Bruce Springsteen is set to take 20,000 fans down to "The River" at the Moda Center on Tuesday night.

For many, the show will no doubt be transcendent. But with all due respect to The Boss, this day in Portland music history will probably always belong to Irish supergroup U2.

On March 22, 1981, four musicians -- just boys really -- in a struggling band from working-class Dublin were involved in one of rock 'n' roll's great disappearing acts at an east Portland bar.

Years before the platinum albums, sold-out stadiums and record-breaking Grammy wins, U2 played to a handful of people at the long-gone Foghorn Tavern in the Gateway district.

What happened after the show at 1200 N.E. 102nd Ave. has been chronicled in several stories and books about the group.

A nondescript brown briefcase belonging to frontman Bono vanished, leaving the 20-year-old future rock star devastated and throwing the young band into chaos.

U2 was touring in support of its first album, "Boy," and preparing to return to the studio. Besides personal treasures, the briefcase included months of work on lyrics, chords, notes, album concepts and photo proof sheets.

According to "Into the Heart," a book about the origins of U2 songs, the band suspected three flirtatious women who came back stage of swiping the satchel.

"It wasn't the money, the passport, the personal knick-knacks," U2 biographer Eamon Dunphy wrote in "Unforgettable Fire." "It was the words he had written. And the breach of trust."

The loss left Bono scrambling to re-create months of work, forcing him to re-write songs from memory and on the fly in the studio.

The apparent theft of the lyrics came at a fraught moment for the band.

At the same time, the members of the band, three of whom were devout Christians, also found themselves in the throes of a spiritual crisis.

Bono, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and guitarist The Edge were members of a rather strict religious group known as the Shalom Fellowship in Dublin, said Matt McGee, editor of the @U2 blog. The sect was pressuring the musicians to disband U2.

At one point, Bono and Edge even walked away from the band, feeling there was no way to reconcile being in a rock band with their faith.

"It was weighing very heavy on them, with Shalom trying to convince them that their chosen path wasn't in line with what was thought of as a Christian lifestyle," McGee said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

"I think because of the stuff going on outside the band, things were already messy with U2," McGee said. "All of sudden, for the lyrics to go missing, for Bono to lose the lyrics, it probably felt like they had the rug pulled out under their feet. They were feeling out of control, a little tipsy, unsure if they had a future."

A recent AV Club story on the making of "October," the band's second album, also mentions the lost briefcase and the ensuing chaos that threatened to trip up the eventual Rock 'n" Roll Hall of Fame inductees:

Adding to the religious crisis was Bono's paralyzing writer's block, which (as the story goes) arose after a briefcase with journals and notes for October disappeared after a show in Portland, Oregon. This made the studio sessions a bit fraught, as the vocalist recalled in a 1982 Melody Maker interview: "I remember the pressure it was made under, and writing lyrics on the mic and at PS50 an hour, that's quite a pressure." Today, ("October" producer Steve) Lillywhite hears remnants of this stress when he listens to "Is That All?" in particular: "Bono basically [is] blaming everyone else for his lack of lyrics. It's like saying, 'You don't want me to try anymore? Is that all I can do?' It made me laugh. I hadn't realized at the time. He's the nicest man in the world, but probably at that time he was going, 'I need to blame someone. I can't have all of it.' He was feeling so guilty that he hadn't maybe written the best lyrics of his life."

Today, "October" remains U2's least popular album in terms of sales, critical response and fan acceptance.

It is easily U2's most overtly religious album, filled of references to their Christian beliefs. It also echoes the wandering, questioning, painful laments found in David's Psalms, with Bono singing "no one is blinder than me" and "is that all?"

Bono, Mullen and The Edge eventually left the Shalom Fellowship, believing they could serve their faith and make the world a better place "from a position of strength," according to the autobiography "U2 By U2."

Still, even as U2's popularity skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s, the mystery of the missing briefcase -- and the moment of truth that it triggered -- nagged at Bono.

In 1983, when the band returned to perform at Portland's Paramount Theater on the wildly successful "War" tour, Bono asked if anyone had seen his briefcase. On Easter Sunday in 2001, Bono repeated the question at a sold-out show at the Rose Garden arena.

The briefcase was eventually found, sitting alone in the attic of a house rented by Cindy Harris in Tacoma. Harris mentioned its contents to her friend Danielle Rheaume, a writer and huge U2 fan who lived in Olympia.

Rheaume knew exactly what Harris had. By then, Bono's briefcase had become a legend of rock history. "It never occurred to me to keep it," she said. "I wanted to get it back to him."

A notebook contained doodles, phone numbers and rough, hand-written lyrics to what would eventually become classic songs such as "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "Gloria." Bono's work visa was in there, listing his real name -- Paul David Hewson -- as well as letters from his future wife, Ali.

But more than anything, Rheaume loved Bono's pages and pages of practiced introductions in a blue pad. "They were funny," she told me. "They were these introductions of himself. We know him today as Bono, a rock star, someone who is used to being on the world stage. Back then, he wasn't as confident, he was 20 years old, he was still Paul David Hewson and he was trying that identity of Bono."

"Some of the notes actually said, 'Hi. I'm Bono.' He would write, 'Is this boring? I hope not.'"

In 2004, when Bono visited Portland to speak about his work fighting AIDS and extreme poverty as part of a World Affairs Council of Oregon lecture series, Rheaume returned the singer's long lost belongings to him.

That night, as Rheaume and Harris sat in the ninth-row Rose Garden seats Bono had given them for the lecture, he announced the lyrics' return and thanked the women.

Of course, the briefcase probably wasn't stolen, as Bono had initially thought.

The singer may have simply forgotten it at the Foghorn.

A few days after Bono's lecture, The Oregonian ran a story about Denny Livingston Jr. and Steve E. Graeff, roadie on U2's first Northwest tour.

Livingston said he was the last crew member to walk out of the Foghorn that night and saw the briefcase in the dressing room. He looked inside, saw that it belonged to Bono and took it for safekeeping.

But the next night in Seattle, the band didn't mention it, and Livingston told The Oregonian he forgot to return it. He gave it to Graeff, who tried to contact the band through the promoter. Graeff said he never received a call back.

Weirdly enough, Graeff was at the time renting the same Tacoma house Harris rented with her husband and where she eventually found the briefcase. Graeff said he was the one who put it in the attic above the garage.

Bono was just another aspiring rock musician. The briefcase was nothing special. Graeff said he forgot about it and left it behind when he moved out.

"It was kind of a sour note," Livingston told The Oregonian, referring to reports of stolen lyrics. "You try to do something nice and end up basically semi-responsible for a negative situation when you're trying to do the right thing."

No groupies. No theft.

But Rheaume, who wrote about her U2 "voyage of discovery" on Medium.com just last week, isn't convinced Bono just absent-mindedly left his belongings at the Foghorn that night 35 years ago.

In the piece, she wrote:

The more I uncovered about the circumstances around the loss of Bono's briefcase, the more I came to see its loss as an essential test that U2 had to withstand on their route to being the resilient, determined band they are today. Then again, if they hadn't already possessed those qualities, Bono's briefcase might not have gone missing in the first place. Therein lies this paradox: I have since learned there is compelling reason to believe that Bono's briefcase was hidden backstage by an embittered local crewmember retaliating against U2 for being too particular about their technical and artistic details. Another crewmember had attempted, but failed, to return it to Bono a few days after their show at the Foghorn. Here was another case where the exact same qualities that brought disapproval in one environment brought approval and success in another environment.

Were you at the Foghorn Tavern on that night 35 years ago?

Be honest.

Whenever Bono mentions the show from a Portland stage, thousands typically shout back, making the rock star laugh and shake his head.

There's now way they can remember the gig, he responds.

"Because as far as I can remember, there were only eight people at the gig, and four of them were the band!" he said at his 2004 speech at the Rose Garden. "The fifth was the bartender, the sixth was security, and the seventh and eighth people were thieves. I'm not kidding you!"

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@josephjrose