U2 tour engine to be idling for at least 8 weeks

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that U2 singer Bono’s back gave out last week. Just look at what’s been riding on it since the band launched its 360A?A° Tour last year.

“There’s no question it’s monumental,” Arthur Fogel, Live Nation’s chief executive of global touring and producer of U2’s tours since PopMart in 1997, said Tuesday shortly after the promoter announced the postponement of the 16 shows on the North American tour leg after Bono’s back surgery last week in Germany. “It’s a massive production.”

To wit: U2 manager Paul McGuinness has put tour overhead at $750,000 a day, which covers the cost of moving crew and nearly 200 trucks that hold three complete stage setups to leapfrog over one another as the show moves from city to city.

It was so expensive to produce that, nearly three months into the tour last year, McGuinness said they were still operating in the red. More than 1 million tickets have been sold for the North American concerts this year.

Each show, Fogel said, requires taking over each venue for roughly a week: four to five days ahead of the concert to build the stage, a day for the show -- or two, in the case of the band’s scheduled June 6-7 concerts at Anaheim Stadium -- followed by two days after the performance to break down the stage for transportation to the next tour stop.

“We’re now going through the process of addressing our options and assessing the logistical issues,” Fogel said. “But I have no doubt we’ll solve them all.”

The rejiggering of the tour came after doctors assessed an injury that Bono sustained while preparing for the tour.

“Bono suffered severe compression of the sciatic nerve,” said Dr. Muller Wohlfahrt in a statement that Live Nation issued Tuesday. “On review of his MRI scan, I realized there was a serious tear in the ligament and a herniated disc, and that conservative treatment would not suffice. I recommended Bono have emergency spine surgery with professor [Jorg] Tonn at Munich’s [Ludwig Maximilians-University] Hospital on Friday.”

Tonn said that when he met with the singer, “He was already in severe pain, with partial paralysis in the lower leg. The ligament surrounding the disc had an 8-millimeter tear, and during surgery we discovered fragments of the disc had traveled into the spinal canal. This surgery was the only course of treatment for full recovery and to avoid further paralysis.

“Bono is now much better, with complete recovery of his motor deficit,” Tonn continued. “The prognosis is excellent, but to obtain a sustainable result, he must now enter a period of rehabilitation.”

That is expected to take eight weeks, prompting the shifting of the North American tour dates to 2011. Fogel said it is hoped that Bono will be able to resume performing for European dates that begin Aug. 6 in Turin, Italy, and continue through Oct. 8 in Rome.

At that point, it would be virtually impossible to stage the North American shows because of weather and the schedule of football games booked in the many stadiums.

“We’re obviously a little spoiled out here” in California, Fogel said. “But the climate window as you move east narrows dramatically.... It’s a classic example of the realities of life intersecting with entertainment.”

Ray Waddell, who covers the concert industry for Billboard, said U2’s 360A?A° Tour is shaping up to become the highest-grossing tour of all time worldwide.

That record is held by the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour, which grossed $558 million during its 2005-07 run, according to Billboard. U2’s tour took in $311 million worldwide in 2009, Waddell said.

U2 manager McGuinness said Tuesday in a statement: “For a performer who lives to be on stage, this is more than a blow. He feels robbed of the chance to do what he does best and feels like he has badly let down the band and their audience....

“His concerns about more than a million ticket-buyers whose plans have been turned upside down, we all share,” McGuinness said, “but the most important thing right now is that Bono make a full recovery.”

Tickets for the Anaheim shows and other U.S. dates will be honored when the concerts are rescheduled, promoters said.

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randy.lewis@latimes.com