“Achtung Baby is definitely a reaction to the myth of U2,” The Edge, guitarist-keyboardist for the Dublin rock superstars, says of the band’s new album.
“We never had any control over that myth,” he told Musician magazine. “You could say we helped it along a bit, but the actual myth itself is a creation of the media and people’s imagination. Like all myths.”
The myth that singer-lyricist Bono (Paul Hewson) built, with no small help from The Edge (Dave Evans), bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., indeed has turned into a rugged, larger-than-life mountain of a creation.
U2, slated to launch its first American tour in five years Saturday night at the Lakeland Civic Center Arena, was clearly the biggest — and maybe most important — rock band of the ’80s.
In Time magazine’s only third cover story on a rock group (The Beatles and The Who came first), canonized Bono and the boys in an essay toasting the March 1987 arrival of the The Joshua Tree album.
“U2 soars with…songs of spirit and conscience. Their songs are as revivifying as anything in rock, with a strong undertow of something not often found this side of Bruce Springsteen: moral passion.”
Noted Musician magazine at the time: “[U2 is] the biggest band in the world. Almost alone among their generation of groups, they have upheld rock’s best values while also winning a stadium-size audience.”
The praise and popularity — The Joshua Tree sailed to the top of the charts almost immediately, and two tracks became No. 1 singles — probably were predictable.
U2, from its beginnings as a punk-inspired group of Christian idealists (Clayton was the dissenter), was bestowed with Next Big Thing status.
Boy, the band’s 1980 debut album, was primitive and sonically bare-boned, barely hinting at the grander, richer and maybe more pretentious efforts to come. It opened with “I Will Follow,” a halting, jagged anthem about vulnerability, and closed with “Shadows and Tall Trees,” an ambling guitar tone poem about doubt.
October, the next year’s follow-up, was a denser album — “Gloria” was a Gregorian chant-inspired song of praise to God; “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” was a dreamscape rife with violence and passion; “Fire” was injected with images of Apocalypse — that now seems transitional.
War, released in 1983 and preceded by The Edge’s near-decision to exit the group over spiritual concerns, represented the band’s first important artistic flowering, via such moody, moving cuts as the anthemic, anti-war “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” catchy, direct love song “Two Hearts Beat as One,” the pulsing “New Year’s Day” and “40,” a version of Psalm 40 that turned into an effective a cappella audience-participation concert closer.
By the time of 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, the central U2 method-of-operation was in place. A veritable Edge orchestra of guitar chiming, churning, echoing and strumming; always propulsive, increasingly more sophisticated rhythm-section manoeuvres from Clayton and Mullen; and Bono’s emotional, mystical, often over-the-edge vocal approach.
The album, given a new spin on aural spaciousness by Brian Eno and his collaborator Daniel Lanois, was full of thematic and musical ambition — the mini-epic “Pride (In the Name of Love),” about civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; the urgent title track; the over-reaching “Elvis Presley and America” — but is best thought of as a segue to the immensely more accomplished The Joshua Tree.
The latter album, the pinnacle thus far in a career that might have safely concluded with the subsequent massive world tour, fulfilled all of the band’s artistic and commercial promise.
It was a dramatic culmination that managed to distill all the band’s elements into a seamless 11-song suite, including the earnest, tuneful “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a song of spiritual doubting in sharp contrast with earlier declarations of faith; the swirling “With or Without You,” as moving a tortured love song as ever written; the sound-effects strafed “Bullet the Blue Sky,” about war-stricken Central America; and “One Tree Hill,” inspired by mourning over the death of a U2 roadie and friend.
Rattle and Hum, the part-live, part-studio soundtrack of the 1988 rockumentary of the same name, marked the beginning of a period of critical backlash and lowered expectations.
The songs, including a collaboration with B.B. King (“When Love Comes to Town”) and a Bob Dylan cover (“All Along the Watchtower”), represented the band’s attempt to tap into and co-opt all of American pop, rock and soul.
Egos showed, critics balked, sales figures slipped, and the band — cued by Elvis during the group’s visit at Graceland? — disappeared for three years.
Bono, in a speech he gave in 1989, hinted at what sounded like a possible demise of U2.
“He said we were going away and we had to think it all up again,” The Edge told Musician. “A lot of people read into that that we were going to break up. Well, when we got to Berlin it was almost like, maybe that was prophetic, because it was so hard.
“It was so heavy. It seemed for a few seconds like, ‘Well, maybe this is what we should do, maybe we really have to break up and then see what happens.’”
U2 news during the band’s absence has not been particularly positive: Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait scored with a hilarious send-up of Bono; Dublin band The Joshua Trio (now on U2’s Mother Records) made a career out of mocking the group; and experimental ensemble Negativland released “U2,” a riotous single that intercuts Casey Kasem’s song-introducing profanity with the melody of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” SST, Negativland’s label, was sued by Island, U2’s label, and instituted a “Kill Bono” campaign. Negativland and SST parted ways over the ugliness.
Achtung Baby, which arrived late last year and rapidly topped the album charts, is surprisingly invigorating.
The music, a thicket of throbbing industrial sounds, dance rhythms, and some of the same old chiming and churning, is remarkably fresh sounding, and individual tracks — the distortion-laden “Zoo Station,” the whispery “The Fly,” the haunting “Mysterious Ways” — reveal more on repeat listenings.
Political and religious message-giving seems to give way to rather mundane Everyman lyrics about love — lost, found and elusive.
“I think it’s felt that they have delivered on the early promise,” says Niall O’Flynn, news editor for the Irish Evening Press in Dublin. “They haven’t been afraid to make a departure from previously successful elements in the music. They have kept changing. They have kept moving forward.
“Every time you think you’ve got the band under wraps, that you think you know how they’d react to something, they go and do something different.”
Achtung Baby resonant and urgent and tuneful, is as promising a place to ignite U2’s ’90s career as any.
The other half of the attack — the band’s concert mettle — shows itself on Saturday.
© The Tampa Tribune, 1992.