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"We always see this planet as belonging to God -- I think it belongs to us. We probably stole it from God. But you can try and give bits of it back." -- Bono |
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"We always see this planet as belonging to God -- I think it belongs to us. We probably stole it from God. But you can try and give bits of it back." -- Bono |
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How The West Was Won (Part 2)
Uncut Magazine,
September 08, 2003
The tour's unofficial christening took place on March 27 on the roof of a liquor store on 7th and Main in downntown LA. The show was a legal video shoot for "Where the Streets Have No Name," but the LAPD moved to shut it down when the huge crowds blocked the surrounding streets. U2 were also collecting footage for the tour movie that later became Rattle and Hum, and film producer Michael Hamlyn was almost arrested during a stand-off with the police. Still, it made for a dramatic promo, lending U2 a rare dash of rebel-rock credibility. Just days later, U2 stumbled into a far less stage-managed scandal. Arriving at Arizona State University in Tempe for their first proper show, they were met by protesters incensed at the band's decision to play when Governor Evan Mecham had recently repealed Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a state holiday. Other bands had already cancelled or moved shows to different states, adding insult to injury for U2, who had written two songs about King and endlessly lionised hin in interviews. U2 acted quickly to limit the damage, donating money to the Mecham Watchdog Committee, a campaign group calling for the King holiday to be reinstated. The band also released a statement branding Mecham "an embarrassment to the people of Arizona," and Bono later claimed, "Had we known a few months in advance, I don't think we would have played Arizona. But we weren't aware of the exact situation until we got there." Arizona was full of bad omens. During final rehearsals on April Fool's Day, Bono slipped from a stage ramp and gashed his chin on the portable spotlight that became a feature of The Joshua Tree tour. Dazed and bleeding profusely, the singer was instantly ushered backstage to a waiting ambulance. The next night, Bono struggled through the opening show with a throat virus. Fearing further problems, U2 decided to postpone a show for the first time ever, pushing the April 3 date back by 24 hours. On their extra day of leisure, the band flew to Las Vegas, caught the Hagler-Leonard fight and dropped in on a Frank Sinatra show. When Sinatra gave the hotly-tipped rockers a public welcome, it was the start of a long and strange friendship between Bono and Ol' Blue Eyes. The tour's opening two-month leg thundered on into Texas and California, then skipped across the Midwest to the eastern seaboard. Huge but stark, with none of the overtly theatrical gimmickry of the band's '90s reinvention, the concerts were plagued by technical hitches but well received and reviewed. Returning to Vegas in mid-April, U2 shot a video for "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," strolling through the streets like buskers. In Los Angeles several days later, Bob Dylan joined the band on stage, and began co-writing songs with Bono that would eventually appear on Rattle and Hum. And he was not the band's only celebrity visitor. The guest list included Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson and more. Charlie Sheen also dropped in on one of the Arizona shows, only to be lectured about his dissolute lifestyle by Bono. Sheen was "plastered," as he told Premiere in 1988, and the U2 singer expressed his disapproval. Through his hangover the next morning, the Hollywood brat experienced a Damascene conversion: "F*** it, man, enough." From that day onwards, his soul cleansed by the power of Bono, Sheen embraced a pure life of cocaine and whores. In late April, just as The Joshua Tree began its nine-week reign atop the Billboard album charts, U2 became the first rock band since the Who to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Writer Jay Cocks, a sometime Martin Scorsese collaborator, gushed that "their songs have the phantom soul of The Band, the Celtic wonderment of their compatriot Van Morrison and some of the assertiveness of punk, refined into lyrical morality plays." America was eating out of their hand. Europe was next. On May 27, the second leg of the tour kicked off at Rome's Stadio Flamino, with U2's extended family flying out to witness them shift up from arena to stadium gear. "It was like a huge gospel show," Brian Eno told Musician magazine. "There were 60,000 people there and it was a fantastic feeling. Quite often Bono wasn't singing. He'd stop and the whole 60,000 people would sing the song. It was very emotional." June saw U2 play thier first U.K. show since Live Aid at Wembley Arena. Introducing a ragged cover of Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," Bono used the platform to lay into Thatcher on the eve of her third election victory. "You talk about our country being divided," he raved, "but your country is even more divided." U2's media charm offensive took at surreal turn on June 25, when they conducted a radio interview in the nude -- or so it was claimed -- with Irish DJ Dave Fanning. But there was more flak two days later. As the band played the first of two shows at Dublin's Croke Park, they were profiled on a British TV World in Action special as semi-mystical saviours of Ireland. "I grew up with violence in me," Bono claimed on camera. "It's still in me and I despise it...there's an anger in the streets of this city and this country of Ireland and I want to be part of that anger." For most observers, the programme confirmed the popular caricature of U2 as posturing windbags. As Bono protested in the News of the World on July 28, the band has also become a target for psycho stalkers. "I get death threats from people who want to kill me, while other travel from all over the world to pinch Y-fronts from my washing line," he fumed. "Someone puts an arm around you, then you get a paternity suit." In Rolling Stone a few weeks later, the singer elaborated: "I go out and I don't know who I can talk to. I've got people who want to kill me, people who want to make love with me, so they can sell their story to the newspapers, people who want to hate you or love you or take a bit of you." Even allowing for Bono's irrepressible talent for self-dramatising blarney, the death threats were no fantasy. For months, a mentally fragile Irish-American called Patrick Harrison had been demanding financial recompense for more than 100 songs he claimed to have supplied to the U2 singer, including all of The Joshua Tree. Finally going public in 1989, Harrison told the News of the World that "most of them I provided in two long letters in 1986. But the last 11 I handed to him personally in a plastic carrier bag when he was appearing at Tempe, Arizona, a year later." He also made veiled threats of revenge: "If I took a gun and shot him, that would get everyone's attention." U2 returned to North America in September for the third and longest leg of the tour, which coincided with the British and Irish publication of Eamon Dunphy's semi-official band biography Unforgettable Fire. Although it was effectively commissioned by U2, the book misfired badly with revelations that mortified the band and factual errors that shamed Dunphy. The reviews were savage, from Neil McCormick's forensic demolition in Hot Press to Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone declaring the book "an embarrassment...full of breathtaking inaccuracies." That aside, Dunphy's book is essentially a positive U2 tribute. Certainly the troublesome details about the group's family backgrounds and religious beliefs barely raise an eyebrow by modern rock-biog standards. But the public fall-out between band and author was far more revealling. "Bono want to be seen as Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger, but he's more like Des O'Connor," Dunphy told The Sun in October, branding the U2 singer a "pompous git" and a "bigot" who was ashamed of his relatively middle-class upbringing. "Theirs is a very hierarchical world which reeks of the old 'lord of the manor' thing. It is not in any way democratic. They don't think anything, for example, of keeping people hanging about for them for a long time. A lot of the time they made me feel like a salesman." U2 manager Paul McGuinness hit back at Dunphy in the band's official fanzine, Propaganda. "It's a pity that Eamon reneged on his promise to let us see the manuscript to correct errors but he was pressurised by his publisher," McGuinness claimed. "The coverage of people's personal and family lives is something that none of us anticpated." In NME a year later, Bono said, "Eamon grew obsessed with defining Ireland via U2 -- he had this thing about suburbia. He even wanted to call the book Suburban Heroes! Y'know? It all gets too absurd." Larry Mullen Jr. added, "A lot of guys talk about honour and dignity but, in the end, they can't even spell them." According to John Waters, who wrote one of the essays appended at the end of Unforgettable Fire, the bust-up only occurred because U2 failed to read Dunphy's manuscript in time for publication. Consequently, both felt exposed. "It got pretty vicious between them," says Waters. "At one point Bono said to him, 'You know what you are? Rat poison!' And Dunphy agreed, apparently, with his evaluation!" Back in America, as The Joshua Tree dates rumbled to a climax, touring madness began to take its toll. Film-maker Phil Joanou, a former Steven Spielberg protégé, was now on board to direct the movie of the tour that would become Rattle and Hum. Nicknamed "E.T." by the band, the 26-year-old director was on hand on September 25 when Bono dislocated his shoulder on stage at Washington's Kennedy Stadium, even following him into the ambulance afterwards. Hence the singer's arm sling two days later when Joanou filmed Harlem's New Voices of Freedom choir rehearsing their soaring gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" with U2 before a guest appearance at their Madison Square Garden shows. Joanou's cameras caught many moments of unabashed joy and idolatry. A trip to Gracelands to pay homage to Elvis, Spinal Tap-style. A meeting with legendary bluesman B.B. King in Texas to duet on "When Love Comes to Town." A clandestine five-hour recording session at Sun Studios in Memphis, the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, laying down tracks for Rattle and Hum A version of the exquisite love ballad "She's a Mystery to Me," written for Roy Orbison, was also recorded there. For two shows in November, U2 donned hats and wigs to play a short support set for themselves as bogus Texas country band the Dalton Brothers. Few people recognised them. And yet, as Bono later admitted, the tour had its darker side, too. "It was one of the worst times of our musical life," he recalled in the Rattle and Hum book. "We were on the run the whole time and I busted up my shoulder and was in a lot of pain. And I found that I was drinking a lot just to stop the pain." The singer dropped even murkier hints in a Rolling Stone interview in October 1987. "Members can get a bit out of control on a tour and forget where they've come from and who they've left behind...you can start to live out the music a little too much sometimes, where the demons you're exorcising in the songs sort of follow you home." Warming to the notion of trashing his goody-goody image, Bono claimed he was taking "bastard lessons" and confessed, "If you could see into the dressing rooms and the offices of a lot of bands in our position, you would see the real abuse of power. Like making a promoter crawl because you are paying his wages. Like the sexual abuse of people who are turned on by your music. I don't know whether I am guilty of all of those. Maybe I am. But that is the type of power I worry about in rock 'n' roll." In NME some months later, Adam Clayton confirmed U2's reputation for backstage Bible-reading had given way to more traditional rock hedonism. "The excess is always there," he said. "It's unnatural to be away for three months and living out of a suitcase. It's not something you can legislate about. There's none of this 'no drugs on the road' or whatever. People get through it the way they do. A lot of people do fuck themselves up, and it's not just in rock 'n' roll bands." Joanou shot black-and-white concert footage at Denver's McNichols Arena on November 7 and 8, as well as U2's impromptu "Save the Yuppies" free show in downtown San Francisco on November 11. With their official stage gear on the way to Vancouver, the band borrowed equipment and crew from the Grateful Dead and played a free show to 20,000 people on the back of a truck. As the nine-song set ended, Bono climbed on a sculpture and spray-painted "Rock & Roll - Stop the Traffic." San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein, conducting a war on graffiti at the time, was outraged. "I am disappointed that a rock star who is supposed to be a model for young people chose to vandalise the work of another artist," she told reporters. A warrant was issued for Bono's arrest, but dropped when he apologised and agreed to pay to clean up the graffiti. But Bono's climbdown was not wholly sincere. Returning to play nearby Oakland Stadium three days later, he told 60,000 cheering fans: "Somebody should explain to Mayor Feinstein there is a big difference between graffiti art and an act of vandalism." The Joshua Tree tour ended where it began -- Tempe, Arizona. For two cold nights, December 19 and 20, the Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe was filled to capacity after a bargain five-dollar price was set in order to ensure impressive crowd scenes for Joanou's cameras. In the Rattle and Hum spin-off book, Bono described the concert as "like Apocalypse Now but without so many helicopters." The first night went badly, with Bono departing from the pre-agreed set list in order to hype up a lukewarm crowd. In an emergency backstage post-mortem, Joanou declared the show a "total disaster." But the second night soared along, a triumphant finale in front of family, friends and Island Records boss Chris Blackwell. Closing the tour on a special note, U2 aired their festive cover version of Phil Spector's yuletide pop gem "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." And then, after nine months on the road, playing 110 shows in 72 venues to over three million people, it was all over. America had been courted, colonised and all but conquered. All they needed now was a killer sequel to secure the throne. John Waters has coined a word for U2's ambitions for The Joshua Tree. They were aiming to "pantheonise" themselves, to pole-vault into rock's premier league alongside Elvis, Dylan, Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones and all the rest. By standing on the shoulders of giants, jamming with elder statesmen and writing songs for rock 'n' soul legends, they might pass for cultural giants themselves. It was an audacious plan. All the more so because it worked -- to the tune of 14 million album sales. In America, The Joshua Tree became the third biggest-selling album of 1987. In interviews, Bono took credit for subverting the mainstream by reviving '60s-style passion in an era of plastic pop like Debbie Gibson, Mel & Kim and Rick Astley. But U2's sculpted retro-classicism did not arrive in a vacuum. Springsteen and Live Aid had already made fist-pumping stadium compassion huge. Rock nostalgia was everywhere, from Fleetwood Mac's comeback to the Travelling Wilburys to jeans-advert hits for Ben E. King, Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke. In the year that MTV launched in Britain, the same punters buying Def Leppard and T'Pau and Terence Trent D'Arby were also buying The Joshua Tree Still, Bono could afford to boast. "Soul music," he told the Grammy crowd in February 1988 (The Joshua Tree won Best Album). "That's what U2 wanted to make. It's not about being black or white, or the instruments you play, or whether you use a drum machine or not. It's a decision to reveal or conceal." Collecting the Best Group gong, a semi-coherent the Edge thanked a long list of friends and heroes including Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Flannery O'Conner, Walt Disney, John the Baptist, "sumo wrestlers around the world" plus "Batman and Robin" -- U2's studio nickname for Lanois and Eno. Bono also popped up at the Brits in March to collect U2's Best International Group award. But otherwise the Dublin quartet laid low for most of 1988. Initially tipped for a spring release, the Rattle and Hum film and soundtrack album were pushed back to autumn. Early in the new year, the Edge and Bono spent some time in a cottage in western Ireland writing songs to complete the record, a sprawling consummation of the band's romance with American roots music. One product of this session was "All I Want Is You," the elegant love ballad which closes the album with exquisite orchestral strings courtesy of legendary Van Dyke Parks. Several live versions of tracks from The Joshua Tree were augmented by leftovers from the album sessions, notably the dreamy serenade "Heartland." But Rattle and Hum is also haunted by ghosts in the shape of cover versions and naked homages. Hendrix and Dylan jostle for attention in a ragged live assault on "All Along the Watchtower," featuring a cheesy improvised rap from Bono about fighting his righteous battles with "three chords and the truth." Dylan also appears on the bouncy lament "Love Rescue Me," originally bashed together with Bono during U2's June 1987 dates in Los Angeles, and on the whirling anthem of sexual frustration, "Hawkmoon 269." The name "Hawkmoon" was taken from a Dakota backwater town that U2 passed on Amnesty's Conspiracy Of Hope tour, while the "269" refers to the number of takes it required in painstaking studio revisions. "We actually physically wore the tape down doing that number of mixes," Bono told Niall Stokes of Hot Press. "We were recording in Sunset Sound, with all the shit that happens around there going on. Search-and-destroy choppers looking for drug busts. Sunset Strip. Hookers. Every neon sign advertising sex in some shape or form. You could feel that all coming through in 'Hawkmoon'." Even more supercharged with lust is "Desire," a three-minute crosstown traffic jam of raucous, tumescent, bluesabilly swagger set to a Bo Diddley backbeat by way of Buddy Holly, the Stones and the Stooges. In October 1988 it gave U2 their first ever U.K. No. 1 single, later reaching No. 3 and winning a Grammy in the U.S. Another killer single, "Angel of Harlem", dated back to the band's Sun Studios session with the Memphis Horns in November 1987. A Stax-heeled stomper dedicated to Billie Holiday, it also features cameos from John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. "It's a jukebox song," Bono claimed in Hot Press. "That's one that people will play in bars." The B.B. King duet "When Love Comes to Town," another future single, reaches similar heights of soul-fired abandon. Completing a guest list that reads like a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame VIP party, Little Richard's testifying intro was directed over the phone by the Edge. Even the Beatles got a look in on the punchy opening cover of "Helter Skelter" and the sour tirade of "God Part II." Nodding to "God" from John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, it finds Bono railing against dirt-digging biographer Albert Goldman for his scabrous Lennon and Presley biographies. When U2 ran into Yoko Ono, she said, "That was a nice cover version you did of John's song." Yoko may have liked it. Most critics didn't. Finally released in October, the Rattle and Hum album was greeted with much harsher reviews than The Joshua Tree In Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis found it "calculated in its supposed spontaneity...the album ably demonstrates U2's force but devotes too little attention to the band's vision." In the Village Voice, Tom Carson decried "an awful record" bogged down with "half-baked, overweening reality" and "know-nothingism." And John Pareles of The New York Times claimed the album was "plagued by U2's attempt to grab every mantle in the rock 'n' roll hall of fame… each attempt is embarrassing in a different way." Many U.K. critics were similarly scathing, although NME's Stuart Bailie was a notable exception, awarding 8/10 to "a crazy, turbulent beast of a thing" from a band "reaching back to traditional sounds with a winning enthusiasm." Curiously, Bailie's review replaced a stridently negative 4/10 notice by Mark Sinker branding Rattle and Hum "the worst album by a major band in years," and accusing U2 of "treating B.B. King like their butler." That last-minute substitution reflected NME market research which showed that a U2 cover could boost circulation by 30,000 copies. Sinker left the paper in disgust, although with hindsight he admits his review was a deliberate act of provocation. "I set them up to make fools of themselves," Sinker laughs today. "But I thought, absolutely correctly as history has proved, that it was an appalling record. Within a year, Record & Tape Exchange was full of unsold copies." Ultimately, though, the Rattle and Hum album proved critic-proof. A transatlantic chart-topper, it became the first double album to hit Billboard's top spot since Springsteen's The River eight years previously. It had shifted five million copies by year's end, and continued to sell steadily, eventually matching The Joshua Tree with total sales of 14 million. But Rattle and Hum on film was another matter. With its portentous tone and monochrome monumentalism, Joanou's movie was widely slated as a real-life cousin to This is Spinal Tap. Iain Johnstone in The Sunday Times branded it "possibly the worst rock documentary ever made...U2 emerge as the most bland, uninspiring and uninteresting quartet of musicians assembled since somebody shook the Monkees out of their plaster casts." Andy Gill of The Independent complained, "We never get close to U2 at all, never find out anything about them...in their urge to avoid looking daft, they have re-edited their reality to the point of solemnity." Meanwhile, U.S. critics found U2's celluloid bid for American icon status presumptuous and preposterous. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post quipped that it was "a tad early for the band to be lobbying for admission to the pantheon," and wondered if there had "ever been an entertaiment figure more in love with his upper arms than Bono?" Meanwhile, David Fricke in Rolling Stone noted "an uncharacteristic lack of focus" and "the band's inability to reconcile the difference between discovering America and conquering it." As an extra kick in the teeth, several newspapers claimed IRA paramilitaries had put Bono on a hit-list for his "fuck the revolution" speech following the Enniskillen bombing outrage that left 11 dead and 63 injured on November 8, 1987. The singer had been advised to cut his on-stage outburst from the Rattle and Hum film but, to his credit, it stayed. Some papers suggested the film's charity London premiere on October 31, would have to be cancelled. It wasn't, and U2 all turned up, although their attempts to busk in Leicester Square were prevented by rowdy crowds and police. Another day, another death threat. In the U.S., Rattle and Hum made just $8.3 million on 1,400 screens over its opening Thanksgiving weekend -- a perilously poor showing for its budget of $5.6 million. As it was pulled from screens, both band and film-makers went on the defensive. Although U2 had control of the final cut, Joanou took the blame for the documentary's relentlessly serious tone. "The movie was meant to be a fairly serious depiction of their music," Joanou told Rolling Stone. "I have footage that could have changed that, but my plan was to do an aggressive, grab-people-by-the-throat-and-shake-them kind of movie rather than a romp through America with U2. A romp with U2 wasn't something I could swallow, so I went for an overly serious, pretentious look at U2. That's a fair criticism, but what the hell?" On the question of U2 ranking themselves alongside the elder statesmen of rock 'n' soul, Bono did himself few favours. "Let's get down to the Beatles here," he seethed in Rolling Stone. "We're not saying we're a better band than the Beatles, but we are more of a band than the Beatles. We are. There's four of us -- a street gang, essentially, who drew no lines." Digging himself an even deeper hole, the singer continued. "As an Irishman, I feel a real closeness to the black man because we were both the underdog, because we both have soul and the spirit to spit it out," Bono said. "The Irish have been described as white niggers, and I take that as a compliment. A lot of my heroes happen to be black artists… it's just a bummer, me buying all these black records and them not buying any of ours." For years afterwards, U2 would dismiss Rattle and Hum as "compromising" and "embarrassing." But in fairness, the documentary has enjoyed a healthy shelf-life, and remains an exciting, technically excellent snapshot of a huge band at a crucial turning point in their career. By the time of the band's next album, Achtung Baby, U2 had more gracious things to say about their big-screen folly. In 1992, Bono defended Joanou in Rolling Stone. "He was into the Big Music," the singer said, "He gave the music the same weight Scorsese gave the boxing ring in Raging Bull. You may not like it, but it was a strong point of view." The backlash against U2 in the wake of Rattle and Hum was more critical than commercial, but the project left a sour aftertaste for band and fans alike. America had been in the palm of their hand with The Joshua Tree, only for it to roundly pan the sequel's self-aggrandising mix of flattery and cultural appropriation. Not so much unrequited love as an elephant flicking away a bothersome fly. Hmmm… a fly? That sounds like a possible new direction… It wasn't just Americans who foundRattle and Hum ridiculous. In Dublin, a clutch of journalists from Hot Press magazine formed a comedy covers band called the Joshua Trio specifically to mock Bono's self-serious screen image. Wearing religious robes and re-enacting key scenes from U2's life, the trio even featured in Rolling Stone. "This is when U2 were at their most pompous," recalls Arthur Mathews, a Joshua Trio founder who went on to co-write the cult TV comedy Father Ted. "They subsequently did lighten up, and whether we had anything to do with that I've no idea. Possibly, Rattle and Hum lends itself to satire, the whole messianic thing with Bono. But I grew up with U2, I'm more or less the same age, and I feel they're almost part of the family. You fall out with them at times, but at the end of the day you make up again. When they started off, they were very un-self-conscious and un-cynical. And that was very un-Irish -- they weren't prone to a lot of the Irish neurosis. They were willing to take chances and be laughed at. People would laugh at them, you know? I certainly did." Mocked and chastened, U2 were already looking for a new identity by the time they played their final live dates of the decade in late 1989. Postponed from the end of the original Joshua Tree tour, the four-month Love Town jaunt finally brought the show to Australia, New Zealand and Japan, along with a smattering of European shows. As a harbinger of the less sanctimonious, more hedonistic U2 that would emerge in the '90s, the tour began with the band's first ever drugs bust. Discovered by police officers sitting in the open boot of his Aston Martin outside a Dublin pub in August, Adam Clayton was found to have 19 grammes of cannabis. But unlawful possession charges were dropped at a court hearing in September after the besuited bassist agreed to pay £25,000 to a local charity. A few years earlier, even this minor rock 'n' roll infraction might have shattered U2's saintly image. But as the '90s dawned, they were already in reinvention mode. "It's a very interesting time for U2," Bono told Rolling Stone in 1989. "There is a sense of 'up drawbridge,' cut ourselves off, and a sense of feeling misunderstood. Rattle and Hum was the end of something...As far as we're concerned, the '80s was just a rehearsal." At the band's New Year's Eve show in Dublin, Bono told the crowd, "This is the end of something for U2...we have to go away and just dream it all up again." (Continued in Part 3)
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