By Cathy Maestri
InstantRiverside.com

As a music critic, we’ve seen a lot of bands over the years — the transformative, the mediocre and the really, really awful. U2 has been our favorite since the first time we heard “Gloria,” and we go to great lengths to see them as often as possible, our karmic little way of trying to make up for some of those bad shows.

Which is why we bought tickets for two stadium shows in two different states in a week’s time and, but for the economy, would have seen a third.

Tuesday’s show in Phoenix wasn’t a life-changing event for us — honestly, many of U2’s shows have been — but to someone who’s lost track of how many times they’ve seen the band, it felt like home. Which, in retrospect, was exactly what we needed. And why we’ll go again on Sunday, to the largest event ever at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl.

We might even try to squeeze inside the giant claw again.

U2 figured out how to get closer to concertgoers three tours ago, letting a few hundred eager early birds inside a heart-shaped catwalk extending from the stage; last time out, it was an oval. If you were lucky enough to get in, it felt as though you were seeing the band in a club.

For its current 360 ; the stage beneath is encircled by a human moat contained by another raised catwalk.

From on high in the Rose Bowl, it’s going to look as though the stadium has been invaded by some sort of electric spider, or that it’s housing a spaceship in dry dock.

The greenish skin protecting the structure is what makes it look so odd when the lights are up. Once the show starts, the claw is actually home to some surprisingly subtle technology. Cameras rise and fall, the operators stationed far below and out of the way, while images circle and stretch across a curved surface. Bridges crossing from the stage to the catwalk quietly roll a foot or so over the 2,400 concertgoers below.

At Tuesday’s show at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona, a crowd of 50,000 or so seemed like an intimate gathering — especially considering 96,000 are expected at the Rose Bowl.

The experiences promise to be polar opposites. We rolled straight into a great parking spot beneath a sliver of desert moon about an hour before showtime –the new home of the Phoenix Cardinals football team opened two years ago in what was then the middle of nowhere; now it’s surrounded by acre-after- acre of paved lots.

For the show at the grand dame of college football, we plan on getting to our prepaid golf-course parking spot before lunchtime. That’s being encouraged by the Rose Bowl — starting at noon, early arrivals will be able to watch Sunday football in a picnic area; food vendors and music are also promised. (We suspect the more practical plan would be to go a little later in the day and take a shuttle.)

If you’ve got seats for Sunday, our recommendation is to take along a little pair of binoculars, if only for celebrity-spotting; once the show starts, you’ll be getting the full effect of the claw’s wrap-around images (which will be streamed live on YouTube as well as recorded for a DVD).

Those with general-admission floor tickets for the Rose Bowl will have to weigh their options. You can go early and snag admission to the moat and spend the evening getting jostled, mingling sweat, craning to see past the sea of uplifted cameras and PDAs and twisting to watch band members as they move behind and perhaps above you. (OK, so that last one is actually a good thing. And Meg, our touring partner, got some great photos.)

Bono has always had the ability to seem as though he’s making eye contact with everyone in the venue, whether it’s a club or a stadium, but it’s nice to be right there. Plus, the sound from the claw was just about perfect in Phoenix, free of the usual stadium echo.

We didn’t have a particularly great spot in the moat, got annoyed at people who pushed their way in front of us, ducked in a panic the first time the bridge moved our way and emerged with a few small bruises. We all, of course, had a great time.

Despite the fact that a high-tech show leaves little room for flexibility, in Phoenix U2 slipped in bits of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes,” the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” and an Irish folk tune, “Dirty Old Town.” We were delighted that they reworked “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” from their latest album, “No Line on the Horizon” — we maintain the album version is two mismatched tunes jammed together.

In Phoenix, Muhammad Ali was there, inspiring Bono’s boxing-related band introductions. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, the Pogues and Sen. John McCain and his family were also in attendance, though presumably not all in the same area. Bono pulled up a set of triplets to dance with, and held the hand of a little girl as he walked around the catwalk.

So we’re looking forward to see what gets played on Sunday and who gets shout-outs at the Rose Bowl. And trying to figure out how many shows we can see when U2 comes back in the spring.

– photos by Megan McLean