While I was in San Francisco last week attending the Google Plus Photography Conference I participated in the Embarcadero photo walk with Trey Ratcliff. As part of the walk we came upon the Vaillancourt Fountain and I realized that this was the general area that U2 held a public concern years ago. I vaguely remembered that Bono had spray-painted a sculpture and had gotten in trouble with the city. No one on the walk seemed to remember the incident and when I finally got a chance I looked it up I found this YouTube video. The incident occurred during the bands Rattle & Hum tour in 1987. In the video Bono climbs up on the sculpture at around the 2:50 mark and records the message that "Rock & Roll stops the traffic." The graffiti was removed long ago, which is sort of a shame since it was an iconic moment and it would have been fun to still see the paint today and remember a moment 25 years ago.
I've included a few more of the photos at my Google+ page which you can find here.
Update: Unfortunately the video was pulled by YouTube for copyright reasons. I think if you search "U2 Embarcadero" there are still some other videos out that show some of what was in the video above.
