When Bono called me out
David Cohen described The Joshua Tree as one of the most sexually frustrated recordings ever made – and Bono didn’t like it.
Are you off to see U2 this weekend when the band brings The Joshua Tree Tour to Auckland? I know I’m not.
Oh, I have read it’s an exhilarating jaunt down memory lane, and I’ve absolutely no reason to doubt the generally positive notices of a show that ‘‘oozes confidence and command’’, as the reviewer in The Guardian put it.
And yes, I know, because the promoters have flogged the line relentlessly, the Irish group have said this latest leg of the never-ending tour is ‘‘going to be like a homecoming’’.
It’s also going to be good for business. The four members have trousered much loot for this 30th anniversary tour that’s now into its third lucrative year.
In 2017 alone, 2.71 million tickets were bought for 51 performances of the consensus classic, whose appeal is as evergreen as the New Zealand landscape it warmly celebrates on one of its smoother tracks. The original recording itself has now sold well in excess of 25 million copies. Talk about a beautiful day.
So the fact I won’t be going to catch One Tree
Hill and the other songs reworked probably puts me in the minority. Although I can hardly be the only one. You may have even arrived at the same decision. But I’m fairly certain our reasons will be different.
Some might say, for example, that an evening of U2 is potentially as exciting as watching a group of middle-aged gentlemen – your accountant, your chemist, your school principal – barrelling along the city pavement on electric scooters.
Not me. True, Paul ‘‘Bono’’ Hewson (what is it with guys pushing 60 who insist on using childhood nicknames?) may indeed look a bit foozleheaded these days, what with those trademark Nascar glasses and all. The three others have also probably seen their best days on the youth rebellion front. But then again, we all lose our charm in the end.
Others may find the whole U2 package a bit rattle and ho-hum in 2019. There’s those universally known hoarse pieties, yielding to beclotted pretensions that are now so instantly recognisable, repeated and rinsed, over and over and over again beneath Dave ‘‘The Edge’’ Evans’ stupendously familiar guitar chimes and the workmanlike rhythm section of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.
Me, I think it’s only rock and roll, and, even if I don’t much like some of it, nobody ever gives Bruce Springsteen grief for doing precisely the same thing.
Nor is it that I’m bothered by these heritage rock events in general. U2 can hardly be held responsible for inventing the retro-trend, which probably started with Brian Wilson, who first toured his classic Smile album 15 years ago and trousered a fair bit of well-deserved loot along the way.
Or perhaps it was Lou Reed replaying his Berlin song-cycle in all its smugly pessimistic entirety around the same period? No, hang on, maybe Van Morrison started it all the day he decided to take Astral Weeks back on the road decades after its release.
The point is: (a) it wasn’t U2, and (b) neither you nor I know the correct answer, and (c) all this is getting us away from the devastating reason why I can’t set foot in Mt Smart Stadium over the next couple of nights.
You see, the actual reason I will be skipping the 30th anniversary show is because it also marks 30 painful years to the exact date when my personal
Some might say that an evening of U2 is potentially as exciting as watching a group of middle-aged gentlemen – your accountant, your chemist, your school principal – barrelling along the city pavement on electric scooters.
contribution to U2’s original live performance of the album here in New Zealand featured in the band’s set.
What’s more, my (admittedly microscopic) contribution was only ever included in just that one set, never to be heard or referred to again, and would probably have remained in utter obscurity were it not for my ongoing efforts to rehabilitate it.
This is an unlikely claim but, to the best of my knowledge, true: I think I may be the only music writer ever to have a portion of one of his reviews performed by U2. What’s more, it happened on November 8, 1989, live in front of 40,000 fans at Athletic Park in Wellington, where earlier that same day my dissenting analysis of the group’s classic work had been published in the city’s former Evening Post newspaper.
They called it the Lovetown Tour, but to all musical intents and purposes it was The Joshua Tree’s first New Zealand airing.
Most of the album was sprinkled through the playlist – as it also was in the anticipatory piece I wrote about it.
In the original article, I offered a map of sorts to the record, journeying as it does through English mining towns, Death Valley, the Plaza de Mayo, even the evocatively named Auckland suburb of One Tree Hill. Also appearing on the album screen is a spindly young Dubliner, not yet 30, high on a hill in an undisclosed Central America locale, shaking a bony fist at fighter planes buzzing overhead, while bringing stunning word to listeners that, yes, heaven help us all, outside it’s America.
You really don’t need to know much about any of that. What you need to know – and this is the point I tried to impress on readers – is that this may be one of the most sexually frustrated recordings ever made.
Why? Because, I pointed out, in every art form, ‘‘whether music, literature, the cinema or indeed lovemaking, there’s one absolutely essential rule of structure: tension-climax-resolve’’.
Leaving aside the occasionally dreadful lyrical flourish, U2’s material seemed pretty proficient on the first score, not half-bad on the second and utterly hopeless on the last, which is why much of The Joshua Tree, in particular, feels like nothing so much as a case of somebody not finding what they’re looking for.
It’s also probably why, I suggested from my perch, U2 has recorded relatively few songs about sex itself.
Later on, communicating from his own perch, Bono took an unscheduled break on stage to solicit a collective opinion from the crowd on this lessthan-ecstatic appraisal.
Going by the yowls of response, the fans were about as impressed as he had been.
Aye, he told them approvingly as the noise subsided, the group did indeed follow one great rule of songwriting: ‘‘Climax! Tension! Resolve!’’
And then it was on to the next song. And that was pretty much that. The unforgettable fire of my unlikely collaboration with the group was extinguished for all time.
And I never even received a royalty cheque – it was as if my words had been given to them proBono.
Thirty-whatever years on, of course, the superstars can justly lay claim to having pulled off the greatest resolution of all: longevity. Not only have they survived but positively thrived, as the extra show in Auckland attests.
Who can possibly hold that against them? Even the Library of Congress has now chosen The Joshua Tree for preservation on account of its enduring cultural significance.
Time flips, history shrinks and sometimes we’re all just running to stand still. But ahead of this weekend’s shows, and adapting the words of the critic Jon Landau, all I can say today is that I have seen rock and roll past and its name still is U2.
U2’s The Joshua Tree Tour is at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium tonight and tomorrow night. Tickets for the second concert are still available via Ticketmaster.