Larry Mullin, Jr. (of U2), said that they very nearly didn’t get to play live that night and that many fans lined up for tickets and didn’t get to see a show. Anyone know what he was talking about? Was there some scandal, or did the Grammy’s people not want U2 on because of Bono’s famous use of the “F” word last year?
Bono’s notorious remarks were at the Golden Globe Awards, not the Grammys (no apostrophe). And it was in 2003, not last year.
No, it was about the recent fuss involving the ticket presale for u2.com members. Here’s a good article describing what went on, you can find a lot more on the atu2.com site, and even more of the fan reaction in their forum.
To summarize, late last year U2 officially ended their old fan club/magazine, Propaganda. This wasn’t exactly a huge surprise, since it had printed only one or two issues in the last four years. To replace Propaganda, they offered a fan club through u2.com that cost $40 to join, or $20 for former Propaganda subscribers with issues remaining on their subscription. This was the first point of discontent - Propaganda’s record keeping was somewhat lacking, and a large number of people who were entitled to the reduced rate couldn’t get it because there was no record of their subscription. The second problem was that when the new fan club was announced, they more or less promised advance tickets for fan club members.
When the actual presale was announced, people were upset to find out it was through Ticketmaster, as opposed to the old Propaganda system where people mailed in forms listing the type of ticket they wanted and their choices for which cities they wanted. The old system wasn’t perfect, and people couldn’t always get their first choice, but they almost always got something. This year’s presale however, was something of a disaster. For starters, Ticketmaster’s servers couldn’t handle the demand, so a lot of people were timing out. This caused problems because in some cases it caused some people’s presale passwords to get marked as used, even though they hadn’t actually managed to get any tickets. The people who did get tickets were in many cases stuck with upper deck seats that cost $165, while the prime seats on the floor were turning up on ebay within minutes of the presale. A lot of fans were left feeling ripped off, because they’d paid $40 and hadn’t got anything out it, while the scalpers were apparently profiting. Then when the general sales started, because this first leg of the tour is relatively short and they’re playing arenas instead of stadiums, the shows all sold out in ridiculously short times. As an example, the first show in Vancouver sold out in 8 minutes, they added a second show, and it sold out in 9 minutes.
Anyway, that’s what Larry was apologizing for, and if you dig around on the U2 fan sites, you’ll find all you ever wanted to know about the presale and the fan reaction to it.