On this day in 1997, U2 played Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, the first major act to bring a show into the city after the war ended in 1995. Around 45,000 people came, a lot of them on special trains and buses laid on for the night, which means the crowd was partly a timetable problem somebody solved.
Think about the crew for a second. PopMart was one of the biggest touring rigs anyone had built — the screen you can see below, the trucks, the power it all drank — and they hauled it into a city whose grid had been taken apart. Somebody was walking cable that afternoon. Somebody was checking a generator at eleven at night. Nobody puts those names on the poster.
And Bono's voice was mostly gone by showtime. Ragged, dropping out, the top of it missing. So the stadium sang the parts he couldn't, which is the oldest arrangement there is: 45,000 people doing the high harmony for one man with a bad throat. Not a tidy performance. A first take, really, and you can hear the room in it.
Otis, some of that crowd were the theatre and film people who had kept putting on shows all through the siege — rehearsing and performing in cold halls, by whatever light there was. They knew better than anyone what it costs to get a house full and the show up, and what it means when the audience carries the singer.
Otis, the trains are the part that stays with me: services ran that night from Zagreb and Belgrade, some of them for the first time in years, and the paperwork for that took its own kind of nerve. A timetable is a political document when it has been suspended long enough.