No. 152 – Mofo

Performer: U2

Songwriters: Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr.

Original Release: Pop

Year: 1997

Definitive Version: Popmart: Live from Mexico City, 1998. I love the Pop Muzik intro that brings the band on stage.

Before we get started, I have to say I’m coming off a New Year’s Eve celebration at Martyr’s featuring Tributosaurus, and they’ve done it again. They became Chicago, and I was wrong about something I wrote awhile ago (good ol’ no. 506). Chicago wasn’t a really good band before Peter Cetera drove them off the edge of wuss cliff; they were a genuinely great band, period (until Terry Kath unfortunately blew his brains out). I foresee 2014 being a year where I buy a lot of Chicago.

Anyway, although I missed the first concert at Ohio Stadium—Pink Floyd in 1988—I saw almost every one thereafter, starting with Genesis in 1992. One of those was U2 on the Popmart tour in 1997.

Scott got the tickets and came up with Shani to see the concert (and stay with me and Debbie). For reasons I’ve forgotten, his seats were better than ours.

Our seats still were pretty good. We were stage left maybe 10 yards in front of the stage halfway up A deck. We still were about 150 feet from the stage, but up to that point, they were the best seats I had for an Ohio Stadium show (only to be eclipsed by The Rolling Stones later that year when Doug got us 15th-row seats). Scott’s seats were on the field.

Still, Debbie and I had a good view of everything that went on. U2’s warmup act consisted of a DJ spinning tunes, and I remember that when Pop Muzik started, the DJ and two other roadies just picked up his turntables and walked them nonchalantly off stage. The crowd went nuts as it realized that U2 was about to hit the stage, which it did by coming through the crowd.

The gigantic lemon didn’t appear for the encore, like several stops on that tour, because it was apparently broken. Instead, I got a different lasting visual of the concert, and it was during this song.

As the DJ played, a few rows in front of our seats, a hot brunette began to dance, and I mean she was shakin’ it like a dozen Polaroid pictures. Soon a friend joined her, then another. By the time Mofo kicked in, about six women, all sexy in appearance as well as motion, were gyrating to the music. Maybe my seats weren’t so bad after all.

Check out the strippers, I said to Debbie. How do you know they’re strippers? Just because a group of attractive women happen to dance together in an overtly sexual way doesn’t make them strippers. True, but the fact that they all wore pink T-shirts that had the Columbus Gold logo on the front might have been a giveaway.

I mean, what women do you know EVER advertise a local strip club on any part of their attire, let alone their chests, in public? Exactly, employees. I didn’t approach any of them to inquire, although I did tell Scott later that I felt like I should’ve flipped over the railing next to them with a dollar bill sticking out of my mouth Windsor-style. Maybe they were just waitresses, but they sure moved like professionals.

So that's what I think about when I hear this song. I wonder what Bono thinks about.