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Clayton's other prop was his bass, a gift from his parents ("I'll play till I'm bigger than the Beatles!" he promised them), which he handled with similar elan. It became clear after a little time, however, that there were certain limitations to style. The Claytons were dubious when the band started to talk about turning pro. "Quite sensibly," the Edge remembers, "they realized this business is very hard and that Adam is not the world's most gifted musician and what possible chance has he got of making it. My folks probably made the same calculation." "Adam's amazing," says Bono flatly. "He just pretended he could play the bass, when in fact he couldn't. And at the age of 16, he pretended he knew the music business inside and out." He, of all the four, saw the band as his future.
He had to. Bono was dubious at first about joining up ("I thought rock was ugly"), and the Edge at these early stages "didn't ever consider the band as anything other than a worthwhile thing to do on Wednesday afternoons." Mullen, the youngest of the group, could only dream of a career, while Bono and the Edge were getting on with their education and taking their final exams. Clayton, however, had been booted out of Mount Temple, and worried about "commitment" from the others. He hustled hard, trying to force their hand, and made contact with McGuinness.
The band, which had gone through a variety of names, including the Hype, was better with chutzpah than with chords. "You see," says Mullen, "we couldn't play. We were very, very, very bad." In the first hot flush of punk, this did not greatly matter, and after seeing them in 1978, McGuinness, who had done mostly film-production work up until that moment, agreed to become their manager. "It looked to me like they would be a great rock band," he says now, adding, "I've only had to be right once."
McGuinness farmed himself out for the occasional production job and began to "live off my wife." The boys, still living at home, would occasionally be ! driven to dates by a stray mom or dad. This sort of early scuffling can break a band or bond it, and with U2 it seems to have brought the group closer. After a bit. "The first couple of years," says Clayton, "we kind of hated each other. It was very competitive, and everyone was trying to come out on top." As the band gigged around, scrambling to get heard by record companies and earn a little living money, there were third-party suggestions that one member or another be dropped in the interest of strengthening the band's musicianship. All such notions were rejected out of hand. "We never, ever felt that being a great musician was a necessary qualification for being in U2," says McGuinness. "The individuals were much more important than whether you could play."
There were other ties, ones that stayed strong beneath the surface tension. Grief could be shared, understood. When he was 15, Bono's mother died from the effects of a stroke she suffered at his grandfather's funeral. Mullen lost his mother in a traffic accident in 1978. "The thing that has kept us going," he says now, "is the fact that we are friends. This whole band is based on our friendship. If it had originally been based on our music, we would have failed."