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Of course, if there were any reasonable people heading into Philips Arena Friday or Saturday night for back-to-back, sold-out concerts by U2, there weren’t any going out, because U2 just flat-out put on a synapse-frying show.

One of the most intense rock ‘n’ roll light shows ever and a barrage of decibels combined for sensory overload. Beaded curtains of light hung above the stage in sheets, flashing and showing shimmering images.

The stage was surrounded by a huge, egg-shaped catwalk, which was itself lit with pulsing lights around the perimeter. It allowed the band members — mainly famous frontman Bono — to get off the stage, into the arena, and play to the crowd.

And play to the crowd he did, with as much showboating as Wayne Newton working a lounge in Vegas. Friday night, he got a young woman out of the audience for a long slow dance to "With or Without You." He donned a blindfold and pretended to be a political prisoner. He gave one shout out to America’s military, another to New Orleans clean-up volunteers.

He threw a few bars of "Georgia on My Mind" into the staggeringly propulsive opener "City of Blinding Lights." He talked about his dad, and how he died recently, but was always asking Bono to take off his sunglasses. "So anyway, this is for you, Dad," he said, taking off his ever-present shades, as the band launched into its recent hit "Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own."

"And it’s you when I look in the mirror," he sang, to everyone’s aging or dead parents. And he even hit the high notes. That ham metaphor isn’t a knock, more a nod of respect. U2 could charge triple digits for tickets (which they do), come out, play the tunes and move on, but they apparently want their fans to experience everything from emotional turmoil to a political awakening to partial hearing loss. (Man, were they loud.)

They’ve always been this way, more or less, for 25 years, with some slight missteps in the ’90s when they got a little too cutesy, some felt. They’ve long since ditched the irony; Bono in concert these days is as serious as a biopsy report. The self-described "Irish megalomaniac" donned a headband with a Star of David, a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent moon on it for the anti-violence anthem "Sunday Bloody Sunday, announcing that "We are all sons of Abraham."

He promoted the One "campaign to make poverty history," got in a plug for his efforts on African debt relief and scrolled the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the Jumbotron. What U2 has gotten really good at, though, is integrating all that into two hours-plus of rock ‘n’ roll kick-in-the-head catharsis.

That Jumbotron was frequently divided into four panels so all four band members were on display: guitarist the Edge, with his stocking cap and array of killer licks, chiming, chopping, soaring and just filling Philips; bassist Adam Clayton, as stoic as Bono is histrionic; drummer Larry Mullen, shown in close-up so you could see the tendons popping on his forearms. Opening act, the Institute, suffered the same fate as most acts that have to go out in an arena of people still trickling in to see the headliner:

Hardly anyone cared. Singer Gavin Rossdale, formerly of Bush, tried a little showboating himself, and he’s got some moves, but after 45 minutes, the band hadn’t really moved the needle.

- Atlanta Journal 

At the back of the arena, there are banks of computers and one-of-a-kind video gadgets that will turn a beaded curtain behind the band into an enormous video monitor during the show. It’s a geek’s dream, and Kapellen is living it. He is a full-time technology expert who travels with the band, which is in Atlanta for Friday’s show and one more tonight. As Kapellen explains how he helps tend to 17 truckloads of traveling technology, his radio buzzes.

"Josh, Josh. Josh to production." In a flash he is rushing toward the production office, literally parting the fog. There’s no way of knowing what he might face. He’s mainly responsible for maintaining a wireless computer network used by everyone from front man Bono to one of the hundreds of stagehands.

"But at one time or another I’ve worked on almost everything here," he explains on the fly as he bustles through the door at the production office. "Our printer is jammed," explains a woman sitting at a computer. Kapellen, 28, is a former aerospace engineer and currently a member of Best Buy’s computer repair unit, Geek Squad.

The U2 tour hired the company to handle some technology tasks. In this case, Kapellen has no secret solutions to this problem. He does what you’d do at home. He pulls out the print tray, yanks at the stuck paper and watches in satisfaction as the printer returns to life. Even trivial problems can cause big headaches while on the road, explained Jake Berry, production director for the U2 show.

Technology in the form of wireless computer connections and cellular phones has made life on the road more tolerable than when Berry started in 1975. "Back then you’d call home once a week," he said. "Now, you’re in touch every day.

Some of the people here use the computer networks to see live video of babies back home." The terms of his contract won’t allow Kapellen, who is from Minneapolis and single, to tell any stories about U2 members. But he says he’s spent time with all four since the tour started Feb. 24. Besides keeping their laptops going, he’s helped set up game systems and retrieved data stored on PDAs that have gone on the fritz.

His days typically start around 5 a.m. and stretch around the clock to the early morning hours. So he has no trouble sleeping when he crawls into one of the bunks — stacked three high — on the bus that transports the stagehands when the concert moves to a new city. The tiny curtained enclosure is not much bigger than a coffin.

"You have to remember not to sit up quickly because, because you can’t," he said. Bono and the other band members needn’t worry about headroom. They travel by private jet. But the guts of the show — including hundreds of speakers and enough computer equipment to supply a good-sized company — move over the road.

And each time the high-tech caravan reaches a new city, hundreds of miles of cable and wire are connected to fire it up again. "In 20 minutes or so after we get the network equipment unpacked, we are up and running again," Kapellen says. And he’s ready to face new high-tech challenges, even if it’s just a balky printer tray.

- Atlanta Journal