BACK TO THEIR ROOTS
U2 touring under the shade of the Joshua Tree, Stuart Derdeyn writes.
U2 was already well established in 1987. But the March 9, 1987 release of its fifth album, The Joshua Tree, turned the Irish quartet of Bono (vocalist), The Edge (guitar), Adam Clayton (bass) and Larry Mullen Jr. (drums) into a global phenomenon. Three decades later, the band is playing the album from front to back on The Joshua Tree Tour 2017.
Currently, the members are — once again — rehearsing in Vancouver before opening night.
It’s the first time in its 41-year career that the group has toured on a previous release rather than new material.
Typically, this is what happens when a band no longer connects to its fan base with new music and needs to appeal to nostalgia to get bums in seats. Arguments could be made that U2, who recently entered the ranks of the Sunday Times Music Millionaires List in the No. 3 spot, is in that place, too.
The band’s most-recent album, Songs of Innocence (2014), was met with lukewarm reception — particularly following an invasive marketing campaign that saw the album put into people’s iTunes accounts without their consent.
Everyone makes mistakes and, in characteristic style, the band apologized for this massive overstep. Regardless, Billboard reported that the 36-date, North American leg of the 2015 Innocence + Experience tour played to 650,582 in attendance and grossed US$76,166,563. By comparison, the 109-date, 1987 Joshua Tree Tour earned $56,278,095.
No, The Joshua Tree Tour is more than just a money grab. Like its namesake plant that draws life from seemingly impossible surroundings, the music provides a kind of food to fans decades down the road.
The second half of the concert offers a career retrospective, and nobody is even talking about that.
With sales in excess of US$25 million and a special-anniversary release for every decade following the original release date, the album is a phenomenon.
One of the few rock records from the era to be archived by the U.S. Library of Congress National Recording Registry — alongside NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (1988) and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (1980) — it’s safe to consider The Joshua Tree a cultural legacy.
Taken through the lens of the album’s now-classic songs such as Bullet the Blue Sky or Red Hill Mining Town, the observations upon American society from an outside-looking-in globalist view resonate stronger than ever.
The blending of Irish and American folk traditions is effortless. But more than anything else is the dominant Christian spirituality and message of such tracks as I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, With or Without You, In God’s Country and the album’s stunning opening song, Where the Streets Have No Name.
The video for this tune of the band pulling a Beatles and playing on a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles is classic.
The reverend Dr. Ross A. Lockhart, associate professor, St. Andrew’s Hall at the University of B.C., certainly feels that many North Americans miss this. He cites the well-respected book Walk On: The Spiritual Journey (Strang Communications) of U2 by author Stephen Stockman as an excellent reference point for further research.
“My family background is all in Northern Ireland and I go every few years, and thinking of U2 you have to recall that this was a band formed at the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and of a society that was being torn apart, in some ways by matters of faith,” said Lockhart. “The fact that the band is half-Catholic/half-Protestant was an unusual mix at the time.
“There was also the debate at the start of U2’s career if they were going to be a Christian band, but they decided to go mainstream.”
Mainstream, yes, but lyrically mining the Bible and other scripture for content.
Lockhart says for so many fans the music gains greater depth from the deeply spiritual lyrics. If The Joshua Tree is where the band brought its message blended with some of its most powerful melodies, it always featured a religious quality and continues to do so as tracks such as City of Blinding Lights (hello, heaven) or Grace from 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind make evidently clear.
“Grace is such a profound theological statement about the gospel communicated in a mainstream platform, which you really only otherwise hear in country music,” he said. “And they have managed to do it without taking many hits as others often do when they stray into that area. U2 has managed to pull if off by a combination of their genuine sincerity and not being in any way preachy.”
Not all fans would agree with that latter statement.
At one time, Bono seemed to become ever-present, turning up on stages and at letter openings to, well, preach about debt relief and other causes.
But Lockhart is right that the diminutive frontman with the big voice never took the same sort of drubbing that the far-less-friendly and gracious Sting received for his charitable efforts.
The same could be said of The Joshua Tree, which managed to combine the best elements of the band’s chiming, driving, postpunk sound, impeccable production and willingness to delve into “Americana” and turn it into something epic. Even the most-diehard fans of the band admit that it went too far with its interest in roots music for the 1988 documentary and album Rattle and Hum.
The complete reversal into electronic dance music from 1991’s Achtung Baby carried on two albums too long based on going back and listening to Zooropa (1993) and Pop (1997). U2 entered the 2000s in a weakened state, only to come back with the excellent All that You Can’t Leave Behind (2000), How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb (2004) and No Line on the Horizon (2009).
Perhaps it’s venturing back to the album that gave it so much to see if it can find what it’s looking for musically moving forward.