Planning, Itinerary, and Ticketing
Rehearsals for the tour began in December 1991 at The Factory in Dublin. During this time, Eno consulted the band on the visual aspects of the show. The band found it challenging to recreate all the sounds of the new album. They considered using additional musicians, but their sentimental attachment to a four-piece prevailed. They left Dublin on 19 February 1992 to set up at Lakeland Civic Center in Lakeland, Florida for rehearsals before the opening show at the venue on 29 February.
Unlike many of the group's previous tours, which began ahead of or coincident with the release of a new album, Zoo TV started four months after Achtung Baby was released, giving fans more time to familiarise themselves with the new songs. By opening night, the album had already sold three million copies in the US and seven million worldwide. The first two legs of the tour, 32 shows in North America and 25 in Europe, were indoor arena shows. While the band had toured North America every year between 1980 and 1987, they were absent from the North American tour circuit for over four years before Zoo TV. The US concert business was in a slump at the time, and the routing of the first two legs generally allowed only one show per city. This was intended to announce the band's return to major cities, to gauge demand for ticket sales, and to re-introduce the notion of a "hot ticket" to concertgoers. Tickets for the opening show in Florida sold out over the phone in four minutes, demand exceeding supply by a factor of 10 to 1. To combat ticket scalping, the band avoided selling tickets in box offices as much as possible, preferring to sell over the telephone instead. Several cities' telephone systems were overwhelmed when Zoo TV tickets went on sale; Los Angeles telephone company Pacific Bell reported 54 million calls in a four-hour period, while Boston's telephone system was temporarily shut down.
In Europe, ticketing details were kept secret until radio advertisements announced that tickets had gone on sale at box offices. In many cases, tickets were limited to two-per-person to deter scalping. Due to the production costs and relatively small arena crowds, the European arena leg lost money. McGuinness had planned larger outdoor concerts in Berlin, Turin, Poland, and Vienna to help the tour break even, but only the Vienna concert occurred.
Both the Outside Broadcast stadium leg in the second half of 1992, and the European stadium leg in 1993—called "Zooropa"—were tentatively planned and dependent on the success of the arena tour. While their playing stadiums was motivated by pragmatic concerns, the group saw it as an artistic challenge as well, imagining what Salvador Dalí or Andy Warhol would do with such spaces. Rehearsals for Outside Broadcast began in Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania in early August 1992; a public rehearsal show was held on 7 August. Technical problems and pacing issues forced refinement to the show. Six days before the official leg-opening Giants Stadium show, the group delayed the concert by a day, due to the difficulty of assembling the large outdoor production and the destruction of the largest screen in a windstorm. By the time Outside Broadcast began, Achtung Baby had sold four million copies in the US. Tickets for the Zooropa leg went on sale in November 1992. The leg, which began in May 1993, was the band's first full stadium tour of Europe and marked the first time they had visited certain areas. Scheduling for the 1993 "Zoomerang" stadium leg in the Pacific afforded the band more off-days between shows than previous legs, but this amplified the exhaustion and restlessness that had set in by the tour's end.
Although the tour was listed as co-sponsored by MTV, the group decided against explicit corporate sponsorship; band members, especially drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., were uncertain that the tour would be profitable. The daily cost of producing the tour was US$125,000, regardless of whether a show was held on a given day. An attempt to convince Philips to donate the video equipment was unsuccessful, and the band had to pay for it themselves. In order to defray the heavy expenses of the Pacific shows, U2 asked for large guarantees from local promoters up front, rather than sharing the financial burden as they had in the past. This sometimes caused promoters to raise ticket prices above usual levels, which in turn sometimes resulted in less than full houses. Profit margin was a slim four to five percent at most sold-out shows.
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