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By Tracey Hackett, Contributing Editor
2007.11
U2 fans had more than just turkey and all the trimmings to devour over the recent Thanksgiving holiday. They also had the 20th anniversary re-release of The Joshua Tree, which hit stores on Nov. 20.
Originally released in March 1987, the album has been hailed as the Irish band’s masterpiece by U2 fans and rock ‘n’ roll critics alike — and while it may seem impossible to improve upon perfection, leave it to U2 to do just that.
The re-release adds an entire bonus audio CD of B-sides and rough studio cuts, and the deluxe box set includes a keepsake book, frame-ready black and white postcards of the band, and the much-anticipated bonus DVD of a full-length Paris concert, the Outside It’s America documentary, and “With or Without You” and “Red Hill Mining Town” videos.
Duality
Maybe it’s The Joshua Tree’s intrinsic duality that allows the band to seemingly defy logic in order to improve on its masterpiece — or maybe, over the years, its members have simply become experts at the ‘slight of hand and twist of fate’ that makes it appear so.
At any rate, in the mid-1980s “America had colonized our imaginations,” Bono writes in the box set’s booklet. “The force of its culture — its pop, its movies — was so powerful that the only way to describe this American century was to enter the belly of the beast. And that’s what we did — with our Irish point of view.”
What they discovered about America was a duality so strong that the album’s working title became The Two Americas.
“We saw an album in two halves, almost like a northern and a southern hemisphere of America,” Bono said. “We weren’t interested in America the landmass or the body politic, but in America the mythic idea.”
That mythic idea, they decided upon examination, could best be described as both parched and preposterous.
“Two Americas — the mythic America and the real America, harsh reality alongside the dream,” Bono describes. “It was preposterous and it was parched, and I began to see this era as a spiritual drought. . . These ideas and images coalesced in a single geographical location, a single focus in that desert — the image of the Joshua tree.”
The musical examination of that duality resulted in an album whose songs stand the test of time because they explore the full range of human emotion. From the ethereal melody of “With or Without You” and the euphoric harmony of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” to the explosive beats of “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Exit,” The Joshua Tree is an auditory trip that takes listeners from the pinnacle of Heaven to the hollows of Hell.
Ultimately, however, such songs as “Running to Stand Still,” “Red Hill Mining Town,” and “Mothers of the Disappeared” lead listeners to explore their own humanity in the face of such vices as drug abuse, workers’ rights, and torture and genocide.
The Sorrowtudes
The bonus audio CD of the recent re-release establishes a continuity of The Joshua Tree’s almost Biblical sound, perhaps most evident in the song “Wave of Sorrow (Birdland).”
It was one of the last ideas the band came up with in the recording sessions for The Joshua Tree, the Edge says.
“All of the 12 takes had some kind of special quality — a unique vocal melody or dynamic journey — and when we finished for the day, we knew the track was powerful.”
It was too good for a B-side but not polished enough to include on the finished album, however, and only “after 20 years of gestation” was the final lyric to the song written and recorded.
In the tradition of the Gospel of Matthew’s Beatitudes, Bono’s own Sermon on the Mount in “Wave of Sorrow (Birdland)” culminates with the ‘Sorrowtudes,’ which bless some of the human characteristics that seem irrevocably trapped between the duality of vice and virtue. He sings of blessing the meek who “shall inherit what’s left of the earth,” for example, and the sex worker who uses “what she’s got to save her children’s life.”
“Blessed are the tin can cardboard slums/And blessed is the spirit that overcomes,” the lyric concludes.
Perhaps no other song on the bonus CD captures such powerful spiritual intensity as “Wave of Sorrow (Birdland),” but “Desert of Our Love” has an interesting back-story.
It ultimately became “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Edge explains in the box set booklet and was the “first breakthrough of the record.”
“A mix of reggae and gospel rhythms, it was never going to be an ordinary song,” he said. “This is its earliest incarnation, still showing its traditional roots. I played piano for the backing track. We held onto the drums, and maybe the bass, but everything else got replaced.”
The track is, indeed, an obviously unfinished, very rough cut — but die-hard U2 fans will appreciate the glimpse into the band’s recording session, complete with producer Danny Lanois interjecting his opinion at the end of the take that “it’s the best one today.”
The Bonus DVD
The single most memorable song from the Paris concert — filmed at the Hippodrome de Vincennes on July 4, 1987 — is U2’s performance of “With or Without You,” in which Bono temporarily stops the show to reprimand some rowdy fans in front of the stage.
“No one gets hurt at a U2 show!” he tells the audience before the band continues with the song.
Although the concert includes performances of many live U2 standards — such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “Bad,” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” — it also presents memorable performances of some songs uncommonly seen and heard live 20 years later. U2 followers, for example, will take special interest in the concert performances of “Trip Through Your Wires,” “Exit,” “In God’s Country,” and “Running to Stand Still.”
And unlike the theatrically released, black-and-white Rattle and Hum, which dates to the band’s same musical era, the Paris concert is presented in full, dramatic color.
Outside It’s America, the documentary which takes its title from a line in “Bullet the Blue Sky,” provides not only a slice-of-life glimpse into touring with the band, but also a bit of comic relief. In a vignette about photo shoots, viewers hear Bono whispering behind his hand to the other band members, “No wonder we always look so grim in all our photos — it’s because we’re so bored!” When the photographer immediately asks the band members if they’re bored, however, Bono deadpans, “No!” while the other band members give way to laughter.
Whether U2 fans reach first for the two-disc re-release or the box set, The Joshua Tree 2007 will provide a new perspective on an old favorite.
“It was magical really; it’s a miracle of a record — much better than the band who made it at the time,” Bono concludes.
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Published on
11-26-2007 at 04:30 AM |
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12-03-2007 02:29 PM -
