Rattle and Hum Memories 2: This Is Not A Rebel Song

(Envelope of the program book for the Joshua Tree Tour, purchased at the L.A. Forum in March, 1987)

A bit of a digression...

I guess it is probably hard for anybody under 25 or so to understand what U2 meant to those of us who have been on the rollercoaster with them for 20-25 years; not that I think that somebody 10 or 15 years old couldn't hear early U2 records and enjoy or even love them -- it has more to do with the environment in which we heard the band, when they were new, like nothing any of us had ever heard before, when they were our band. It is probably something akin to the effect Green Day has had on my son -- it is an almost subliminal effect, an addition to the bloodstream or the nervous system. I love Green Day, dont get me wrong, but I will never know what it means to be 14 years old and feel like the very gods have descended on us in the form of Bille Joe, Tre, and Mike. It becomes part of you, grafted onto your DNA. The people who heard Elvis in 1956 or Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1961 or the Sex Pistols in 1977 know what I am talking about: people can always love the music, but they will never know what it meant to have the world changed by it.

I first recall hearing U2 on KGON in Portland; they were playing the primary tracks off of War -- Sunday Bloody Sunday; New Years' Day; Two Hearts Beat As One. I liked them, quite a bit, and the more I heard, the more I liked. I read about them in Rolling Stone and the fact that they were Christians meant a great deal, because their music was good. Most Christian popular music was (and is) crap -- derivative and shallow. The artistic merit is undercut by their desire to shoehorn their music into a predetemined lyrical and musical set -- safe. But U2 was a band first, a rock and roll band, and Christians second (Madeline L'Engle has said much the same thing about herself as writer first, a Christian second.) The only "Christian" band I have heard since then that even tries to emulate this is Switchfoot.

In any event, I found myself liking the band more and more; one Sunday at church several of us got into a discussion of the band and discovered we all liked them; that it was precisely their ability to convey a Christian view of the world that wasn't written like a Hallmark card and played like it was in a church basement as opposed to a garage. U2 soared, they got angry, they yelled, they protested. As the '80's wore on, and we got to see them in Under A Blood Red Sky and at Live Aid and on Amnesty International, they caught all of us in their net who believed in higher realities but didnt want to have to check our brain, our love of rock and roll, and our (self-perceived) coolness at the door.

I have so many memories that revolve around U2. The Rattle and Hum concerts were only the capstone. I remember riding in a pickup truck with my friends in high school, screaming the lyrics to "October" at the top of our lungs. I remember the first time I heard the guitar chords crash into "With or Without You" in my dorm room and felt electricity through my whole body like a lightning strike. I know that every time I put on "The Unforgettable Fire" it will be a religious experience, even though that is generally considered one of the band's worst albums -- for me it is the one where the band utterly threw themselves into the void (and, I suppose, Brian Eno) and embraced the mystery. It may not be a good album, I dont know and I don care -- it is so much the soundtrack of an incredibly special part of my life that I dont think I could seperate the two if I wanted to.

When I met Rob, and Jay, and Paul in Ashland in the Fall of 1986, our friendship began with music, with shared music. Everybody had something of their own religion -- Rob's was the Cure, perhaps; Paul's was anything connected to Phil Collins; Jay's definitely was Springsteen; mine Talking Heads. But the shared faith, the one that pulled all that together, was U2. It was U2 that was enough to get us all together twice more within 1987 to travel at great distance to see each other and commune with the spirits.

And that's how we found ourselves in Tempe.

Part One is here: http://motherbox.blogspot.com/2005/08/rattle-and-hum-memories-1-pin-stripe.html