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By Andy Smith, Editor
2007.11
To say that I anticipated the release of the Joshua Tree record in 1987 would be an understatement. As an avid 19-year-old rock fan, I don’t imagine I’d ever waited on a record with more enthusiasm.
A college boy from the Midwest, I’d spent most of the winter in the south, on a peace march in Florida and volunteering at an intentional community in Atlanta, providing hospitality for the homeless. Ending my internship at the Open Door Community a little early, borrowing food and Greyhound money from Mom and Dad, and depending on guest-list access from my friend Maria McKee, singer for opening band Lone Justice, I decided to go “on tour” for the first leg of the band’s Joshua Tree jaunt, beginning appropriately in the southwest.
Beginning in Tempe and ending in my hometown of Detroit for the band’s first-ever stadium show at the Pontiac Silverdome, spending Easter Sunday with Maria McKee and her Mom in a Los Angeles megachurch, skipping Houston and Chicago, meeting many other devoted fans with whom I’d corresponded via the snailmail networks created by U2 fanzines (the ancestors of Interference!), hearing the band chat with us and do some acoustic songs outside the hotel in San Diego, I was an enthusiastic young Bonophile on the penultimate pilgrimage, a journey of ferocious fandom I have remembered fondly but have not been able to match for this or any band in the two decades since.
My ticket stub and guest pass from the opening show of the Joshua Tree tour
My April 1987 odyssey to completely appreciate and understand my teenage rock obsession had been building since I discovered the band as a high-school sophomore during the War years. Hours had been spent with a low-fi copy of the Red Rocks concert ripped to VHS from MTV. When I finally found myself at a real U2 show on December 8, 1984 at Detroit’s Fox Theater, I was not disappointed. Before the Joshua journey, my most magical U2 moment came in the form of a high school graduation present from my folks, a trip to Chicago to see the Conspiracy of Hope tour at Chicago’s Rosemont Horizon. Even though the months between the unforgettable fire of that June night and the opening of the Joshua Tree tour the next April passed in slow motion on a teenager’s timepiece, in retrospect, I would say we didn’t have to wait that long between U2 records and tours in that first and formidable decade of the band’s career.
For the most part, the snapshots of that spring have faded into the expected blur of a middle-aged man’s memory, and as a fan, I can best reconstruct the beauty of that period thanks to bootlegs circulating on the Internet.
Of the roughly 15 shows I saw that Spring, one stands out. The second-night of the band’s two night stand at the San Francisco Cow Palace on April 25 still sends shivers and rivers through me when I conjure the fragments in my mind and cue up the deliriously delicious digital document on my laptop.
Early that day, I marched in the streets with the thousands in an anti-war demonstration that Bono referred to that night during “Bullet the Blue Sky.” For the show, I was blessed by fellow fans who had admired my touring tenacity and traded me a main-floor front-and-center seat. To this day, this was my best spot at a U2 show, down front and about four rows back.
From Bono’s changing the words during “Bullet” to give props to the day’s protesters to adding snippets of the Doors’ “Light My Fire” to “The Electric Co.” to his invocation of “Candle in the Wind” during “Bad” to his insertion of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to “With or Without You,” this Saturday night serenade surpassed any of my previous (and sadly, probably my future) U2 concert experiences.
By this Bay Area night, the band was still on its meteoric rise before the Rattle and Backlash too soon to follow; indeed, U2 had weathered death threats and achieved supremacy in the theater of a US music scene where number one status was still an anomaly among the lesser lights of bands like Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, and Starship.
To be frank and fair, wandering the different arena’s corridors on too many nights of this tour, much of my idealism about this band and the music industry in general was forever dashed. For a teenage idealist to see his heroes basking without qualm in the brash privileges denied the poor and oppressed their songs pay homage to, well, these moments were sad, sickening, and sobering to say the least.
After coming home from this tour, while I didn’t exactly renounce my U2 fandom, I took a step back. Other than a moment of visitation at the Zoo-tour when it stopped at the Palace of Auburn Hills in 1992, it would be fourteen years in the wilderness before the beautiful days of All That You Cannot Leave Behind when I fully reclaimed my U2 fan status.
Now, for a forty-something retracing his past, a decade is still a big deal. I began the 1980s as an elementary-school nerd listening to the Village People and John Denver. By the late 1980s, I had traveled the country extensively, renounced my upper-middle class background, and intended to change the world. Essentially, my U2 fandom shaped who I would become, and when the band became what I perceived as part of the problem, I rejected the band—for a while. When I came home to U2 in the new millennium, part of what kept it real for me was the realization that fandom required us to be fierce in negotiating the spaces between ourselves and the artists that occupied our imaginations.
What allows me to love the less than lethal Bono of the twenty-first century is recalling the Bono of the 1980s, who, despite his crude contradictions of cocky captivity, kept us rapt with his emotional rock radicalism, reckoning then the spirit of the Sixties with a searing simplicity and soaring mystique.
Here I am, hanging in an actual Joshua Tree, in 1987
When we order the deluxe box set of the anniversary edition, when the stone sets in our eyes and the thorn of how much money we’ve spent on this band twists in our sides, let’s remember that these rich, spoiled superstars gave themselves away with one of the greatest albums of all time, and honestly, we can’t live with or without them.
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Published on
11-10-2007 at 07:26 AM |
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11-10-2007 08:53 AM -
As a 19 year old back then, I can relate to what you've said. 
(LINK HERE: To view this link you must 
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