For the U2 Love Comes to Town Tour programme, the band commissioned Niall Stokes, editor of Ireland’s Hot Press, to sum up something of their musical journey over the decade which brought them to B.B. King and Love Town. As the vast majority of Propaganda readers are in the U.S. and U.K. which the Love Town Tour couldn’t visit, here we reproduce the article which set the scene for the tour.
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Ten years ago, as the first U2 three-track 12-inch single hit the shops in Dublin, only the most visionary pundit could have foreseen the emergence of the theme which inspires the band’s 1989 tour. Back then, the world of rock ‘n’ roll was divided ostensibly on a strict them-and-us basis, with the emerging breed of young musicians, rolling in on the high tide of the new wave boom, conspicuously kicking out the jams and rejecting the legacy of the previous 20-odd years of music, since Elvis Presley’s genius was first captured on tape by Sam Philips in Sun Studios, all the way down in Memphis, in the southern states of the U.S. of A., in 1956.
On the surface U2 might have seemed to fit that prescription. Exuding the kind of freshness, vitality and originality towards which many of their contemporaries could only aspire, they were singular in their style and approach and determined to do it their own way, learning their craft and their instruments on the run, and casting scarcely a reflective glance over the weight of rock ‘n’ roll tradition, or the roots music from which the beast had been spawned, as they went.
In the closing years of the ’70s, among the majority of the young musicians, gospel, soul, country and blues were seen as the musics of another time, another place, another culture. For white urban rock ‘n’ rollers the imperative seemed clear: to create a noise that expressed the frustration, the anger and the alienation they felt, not just in relation to establishment values in general, but about the music business and what it had become in particular. Punk and the “new wave” that followed was seen as a fresh start, rock ‘n’ roll re-inventing itself by rediscovering the garage band ethic — but in that headlong speed-accelerated rush to capture the spirit of the hour, perspective were too often distorted, with the vast and interrelated traditions of popular music, roots music and rock ‘n’ roll being neglected, forgotten and ignored. It was just one of the reasons why, in the long run, punk became a cul-de-sac for so many and the majority of even the most promising and prominent bands of the time were destined ultimately to self-destruct.
To those who knew them, even at the time of the release of their exhilarating first single, U2 distinguished themselves from their contemporaries in their sense of open-mindedness and curiosity. Rather than presuming that they knew it all, they wanted to learn. Rather than relying on hearsay and prejudice, they wanted to really know.
It took some time — but it should have come as no great surprise when that curiosity manifested itself in a desire to dig back into the music’s past, to seek out, understand and encompass the variety of strands that make rock ‘n’ roll the vibrant and powerful form which it has undeniably become.
The fascination was first articulated when Bono reflected publicly on the role acoustic instruments might have in meeting the challenge which music would inevitably face in a technologically transformed world. “I was watching Blade Runner which seemed to be set some place where Los Angeles meets Tokyo towards the turn of the century,” he told Hot Press in 1983, “but somehow the Vangelis soundtrack didn’t click, somehow I could imagine an ethnic soundtrack being more suitable. I remember thinking about the fact that people wouldn’t want pure electronic music in the ’90s — who wants electronic music in an electronic age? There’s a humanity that’s needed and the music of the ’90s, I believe, will encompass ethnic sounds, Cajun, reggae, Irish, blues or hybrids that would be a merger between the available technology and ethnic sounds.”
Once the issue had been identified however, the band’s appetite for induction became almost insatiable. In Robbie Robertson’s timeless phrase, U2 had caught the fever. And, inevitably, the search for the essence took them to the States, where blues, folk, gospel, country and soul influences mingle and intertwine in the most magnificently rich musical tapestry on planet Earth.
From The Unforgettable Fire through The Joshua Tree to Rattle and Hum, the band’s grasp of the roots was becoming firmer, their capacity to incorporate and transform them through their music more sure. It was a measure of just how far U2 had travelled on their journey to the heart of rock ‘n’ roll that Rattle and Hum could itself bring the various strands of rhythm ‘n’ blues, gospel, folk, country and rock ‘n’ roll together with such complete command.
There is, of course, a degree of irony in an Irish band travelling to America to discover these roots. African sounds have had a significant influence on the pulse of American music, and flavours have crept up from the Caribbean too. But among the major sources of all those strands that would ultimately be re-united in rock ‘n’ roll is European folk music and within that configuration the strongest influence was undoubtedly Gaelic, including Welsh, Scottish and — predominately — Irish elements.
During the 19th Century, as the continent of North America was being opened up, thousands poured out of famine-stricken Ireland, a deprived and oppressed people seeking a new promised land where the crushed dream of freedom, independence and dignity might finally be more fully realized. They took with them little in the way of possessions — but in their hearts they carried a torch for one of the greatest motherlodes of musical magic in the known world, in the songs, ballads, and ceili and dance music, of the home country. In what was to become the melting pot of the United States, that music was absorbed, integrated and re-made, its melodic strength being paralleled in country and western, its high-stepping in Cajun and its sorrow in the blues. And thus, in a sense, U2 have travelled deep into the heart of America, only to find themselves musically closer to home than they’d ever previously been.
The question is often asked: Can a white man sing the blues? In a sense, for U2 fans, Rattle and Hum settled that debate once and for all, underlining as it does just how short a step it is from the transportation ballad, written and sung by the Edge, “Van Dieman’s Land” (a song of particular reverence to Australian audiences, themselves based in a land where dispossessed Irish were also destined to find themselves), to a country blues like “Love Rescue Me,” and on to the triumphant electric blues-power of “When Love Comes to Town.”
Sometimes you have to look backwards to move forwards. Every now and then we all need to check where we’re coming from to know where we’re aiming to go. U2’s search for musical roots, however, has gone beyond any mere national or geographic considerations. It’s become a quest to preserve what was once defined as the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.
“Music’s become too scientific,” Edge told Hot Press on the launch of Rattle and Hum, “it’s lost that spark and energy that it had in the ’50s and ’60s. When I listen to most modern records I hear a producer, I don’t hear musicians interacting, and that quality, that missing quality, is something we were trying to get back to in our own music.” And so U2 travelled down the Mississippi to the cradle of rock ‘n’ roll, in Sun Studios in Memphis, to record some of Rattle and Hum‘s most potent music.
“You go into the Sun room and it’s a modest studio,” Adam says. “It’s got the old acoustic tiles on the wall, and the pictures of Elvis and Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee and Carl Perkins — it’s just history. You don’t take a lot of technology into a studio like that — just the smallest amount of equipment you can do with. And you try to get back to the feeling of making rock ‘n’ roll without having huge banks of Marshalls or whatever. Just strip it back and play the simplest thing you can.”
It’s history but it’s also humanity. It’s four guys and some cohorts in a studio making raw, powerful, spontaneous music to the best of their ability — and refusing to tart it up afterwards in the way that so many rock ‘n’ roll records have been in the ’80s. It’s music made for the hell of it — the spirit, the emotion, the message taking precedence over the pseudo-sophistications of the medium. And what cohorts! Bob Dylan on “Love Rescue Me,” the Memphis Horns on the magnificent “Angel of Harlem” — and on “When Love Comes to Town” the greatest blues guitarist of them all, B.B. King.
“We thought, ‘we have this thing U2; now let’s put it aside almost and let’s get lost in the music’,” Bono explained to Hot Press. “We were in there as apprentices — it was quite obvious. You only have to see the movie to see the look on my face, of sheer embarrassment talking to B.B. King, sitting next to this great bluesman.”
But the master paid his own compliment to the apprentice, commenting on the power of the song’s “heavy” lyrics and expressing his astonishment that they could have been written by so young a songwriter. “I used to make love under a red sunset, I was making promises I was soon to forget. She was pale as the lace on her wedding gown, but I left her standing before love came to town…”
He had a point.
Can a white man sing the blues? As B.B. King would doubtless be the first to acknowledge, no one race, creed or color has a patent on the trials, tribulations, heartbreak and pain that run like a powerful seam through the human condition. No one, black, white, brown, yellow or red has a monopoly on the experience of being marginalised, dispossessed, alienated and oppressed.
The Irish in Ireland, the Aborigines in Australia, the Red Indians in America, the Blacks in South Africa, the Palestinians in the occupied territories, the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina — at one time or another we all have felt that same feeling of powerlessness in the face of a dominant culture and we have turned, if not always then at least often, to music to express our sorrow, our anger, our defiance…and our pride. We are all in this together.
© Propaganda, 1990. All rights reserved.