When U2 released “Boy” in the post-punk furor of 1980, Robert Christgau, the dean of rock critics, saw something big coming and was moved to declare, “Their youth, their serious air, and their guitar sound are setting a small world on fire, and I fear the worst.”
By that point, punks and New Wavers were in the midst of conquering the ’70s dinosaurs, taking rock back to its raw, visceral, fun-loving roots, and now here was U2 crashing the party with a jangling new air of grandiosity.
“How are they going to sound,” he wondered, “by the time they reach the Garden?”
With: The Lumineers.
Where: Heinz Field, North Shore.
When: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Tickets: $35-$280; ticketmaster.com.
If that Garden he references is Madison Square Garden, as opposed to the one in Eden, the answer is that U2 would be moving into more and more epic territory, having gone from the white-flag-waving theater spectacle of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on the War Tour in 1983 to shaking arenas in 1985 with the rattling MLK anthem “Pride (In the Name of Love).”
It was with the next record, “The Joshua Tree,” that U2 made that giant leap to stadium headliners in the States, and with this new tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of that 1987 landmark, that’s where the seemingly ageless U2 remains.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers from Ireland will play their fifth Pittsburgh stadium show on Wednesday at Heinz Field, where the band landed its spaceship six years ago on the 360 Tour. Unlike the limited U.S. tour for the coolly received, iPhone-imposed “Songs of Innocence” in 2014, The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 does not line up with a new album, making it the first time U2 has toured without backing up a new release.
The original plan was for U2 to follow “Songs of Innocence” with “Songs of Experience,” inspired by William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” As guitarist The Edge told Rolling Stone in January, that sequel was in the finishing stages when voters went to the polls and elected Donald Trump, in the wake of Brexit, prompting the band to reconsider the tone.
“It’s like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction,” the guitarist said. “So, anyway, we then were looking at the anniversary of ‘The Joshua Tree,’ and another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle, if you want. That record was written in the mid-’80s, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. Thatcher was in the throes of trying to put down the miners’ strike; there was all kinds of shenanigans going on in Central America. It feels like we’re right back there in a way.”
Back there, U2 was a band for the times. “The Unforgettable Fire” had put it in arenas, and at the end of the ’85 tour, the band delivered a stirring late-afternoon performance at Live Aid where Bono went AWOL off the stage and into the crowd to interact with fans for several minutes, leaving the band to put the same bars of “Bad” on repeat and cut “Pride” from the setlist. They were miffed about his freelancing until the reviews rolled in declaring U2’s set to be among the most memorable of the day.
It all set the stage for U2’s grandest statement, “The Joshua Tree,” a fifth album given an extra sheen by producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. Inspired by the band’s travels in the U.S., the album had a working title of “The Two Americas,” reflecting the country’s sprawling physical beauty contrasted with what they perceived to be a less bucolic political direction.
“Where the Streets Have No Name,” with its creeping arpeggiated guitar intro, begins the album on an abstract but hopeful note about transcending class divisions. Political messages run through “Bullet the Blue Sky,” where Bono refers to “fighter planes across the tin huts as children sleep”; “In God’s Country,” which speaks of America as “desert rose” with a “dress torn in ribbons and bows”; and “Mothers of the Disappeared,” a mournful closer about mothers kidnapped in El Salvador, inspired the band’s work with Amnesty International. “Red Hill Mining Town” is an emotional song about a British miners’ strike.
Two of the three big singles — “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You” — get down to the personal, addressing a lifelong spiritual journey and a long-distance love.
Whereas “The Unforgettable Fire” peaked at No. 12 in the U.S., “The Joshua Tree” set a bigger world on fire, hitting No. 1 in the States and topping charts across the globe. It became one of the biggest-selling albums of the decade, with more than 25 million sales worldwide, and earned the band its first Grammys, including album of the year.
The 1987 “Joshua Tree Tour” had its misadventures, starting with a fall into a spotlight. The day before opening night in Arizona, Bono fell and cut his chin while rehearsing “Bullet the Blue Sky” and needed crowd help on the vocals.
On Sept. 20, he fell from a wet stage and dislocated his arm, so he was wearing a sling when he turned up on a bitter cold night at Three Rivers Stadium on Oct. 13, 1987, with Little Steven and Los Lobos before a crowd of 42,000 (a bit less than the 65,000 Genesis drew there that May).
It was a cathartic fan experience on par with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” tour show there two years before, with some white flags waving in the crowd and a chorus of thousands for anthemic lines like “How long? How long must we sing this song?” Bono got his licks in, capping “Sunday Bloody Sunday” shouting, “No more El Salvador! Nicaragua! Beirut! Belfast!”
Thirty years later, U2 — still intact with the original lineup of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. — will take the stage with a few warm-up songs and then do “The Joshua Tree” uninterrupted.
Although bands playing 30-year-old albums can’t escape the air of nostalgia, The Edge emphasized to Rolling Stone that it’s only part of the story.
“There’s an element of nostalgia that we can’t avoid, but it’s not motivated by a desire to look backwards. It’s almost like this album has come full circle and we’re back there again. It’s kind of got a relevance again that we’re certainly aware of.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576.
First Published: June 4, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
