A Casual Fan’s History of U2 Through Achtung Baby

U2 passed through town a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t see the shows (my relationship with Big Concert Events is a complex enough topic to merit its own post another day), but the splash in town and the various clips posted online did prompt me to go back and listen and reflect…

I’ve always had a kind of complex relationship with U2.  I was in high school when they first broke, with the Boy, October, and War albums tumbling out in rapid succession, followed up shortly by a live document, the arresting and inspiring Under a Blood Red Sky.  Their sound was unique and cool (loved that echoey guitar and giant voice) and it fought against the tsunami-tide of 80s music which was composed of electronic sounds and devoid of grit, grind, or substance so I liked them alright, but some things kinda put me off: singer Paul Hewson’s and guitarist Dave Evans’s self-dubbed nicknames—“Bono” and “The Edge”—felt kinda put on, self-puffing, and pretentious (I feel the same way about Gordon Sumner christening himself “Sting”), and the kinda holier than thou politics the band so loudly espoused felt kinda pontifical and rubbed me the wrong way.  And so: I thought they were alright, but I wasn’t really a big fan.

I was a big Brian Eno fan, though— I gobbled up hundreds of hours of his work with art rock professor Robert Fripp, his “ambient” soundscapes, his legendary 3 album partnership with David Bowie, his solo classic Here Come the Warm Jets (Fripp’s guitar solo on "Baby's On Fire" is a brilliant combination of savagery and intellect), and many of his other experiments and collaborations— and so I snapped up the Eno-produced The Unforgettable Fire the week it came out my sophomore year in college. Dave Evans was quoted in interviews as saying that this was how the band was always supposed to sound, that this was the sound they had been driving at all along, and I agreed.  Eno and fellow soundscape sculptor Daniel Lanois had developed Evans’s noted echoey guitar sound into a tool capable of painting richly textured aural pictures while still also crumbling walls with blitzkriegs of rage.  The songs were lyrically heavy— “In the Name of Love” and “MLK” were fitting tributes to Dr. King, “Elvis Presley and America” nicely drew a picture of the King as a metaphor for much of what’s good and much of what’s bad about our country and the American Dream, and the narration and cascading musical rises and falls in “Bad” authentically limn the sadness of someone watching a friend struggle with depression or addiction—  but they’re somehow not quite as Moses-From-The-Mountain preachy as some of the earlier songs.  The album was a huge critical and commercial success, again especially impressive coming as it did in the middle of Rock and Roll’s darkest hour.  Surrounded on the charts, radio, and MTV by the soulless drek of 80s synth pop, The Unforgettable Fire stood virtually alone in every respect:  sonically composed of real instruments— guitar, bass, and drums—rather the sounds of a Pong game, lyrically serious and poetic, and the band, pompous nicknames aside, presented in jeans, t-shirts, and a distinct absence of krazy-glued hair spikes or dye.

Then, The Joshua Tree— a perfect album from beginning to end.  I've listened to it front to back a half-dozen times in the last week, and I can’t find a place where interest or energy leaks out anywhere.  From the windblown opener “Where the Streets Have No Name,”  through ballads  of love and / or self-reflection (“With or Without You”), paeans to land and laborers “Red Hill Mining Town”), political anthems both thunderous (“Bullet the Blue Sky”) and meditative (“Mothers of the Disappeared”), and beyond, every track is a killer.  The lyrical ideas and opinions, while every bit as socially and culturally on-point as anything on “War,” are expressed more artfully.  The sound is enormous and gorgeous.  The songs, with Hewson’s booming baritone carving out soaring melody lines and potent ad libs between Evans’s alternately delicate and ballistic echo-driven guitar riffs, and undergirded by Adam Clayton’s muscular bass lines and Larry Mullen Jr.’s rock solid and sensitive drumming, are arranged impeccably to maintain interest and maximize impact by Eno and Lanois.  The Joshua Tree shows were Rock and Roll Revivals on a massive scale, leaving concertgoers with a sense not only of joining in an event of musical communion, but having been exhorted to higher purposes by the band’s fiery fusing of politics and rock and roll.  Arguably, the band had reached a place in Western Culture to which no one had been since the Beatles: commercially successful on a scale almost impossible to comprehend—record sales in the 10s of millions, globe and calendar spanning tours of the largest arenas and football stadiums— but also with a cultural impact transcending mere rock- or pop-stardom.  Not merely unabashedly outspoken on issues such as apartheid, the IRA, and world hunger, the band was an active leader in fundraising for those causes, and also willing and able to use their stature to take their commitments to the top, lobbying and conversing with political leaders around the world.

A clarifying note here: no one, NO ONE, I repeat NO ONE—including U2 has ever had the musical and cultural impact of the Beatles.  In all probability no one ever will—they changed the world musically and culturally forever.  Everything that U2 has done has been possible because of the Beatles, and so when I say “the band had reached a place in Western Culture to which no one had been since the Beatles” I do NOT mean that they had the same impact or have the same long-term importance as the Beatles.  Rather, I am pointing out that no band since the Beatles had become both musically important and culturally and politically forceful on a global scale, especially relative to their peers.

And so U2 was Mighty Big, Mighty and Big, indeed. Heads swelled, expectations swelled, ambition swelled: the next step was a double album (a mixture of live takes from the Joshua Tree tour and new studio recordings) and major motion picture— Rattle and Hum.  Here’s where things kinda went south for me.  Rattle and Hum contains a number of excellent cuts: the opening reading of the Beatles’ (!) “Helter Skelter” stands at least shoulder to shoulder with the original while adding to, if not radically re-interpreting, it, “Van Diemen’s Land,” featuring a haunting vocal by Evans, details the impact of a little known Irish political activist, the gospel-chorus recasting of “I Still Haven’t found What I’m Looking For” is electrifying as is the band’s take on Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Silver and Gold” is as vivid a portrayal of the desperation in Apartheid South Africa as could be written.  But energy leaks in many places: the Bo Diddley knockoff single “Desire” is merely eh, the bleating and wanky “Hawkmoon 269” doesn’t really go anywhere, and the band’s attempts to converse with American Blues—“Love Rescue Me” and “When Love Comes to Town” (featuring a cute but unremarkable cameo by B.B. King)—fall flat, as do most of the rest of the tracks.

Most troubling of all, Hewson launches into an ad lib diatribe decrying greedy TV Preachers during a concert performance of “Bullet the Blue Sky.”  Sitting in the movie theatre watching him performing this song in the Rattle and Hum film, the following occurred to me: this guy in the movie is up on stage in front of a football stadium filled with roughly 75,000 people who each paid around $20 each, selling t-shirts for another $20 apiece, trying to get people to buy the Joshua Tree record album at $10 apiece, turning the show into a movie which people pay another $10 apiece to see, and also putting the show on a new album mostly moving in the form of CDs, now at $15 piece, and he’s monologuing about a TV preacher “stealing money from the sick and the old????”  What the fuck?  This guy is more full of shit than a septic tank.  Why is what he’s doing any less a type of brainwashing hucksterism than any TV preacher’s spiel, and who’s to say that the feelings people get from watching and sending money to TV preachers are any less legitimately uplifting than the ones people get forking over cash to listen to and see U2?  I mean, I hate the kind of religious moralistic diharrea that Jimmy Swaggart and his ilk spewed (and continue to spew) as much as anyone, but everyone is entitled to like what they wanna like, say what they wanna say, spend money on what they want, and do what they want in pursuit of a dollar, and that includes TV preachers, rockstars, and anyone else.  Mr. Hewson was making a mighty phat living as the Social Conscience Of the World and had a lotta nerve casting stones at anyone else making phat dough from his glass mansion built with money from people (who might well be described analogously to Swaggart's fan club members as "young and innocent") who chose to believe in him.  “Bono” my ass—my new nickname for him was SCOW (FULL DISCLOSURE NOTE: when I first posted this I did not attribute the "SCOW" moniker to my friend Tony Oakson, who coined it in a conversation after we had seen the movie together. My apologies to Tony for the oversight and my thanks to him for his pithy, on-target wit:)) .

And so I was done with U2—couldn’t take them seriously anymore.  They were a joke, a self-caricature.   Their egos and ambitions had turned them into hypocrites.  I believe that you can combine rock and roll and political activism, I believe that rock and roll really can change the world or at the very least metaphorically (or even literally) save the lives of people who feel strongly about it, but you have combine the two very carefully and you have to know and walk carefully amongst the mines that your own ego and the business and industry of rock and roll lay in your path.  Having walked that line, having danced through that minefield successfully for a long time, U2 had become unable to do so anymore.

I picked up Achtung Baby, spun it a few times, and that was it.  Maybe because SCOW had blown the bloom off the rose for me and maybe because I just didn't like the songs and sound as much-- whatever the case, the record never grabbed me, musically or lyrically.  After that I didn’t care.  The band, of course, has soldiered on, and impressively so (how they have done so without my support I can’t imagine, but they seem to have gotten over itJ).  Their records and tours—Zooropa, Pop, All That You Can’t Leave Behind etc etc etc—  have continued to sell millions and garner critical acclaim.  They remain more relevant musically and socially than any band approaching the 40 year mark in their career, regularly selling recordings and concert tickets to people born long after they began playing.  They continue to effectively leverage their celebrity to make positive impacts on social causes (AIDS, 3^rd World Debt, etc etc etc).  More power to them.  Me? I’m gonna go back and listen to Under a Blood Red Sky, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree again.