, they all do it…”

I remember my strong reaction to reading author Joseph Heller’s comment that every President in his lifetime has gotten progressively worse. I wondered if that was true, if we all felt that way. And Heller didn’t live to see Trump.

Like so many other things we used to hold dear, idealism itself, thinking the best of us, as a species, seems to be under attack. That’s why, to me, the recent Apple TV release of “Bono: Stories Of Surrender” seems an unusually courageous move, one worth seeing and thinking about. Will idealism survive?

U2’s Paul “Bono” Hewson is a rock singer who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times for his off-stage work for Third World debt relief and AIDS research. In his other job, he’s the lead singer and co-songwriter of a band that has sold as many as 180 million albums worldwide, making all the members of the band wealthier than anyone could have imagined.

Yet Bono, in my view, is someone who has used his celebrity to do extraordinary things for the good of the planet and the people on it. Some of that may be a Catholic thing, he was raised in a heavily Catholic country, Ireland, he’s wildly wealthy and feels somewhat guilty about it. He’s written about that on “Gone” -— “You gotta feel so guilty. Got so much for so little. Then you find that feeling just won't go away…” and suggested as much in countless interviews and also in his recent memoir, “Stories Of Surrender.”

But just writing a book wasn’t enough for Bono — which, again, irritates people — so he designed a “book tour”: a series of one-man shows where he would engage with an audience to talk about his life, his passions, his wrought relationship with his “da” (father) and a world that did not deal him a particularly kind hand from the start and how he came to love it anyway. One of these shows at New York’s Beacon Theater was filmed and that’s the Apple TV show, “Bono: Stories of Surrender.”

If Bruce Springsteen’s revelatory one-man shows — “Bruce on Broadway” — gave us a warmer, more intimate look at Bruce’s life and career, Bono’s “Stories Of Surrender” may be even sharper, more open and daring, particularly in this political moment. Can idealism survive?

Excepting perhaps President Trump and a few MAGA dullards, just about everybody loves Bruce. Bono is — and has been — a more polarizing figure. He’s been mocked in editorial cartoons “That’s just God, he thinks he’s Bono” and he and the band were severely criticized for what was intended as a wholly generous move in 2014, automatically downloading U2’s new album, “Songs Of Innocence” completely free to all ITunes users on their IPhones. Here they were, giving everyone a free album and it was as if they made everyone eat broccoli for breakfast.

“Bono: Songs Of Surrender,” filmed in evocative black and white, features Bono on stage with a few chairs, some minimal musical accompaniment, talking and mimicking moments from his life that shaped him — and in turn, maybe those of us who followed the band and their music. In telling his story, he also offers us a wide-ranging, if brief, assortment of U2 songs that truly seem to be written out of his life.

He’s 65 now, his face is deeply lined and looks lived in. He wears tinted round glasses and is no kid. But he’s also a natural performer who comes alive on stage. He begins the show describing a life-threatening heart surgery around Christmas in 2016 that could have ended his extraordinary life. But he survived. And had a story to share.

His mother dies after suffering an aneurysm at her own father’s funeral. His father and brother’s response to her tragic death was to never mention her name again. He goes on to describe a remarkably revealing series of encounters with his “da” — a distant father that never would quite give him the acknowledgement he sought, which make Bono seek it even more; a troubled relationship that drove and haunted him.

Yet, later, that old joke about the guy in the hole who ignores all manner of help waiting for a sign from above, seems to apply. In the same week Bono responds to a bulletin board ad in Mount Temple School placed by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and meets David “Edge” Evans and Adam Clayton, the three men he’d spend his onstage life with in U2, he also meets Alison Stewart, the young woman who would soon become his wife and mother of his kids. Quite a week. Astrologers ought to look at his transits.

On stage, his singing is better, more subtle than ever, the brief clips of U2 familiar hit tunes help illustrate his life — which is probably how he hears them, too. And much later, after several barbed, darting, unsettling conversations with “da,” even after worldwide success and acclaim, “da” finally admits he’d heard “Pride” on the radio, U2’s tribute to Martin Luther King and was, to Bono’s disbelief, impressed. “I heard your song ‘Pride” on the radio, he tells Bono. “I might have felt some.”

U2’s Bono acts out a conversation with his “da” — his late father, Bob

A bit earlier, “da” had met Lady Diana and was talking about her to his son. “I must say, uh…she does great things for charity, but it’s not charity that you’re on about, is it? It’s justice, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t need charity if the world was just.”

A revelation! The immovable mountain comes to Muhammad. Bono can hardly contain himself. “Is the son, uh, starting to make sense to the father” he asks?

Bob’s response sets the grenade pin again. “I wouldn’t go that far…”

Yes, Bono loves, admits he lives for the applause and the approval of a world since he couldn’t get much of it from his ‘da.’ He’s stubbornly clung to his ideals, dreaming that a short, clever, relentless smart-assed kid from a broken Irish home could one day step onto a world stage and set it alight. And at the same time, he could use all he’d been given and earned to try and make it a better world by song, by action.

Just one person.

As he sang in “One”: “One life, one blood, One life you got to do what you should. One life with each other. Sisters. Brothers. One life but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other…”

Thanks for the ride, Bono.