Robert Redford Got U2 Drunk Before I Interviewed Them. It Was Awesome.

In January 2008, the concert film U2 3D was the primetime Saturday-night debut during the Sundance Film Festival’s opening weekend. I was a newspaper reporter with USA Today at the time, and I’d arranged an hour-long sit-down with the band—which they abruptly canceled shortly before we were set to meet. Why? Well, Robert Redford had made them a better offer.

The Sundance founder (and Sundance Kid) had invited them to his mountainside Sundance Mountain Resort to have a drink at his personal watering hole. He had reconstructed the joint from the remains of the late-1800s Wyoming tavern where Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang used to get shitfaced and plot train robberies and bank heists.

I get it. I'd have canceled on them for that, too.

But the Sundance resort was more than an hour outside of Park City, Utah, where the premiere would be held that night. There was a window of downtime there, so I boldly proposed that hey, maybe instead of canceling the interview, we could just postpone it. I could meet them instead at the resort and we could have our conversation during their ride back to town. Unbelievably, they agreed.

So, there I sat in the back seat of their warm SUV, watching as Bono and The Edge walked with Redford out of the bar and across a snowy footbridge to our vehicle. They were ringed by onlookers, who surrounded them with raised cell phones, snapping pictures and capturing video. Bono rode shotgun, while The Edge got in the back where I was. Redford said farewell to the Irishmen, and they closed the doors to start their conversation with a reporter. I imagined that was quite a comedown.

But Bono—a recent Esquire cover subject—was downright ebullient. Even The Edge, usually the stone-faced one, couldn’t stop smiling and waving to everyone. Redford had regaled them with the true tales that had inspired one of his breakthrough films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Usually the objects of adoration, the U2 frontmen had been transformed into fanboys themselves. Redford’s generous pours of their favorite whiskey only added to the bonhomie.

“God bless! Look after yourselves! See you!” The Edge called out the window to Redford and his entourage as we motored away down the snowcapped road. One crying visitor to the resort ran up to profess his love for them as they pulled away, but all he got out was: “I cannot tell you … I cannot tell you …” while holding his hand over his heart.

Our driver joked that he had “strict instructions not to let you stop at a bar.” But Bono and The Edge exchanged an 80-proof look that suggested such a stop would be fairly redundant at this point. “Uhh, well,” Bono said. “We just had a little Bushmills at the, uh …”

“The Owl Bar,” The Edge said.

Redford transformed the U2 frontmen into fanboys themselves. The actor’s generous pours of their favorite whiskey only added to the bonhomie.

“And we got the whole story from Robert,” Bono added. The Owl Bar was the refurbished remnants of the Rosewood Bar, which Redford had hauled in from Thermopolis, Wyoming, in tribute to one of his most iconic characters—the one who had given name to his legendary film festival. A larger-than-life Irishman named Joe Magill was credited as the cowboy who gave the Wyoming town its moniker, believing (mistakenly) that Thermopolis was Greek for “hot spring.”

Redford apparently told them that the original bar back was shipped in from their home country back then. “They got it from Ireland. It was built in Ireland,” Bono explained. “There were 500 outlaws holed up, and they had everything, but they were complaining about the quality of their bar. Loads of them were Irish, as you might imagine.”

Here’s where it’s worth noting that this may literally be a case of Drunk History. There were about nine members of Butch and Sundance’s gang, and hundreds of other travelers and workers who passed through Thermopolis, Wyoming, but it’s not clear there was ever a legion of gunslingers numbering in the hundreds. Forgive any inaccuracies.

“A bunch of them get together and go, ‘This bar isn’t really up to much—who’s good at bars?’” Bono said. “But Cassidy bought the fucking bar. He had it commissioned.”

“It’s probably one of the first Irish bars ever exported out of Ireland,” The Edge said.

Well, I said, Butch and Sundance were a profitable operation. The Edge shrugged: “They had a lot of money.”

“I’ll tell you, fair play to Bob,” Bono added, veering back to their afternoon adventure. “I ordered the Bushmills, and thought, ‘In America, it’s kind of against the law, you know, to drink during the day.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah …’” Then he mimed slurping a shot. “This is my kind of man.”

As day whiskey tends to do, the emotions swung rapidly between happy and sad. Bono volunteered that his late father drank the higher end version of that spirit, Black Bush. “At his funeral, Bushmills sent crates of little, small bottles of Black Bush for everybody at the funeral,” the singer said. The melancholy memory was conjured by sharing the same drink with Redford “that dad drank.”

Then Bono perked up. “My dad wasn’t an abuser of alcohol,” he added. Then he wobbled his head and deliberately slurred: “And neither are myself or The Edge!”

I said, “You don’t abuse it. You take good care of it.”

Bono laughed. “Exactly right.”

This was all just the first three minutes.

The guys were untethered and unguarded throughout the hour-long conversation as we rolled through the snowy hills of rural Utah on our way to the 1,200-seat high school auditorium where U2 3D would premiere. I wouldn’t say the bandmates were fully inebriated, and we were also at a pretty high altitude, but they were certainly … cheerful. I don’t believe I’d have gotten as lively an interview had Redford not contributed a few shots of finely-aged rocket fuel.

We joked about picking up a hitchhiker who was thumbing a ride outside the resort. They lambasted entertainers who complained about the burden of fame. “We hate whinging rock stars. Come on, why else do this?" Bono said.

They also beat up on themselves a little. “Normally, when I hear a U2 song on the radio I cringe. Either I sound like a girl, or the lyric isn't finished,” Bono said, while The Edge nodded.

“Some of my best shows and indeed probably the worst shows I ever played in U2 were filmed for this 3-D movie,” The Edge said.

Bono also fretted about seeing himself not just towering on a movie screen but in three dimensions. “I don't think I'm the most vain of rock 'n' roll stars you'll meet, but I had a panic attack at the thought of a 3-D, 40-foot arse,” he said. “Some of the shots I can see, I can't help thinking, ‘You fat bastard.’"

We talked about the movie. We talked about stresses within the world’s biggest band. They told me about the slabs of beef and parmesan cheese that the late tenor Luciano Pavarotti used to send them at Christmastime. They talked about their regret that Frank Sinatra died before he could record a song they wrote for him: “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad.”

I hadn’t drank a drop of anything, but couldn’t help but join their wavelength. I told them I had solicited questions from U2 fans among my family and friends, and my brother Greg dared me to ask: If you’re going in a vehicle at the speed of light and you turn on your headlights, what happens? (Dare won, little brother.)

Not my most professional moment, but The Edge said: "I can answer that.”

Bono twisted around from the front seat. "Edge is the band scientist," he said and jabbed a finger at the guitarist: "Go."

The Edge crossed his hands in the air and declared nothing would happen. "No. because the speed of light. Is. It."

Even The Edge, usually the stone-faced one, couldn’t stop smiling and waving to everyone.

A beat passed as we absorbed this. Then Bono asked, "Know what I think…? I think you can see where you've come from." He flashed his eyebrows behind his signature round glasses.

"Ooohh," The Edge sighed. “He’s very deep, you know.”

At one point, the sun broke through the clouds, casting brilliant white light on the mist shrouding the mountaintops and the sheets of ice and snow clinging to the bluffs. "Can I interrupt this broadcast?" Bono said, cutting off whatever The Edge and I were discussing. "There's an amazing moment in Ireland—where we live—when the sea and the sky have the same color and the line of the horizon disappears. I look at these mountains, and it's just about to happen here."

He pulled out a black CD case and flipped through the hand-written labels on the discs. "I have just the right song for it if I can find it."

I asked whose song it is. It’s their song. From an album U2 is working on. “It’s only a demo,” Bono says, sliding it into the player.

I looked down at the glowing red light on my digital recorder and ask The Edge if I should turn it off. He shrugged and shook his head. Soon his hard-charging guitar opening for “No Line on the Horizon,” which would not be released for another year, filled the vehicle. "That came out of a new distortion box that my guitar tech got," The Edge said.

So we spent the next part of the interview with U2 letting a journalist listen to—and record—the title song from the new album they were workshopping. Another song they played was a folk tune about the late Dubliners singer Ronnie Drew that they’d helped create. Bono sang along with Bono, and pointed out when Sinéad O'Connor and Andrea Corr joined in.

I never shared that audio with anyone, but I did listen to it a lot myself in the months after.

On the event of Robert Redford’s passing, many have shared stories about the way he touched their lives, directly, indirectly, and sometimes just through the movies. This is just one that came to mind for me.

So thanks for this, Mr. Redford. I almost lost the interview completely due to your generosity with the band, but you ended up making the interview vastly better than I could have ever hoped.

I’m going to have a shot of Bushmills tonight, and quote Bono: “Fair play to Bob.”