AUSTIN, Texas
— As much as one might have tried — and some of us really did try — it was impossible to ignore U2 in the spring and summer of 1987.
Produced with cinematic flair and gobs of atmosphere by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, “The Joshua Tree” was released on March 9 and was almost instantly hailed as a masterpiece. The increasingly legendary Irish quartet appeared on the cover of Time magazine in April; its tour of arenas and stadiums launched in Tempe, Ariz., on April 2.
“The Joshua Tree” sat on the top of the Billboard chart for nine weeks. (Chart trivia nerds should note that it replaced the Beastie Boys “Licensed to Ill” on April 25 and was replaced by Whitney Houston’s “Whitney” on June 27 — there’s a joke in there somewhere.) At George Mason Junior-Senior High School at the tip of downtown Falls Church, Va., U2 seemed like something everyone agreed on.
Rock fans of all stripes thought they were the Second Coming.
Girls (and a fair number of guys) loved Bono and that greasy-looking hair. Christian kids, of course, adored them (even if they didn’t think they were the Second Coming, for obvious reasons). U2’s Christianity was overt but never quite evangelical.
This was a chart-topping band their parents couldn’t justify banning from the house.
U2 played RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 20. On Sept. 21, it seemed as if at least half my school — a pretty churchgoing place, for a public school — was wearing U2 shirts.
Never seen anything quite like it before or since.
I was not at that show. As a 12- and 13-year-old kid feeling out the parameters of cultural rejection that punk rock afforded, I was wary of U2. Something that rockers and Christians agreed on was suspicious.
Twenty years and one deluxe, three-disc reissue of their signature album later (it came out Tuesday), I remain almost as conflicted about them now as I was then. The second disc of B-sides and four unreleased tracks is interesting, even if the DVD’s full of videos you’ve seen a million times and the documentary seems to be random home movie footage or “Rattle and Hum” B-roll.
U2 is one of the very few bands to have translated the cool, distant, European post-punk into something both intimate and arena-ready.
And nobody quite sounds like them, no matter how hard they try. U2 kept its own counsel, never replaced a band member and seem to be a God’s-honest team in what it did.
On the other hand, this is arena rock — by design, there’s nothing anti-establishment about it. And Bono is one of the most exhausting rock-star media presences of all time, from his on-stage pretension (especially back then) to his endless political yammering.
Anti-Bono sentiment is understandable, but in a world defined by extreme economic inequality and imposed neo-liberalism, calling him out for being one of the good guys seems a little indefensible.
All of these competing interests — good and bad, triumphant and insipid — exploded as “Joshua Tree” the album became “Joshua Tree” the phenomenon.
The band claimed it was shooting for cinematic and boy howdy, did they nail it.
The ambient synths that open “Where The Streets Have No Name” are about as widescreen as it gets, all Irish mist and rolling clouds. You can practically feel the zoom in on Edge’s guitar.
The first side moves from strength to strength. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” remains strikingly moving quasi-gospel, the romantic resignation of “With Or Without You” prefigures the complicated sentiments on “Achtung Baby.” “Bullet the Blue Sky” is one of the best fake-Doors songs ever, from the drums like troop movements and that off-key bass line that shouldn’t work, but does. “Outside it’s America,” Bono mumbles.
Ah, yes. America. That.
Certain Irish guys do get a bit damp when it comes to America.
These Irish guys, so European on their other albums, went a bit overboard once they figured out all this rock ‘n’ roll stuff came from somewhere.
From “In God’s Country”: “She is liberty/ And she comes to rescue me/ Hope, faith, her vanity/ the greatest gift is gold.” “Bullet the Blue Sky” turns this up to 11 — “In the howling wind comes a stinging rain/ See it driving nails into souls on the tree of pain” and “As a man breathes into a saxophone/ Through the walls we hear the city groan.” Yikes.
It took the half-decent, half-lousy double album “Rattle and Hum” and the hysterically self-important movie of the same name for U2 to get over America. The punch line is that Bono didn’t discover anything that generations before hadn’t found out — this is a huge country. The deserts are majestic and lonely, as are the cities. We’re generous and open one minute, terrifying and imperialistic the next.
America — and U2 — eventually recovered from the “Joshua Tree” phenomenon, but neither has ever quite gotten past the album. It’s a touchstone to a simpler time in pop music, when a rock band could actually unite a whole mess of people and the band could profit accordingly.
Both of these things are a lot less true now.
