Musician circa 1987 //p68
By John Hutchinson
Photos by Jeffrey Croft, Mike Fuller, Adrian Boot

MUSICIAN: But do your socially conscious songs actually achieve anything in terms of change, or are they simply a handy release valve for the consciences of thousands of young people?
BONO: I don't think that it is an artist's duty to provide answers, and the idea that a rock 'n' roll band is going to change the political infrastructure of a country is, I think, just naive. We, as a group, don't have to justify any reaction to our music. Literally, if people went home and battered their wives after a U2 concert, or stuck syringes into their arms, or even committed mass suicide [laughs]- we can't be responsible for the exact response to our music. But, as it happens, the Conspiracy of Hope Tour doubled Amnesty International's membership in the United States. Significant?

MUSICIAN: Yet it was reported that Amnesty International said that the number of young new members was more of a burden than anything else.
EDGE: Not true. That was a spokesman who didn't know what he was talking about. We contacted Amnesty when we heard about that, and they said that, on the contrary, the young people who joined Amnesty International because of U2's interest and the Conspiracy of Hope Tour are greatly valued and are greatly effective.
BONO: There are people who have been working for twenty years for that to happen! I read the article where that point was made, and not only was it bogus, but it was dangerous. It actually encouraged apathy, and that, I'm afraid, is the great middle-class disease. And I'll bet you one thing- that the guy who wrote that article isn't from Cedarwood Road [one of the less privileged areas of Dublin]. In my experience, the only people who talk about class structures are middle-class. As it happens, I really respect the U2 audience. I think they're extraordinary and, indeed, a kind of phenomenon in their own right. They come from different backgrounds, and it seems that, more than any other audience in rock 'n' roll, they have found a way of channeling their energy into hope.

MUSICIAN: To an extent. At your homecoming concert at Croke Park there seemed to be an incredible feeling of solidarity between the band and the audience that I've never seen at an outdoor gig of that size. But Bob Geldof in the British TV documentary on the show, said that the audience's new-found optimism would probably only last as long as the bus-ride home. There were a large number of drunk, semi-hysterical kids in the crowd.
BONO: [angrily] How many? All of them?

MUSICIAN: No, but a significant proportion, I'd say.
BONO: A small minority of a rock 'n' roll audience of 50,000 is a lot of people. If even ten percent of them are assholes, it's a crowd, a frightening mob. But have you ever tuned into the police radio at midnight on Christmas Eve? It's unbelievable- you'll hear things like "They have a priest up against the wall." There are more people hurt at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in Dublin than at a U2 concert! Some people obviously drink too much. I've drunk too much; I've fallen over; I've called the fellow in front of me names and then put up my fists when he turned round. But a lot of the U2 audience are working men with wives and kids- a guy might work overtime so he can get to the concert. And why should we put the responsibility on him to sign up with Amnesty- the guy probably hasn't got the time to have his kid baptized by the local priest! You can't make these grand assessments of the whole audience. Go home with them; get on the bus with them! When was the last time Bob Geldof got on the bus to go home to Finglas? And who knows- maybe next time the kid will think twice about who he votes for, instead of only once.
ADAM: I just don't think it's true that people forget everything on the bus home- not at all.
BONO: Even if it is true, it doesn't detract from what U2 does.

MUSICIAN: Where are journalists getting it wrong?
ADAM: We can't tell you, man. Just listen to the records!
BONO: The most serious misconception is in oversimplification. It's easy to mock us because we have belief in, and respect for, our audience- in a way that is unusual for a rock 'n' roll band. It's easy to paint it as a populist ploy, or as stupidity and naivete. But we came out of that audience, and we're now onstage, playing to it. Whether the U2 audience will be any more significant than the audiences of the 60s or 70s remains to be seen.
EDGE: We're just trying to figure out how to live in this world. That's what it's all about.
BONO: I'm sorry. I apologize if I got carried away with myself. This is an issue that riles me a little bit. I probably haven't expressed myself that well, because I'm still thinking the matter out- I haven't really thought it through enough to give an accurate response. But it worries me that people judge us by their own assumptions regarding what the band is about. When The Unforgettable Fire came out there was a negative reaction to it in the United States- it wasn't a straight rock 'n' roll album. At that point we could have made a rock 'n' roll album, but we started to experiment, and experimentation is almost not allowed, because pop is the dominant force in music in the 80s. People are impressed by record sales. Why? I also think that a great deal of rock criticism is at an all-time low at the moment. It's got to the stage in Ireland where journalists have decided to criticize U2 just for the hell of it! That's not a good enough reason. What rock 'n' roll criticism has to do is own up to its own limitations and uncertainties. And then there is the problem of being an Irish band in Ireland, where a whole generation is on the slippery slope, and they're holding on to us, trying to turn us into some kind of icon.

MUSICIAN: How do you rid yourselves of that burden? And how can you keep in touch with that generation?
BONO: I don't know. I don't know how we're going to do it. I'd say the odds are against us doing it. All this responsibility has been thrown upon us, just because we're a rock 'n' roll band.

MUSICIAN: But you've taken a lot of it upon yourselves- it's a brave thing to have done.
BONO: I suppose we make music that we want to hear. That's all. But I'll tell you what I think. I see something changing- I think people are looking for art that doesn't just reflect the chaos, but challenges it. And that's why I believe there will be a reexamination of soul music, country music, gospel and folk- music made by people. As one French writer said about us, what's so extraordinary about being human? To a lot of the intelligentsia, the most offensive aspect of U2 is our lack of self-consciousness. But rock 'n' roll is not an intellectual art form; it's much more to do with instinct. With U2 I'd like to achieve a balance between the head and the heart, and I'm not sure that we've got it yet. But at least that's what we're aiming for. I'd like to make a rock 'n' roll album now that has at its core a sense of abandonment- there are so few artists owning up to what it's like to have both fears and faith.
ADAM: Our music is about humanity; it doesn't create fantasies.
BONO: A filmmaker like Francis Ford Coppola doesn't have to justify Apocalypse Now in the way that we have had to justify songs like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or "Bullet The Blue Sky." He sees things in a particular way, and expresses them in a movie. We accept it, look at it, and examine the film. With U2 that doesn't seem to be the case. This word "responsibility" crops up all the time in assessments of U2, but do critics judge Coppola by the reaction of cinema-goers to Apocalypse Now? Shouldn't we ask that question about rock criticism? People said, "How can you write a song like 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' when you don't live in Derry?" But they didn't ask Coppola if he was on the river being smuggled into Cambodia. Of course he wasn't- he's a writer! I think that rock 'n' roll criticism itself has to be reappraised- it has to be more intellectually rigorous. It's turning in on itself, and the same standards should apply to rock as apply to other art forms.

MUSICIAN: Tell me about the three songs on the B-side of your new single, "Where The Streets Have No Name."
EDGE: They're different. They're three extremes of what U2 can do. The first one is a version of "Silver And Gold," where you'll find some of the rawest rock 'n' roll that you can hear. We've got a beautiful song called "Sweetest Thing," which is pop as it should be- not produced out of existence, but pop produced with a real intimacy and purity. It's very new for us.
The last one is called "Race Against Time, "which is a study in rhythm. It's like taking some of the rhythms of traditional Irish music, where there is no emphasis on the two or the four- a strange, twisting, rhythmic experiment. I actually played bass on the track, but it was inspired by Adam. He has the knack of playing parts that no one else would ever think of. My bass-playing is very predictable, but this is one of my more unusual parts.
BONO: On the "With Or Without You" EP there are three songs that all deal with obsession, with that kind of sexuality. I'd like to have done a whole side, a whole record, blue. That EP is something close.

MUSICIAN: "Luminous Times" is very somber- it's almost like a track from Low or "Heroes."
EDGE: It's a great track. Some of those songs would definitely have been contenders for the album, but what happened was- and it is a classically "U2" thing to do- we had quite a lot of time to work on the record, but right in the middle the Amnesty tour came up. That took us out of circulation for about two months, because of the dates, recovering, getting the gear back, and getting back into the studio. We ran out of time. There could have been two records, depending on which songs we decided to finish. There was this one album, the "blues" album that Bono was talking about, and another, much more "European," which is kind of the way I was led. "Luminous Times" would have been on it, as would "Walk To The Water." In a funny way you aim somewhere, but the album itself makes up its own mind. We hustled to try to finish it, and to get our own views across, but it is a democratic band, and neither my nor Bono's feelings came through completely. What we ended up with was The Joshua Tree.

MUSICIAN: The song that Marc engineered- "Deep In The Heart"- is very free-form. It's unusual for U2.
EDGE: That's exactly what it is. It's a bit like the "4th Of July" of this record. With "4th Of July" Adam and I were in this room playing and we didn't even know we were being recorded. It was the same with "Deep In The Heart."
ADAM: It was actually recorded on a 4-track cassette machine. It was the only recorder set up.
BONO: "Deep In The Heart" was a simple three-chord song idea that I'd written on the piano, about the last day I spent in Cedarwood Road, in my family house. After I left and went out on my own my father was living there by himself, and there were a lot of break-ins. Heroin addiction in the area was up and kids needed the money. Anyway, my father decided to sell the little house, and before he moved out I went back there and thought about the place, which I'd known since I was small. I remembered a sexual encounter I'd had there- "Thirteen years old, sweet as a rose, every petal of her paper-thin... Love will make you blind, creeping from behind, gets you jumping out of your skin. Deep in the heart of this place... "The simple piano piece that I had was nothing like what these guys turned it into, which was an almost jazz-like improvisation on three chords. The rhythm section turned it into a very special piece of music.
LARRY: Yeah, like Edge says, these moments just come along when you're not expecting them. The great thing about U2, and probably about Adam and myself more than anyone else, is that we struggle with our musicianship all the time. We don't know what to do. We don't know what the format is, we don't know what a great rhythm section is supposed to do; we're still discovering. Even now- and I hope that this is something that doesn't disappear- it's the struggle, the fight to get it right, that makes U2 what it is. The day that U2 stops fighting is the day that U2 will not be the band that it is now.

MUSICIAN: You have control of your studio drum sound?
LARRY: Yes, complete. But Edge or Bono might suggest something- we work together on it. Nothing that I do is really my own; everything is influenced by the others.

MUSICIAN: Do you and Adam work together in the early stages of laying down the backing tracks?
LARRY: We've found it very difficult working together, because neither one of us knew how to play in a band. I'd say, "What are we meant to do here? The bass line goes like that, and I want to play it this way!" An awful lot is battling through it. It was only on The Joshua Tree, and now live, that Adam and I are complementing each other. We've never done that before. It's not through our own fault- we never learned how to do it.
ADAM: I take my cue from Larry's drumming, to be honest. Once Larry has decided on a beat for a song, I try to emphasize it with the bass. We'll rehearse the bass and drums sometimes if we're having a problem with a song.
LARRY: But that's only a new development. At the beginning it was much more difficult, because Adam wasn't playing what a normal bass-player would, and I wasn't always doing what a normal drummer would do. So there was conflict, not in terms of personality, but as far as the playing was concerned. Things weren't sounding right, and so we worked really hard, listening to dance-music, trying to find out how a dance record is made.
ADAM: On the recording of the first three albums we didn't do the backing tracks as a band. The backing tracks were usually guitar and drums, and I'd put down the bass later. I had the luxury, once the song was there, of being able to figure out a bass part. I hated using cans in the studio, because you can't hear anything, so I would do the bass in the control-room, where I could hear the bass and drums. Now we don't bother with cans at all; we use stage monitors.

MUSICIAN: You worked on two songs on Robbie Robertson's new album. I can see some similarities between you and the early Band- a kind of pioneering spirit and a visionary quality. And like the Band, you've looked closely at America from an outsider's perspective.
EDGE: We spring from the same source, perhaps. That comparison is an interesting one, because, as Robbie said-what was his turn of phrase?
BONO: "I was fifteen, and I guess I had the fever!" Robbie puts on sunglasses before he plays up the neck of his guitar. There was messing about and there was playing for real. When he played for real he looked the part- he was incredible to watch. He had the Hawaiian shirt on, and the shades, and he was belting it out. As a singer he's totally underestimated, and, indeed, he underestimates himself. He has an extraordinary voice.
EDGE: What we're doing now, and what we were interested in doing then, was finding out about the original blues music- not the rehashed white blues, which was so awful- which has the spirit of what we've been trying to express since the beginning: the feeling of alienation and loss, the feeling of not being at one with your circumstances. Their music has pain in it, depth and a sense of personal commitment.

MUSICIAN: You don't think that white guys can sing the blues? When I bought the John Mayall and Eric Clapton Blues-breakers album in 1966 it sounded pretty authentic to me, as I imagine your music sounds emotionally authentic to your fans.
EDGE: By the time we had arrived that whole scene had gone.
BONO: Clapton is a true bluesman, there's no question about that. The blues doesn't belong to any color.
EDGE: Yeah, it's all about feeling. I'm sure that Eric Clapton is' more of a bluesman than, say, Robert Cray- but I'm judging purely on instinct. There must have been blacks who felt the blues more than whites, but at the same time I think it's possible for white guys to feel the same emotions- like Keith Richards or Eric Clapton. Those feelings make the blues.
BONO: I think it is inverted racism to believe that the color of your skin prevents you from being a soul singer or blues player.
ADAM: What we're discovering now is that pop music, or commercial music that you hear on the radio, is just not for us. It doesn't fit in with what we're trying to do. We understood Irish traditional music first, realized that it had a long history, and with that kind of understanding we were able to go through to country music and appreciate its depths, and eventually end up somewhere in the Delta. That's what we're focusing our attention on now, rather than on studio techniques.
LARRY: But it would be wrong to suppose that when one of us gets into the blues suddenly everyone says, "Wow! Let's go for it!" We all have different tastes. My interest in blues music is from Bono's perspective, which is that of soul singers. That's what attracts me, as opposed to the actual history of the blues, of which my knowledge is obviously very limited, because I grew up in the 70s.

MUSICIAN: I hear you want to record a country album, Larry.
LARRY: I've had it planned for a longtime, but I still haven't got around to doing anything about it. When this tour's finished, I'll get down to it seriously.

MUSICIAN: I'm told that you have a great voice- that's what Maria McKee says, anyway!
LARRY: Well, this is true. [Guffaws from the band] You think Robbie Robertson is underestimated!
BONO: Go on, give us an aul' song!
LARRY: I did say to Maria that if I did get this country record together, I'd like her to come and help me sing, and maybe write a few songs. Unfortunately, I can't play guitar, and when I did start to learn, I did something to my hand and I couldn't get it round the neck. These guys think that I didn't bother to try [laughter], but it's completely untrue, and I will learn how to play. My initial interest started when I got into Johnny Cash through Bono here- he was always talking about the At Folsom Prison album- and then I became friendly with a guy who loaned me all his country records. I've always known Patsy Clime songs, although I never really understood them, but now I listen to Johnny Cash, to younger people like Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam, and to the Judds especially.
BONO: Larry gets love letters from the Judds!

MUSICIAN: You've been writing country and blues songs, Bono?
BONO: I wrote one for Roy Orbison called "She's a Mystery To Me", "When Love Comes To Town" is the one I wrote for B. B. King. I haven't sent them out yet- I write them, then I lose them. Anyway, they're not fully demoed yet...
EDGE: The best story is about the time that Bono, T-Bone Burnett, Bob Dylan, and I were up one night writing a song, and Bono lost the lyrics! So I hope Bob has them...
BONO: There's another song I wrote about B.B. 's guitar, called "Lucille," but that's a country song. "When Love Comes To Town" goes like this: [sings softly] "I was a sailor lost at sea; I was under the waves before love rescued me; I was a fighter, I could turn on a thread, but I stand accused of the things that I've said- when love comes to town I'm gonna catch that plane. Baby, I was wrong to ever let you down, but I did what I did before love came to town!" The last verse is a gospel verse: [changing tempo] "I was there when they crucified the Lord; I held the scabbard when the soldiers drew the sword. I threw the dice when they pierced his side, but I've seen love conquer the great divide!"

MUSICIAN: Robertson said that when you're writing lyrics for a band you've got to write on the group's behalf, not just for yourself Would you agree?
BONO: No.
EDGE: Not actually true, but accidentally true. There's such a strength of commitment within the group that ninety-eight percent of Bono's lyrics could have been written as if they were for the band.
BONO: But a writer has to be selfish.
EDGE: It's not that Bono would ever be precious about his lyrics- he always comes to us and discusses them. We may only be his first critics, but in that sense there is an input, and occasionally someone from the band will contribute.
BONO: Edge will sometimes walk up to me and say something like, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," and I'll turn it into a song: The original statement came from Edge, and it occasionally happens that a song will work out that way. But I think that the group would support me if I went out on a limb, even if it's something that they don't fully believe in.

MUSICIAN: T-Bone Burnett said that Bono is an inheritor of John Lennon's gift for making grand statements, and that U2, with its capacity for musical expansiveness, is one of the few bands able to "fill" a stadium.
BONO: Well, John Lennon was an artist of performance, in a way, and U2, onstage, is the same- there is a performance of music that has previously been made. We work with what we have before us. If it's a small club, like in the early days, I might g& off the stage. We once played to seventeen people in Birmingham and I would sit down with them in the middle of songs. I'd drink from their glasses, and pour the rest over their heads. If we're playing in arenas, we'll adapt accordingly. U2 music tends to float a bit, and it suits not being hemmed in by a small room. When we're recording we use the studio as an instrument, and we work with the stage as an artist might work with a canvas. We make big music that isn't easily contained.
ADAM: You see, our love of music is not just for the sound, but for the fact that you can communicate with people through it. That's what I believe U2 is all about. It's an ability to reach people, to touch them, to have a relationship with someone through your music. There are no physical limitations to that. You try to provide the biggest platform on which you can get through to people- and for them to get through to you. It's a two-way process.
EDGE: But we never sit down to write a "big" song or a "big" lyric. We write songs because we want to express something.
BONO: I find that people make assumptions about U2 based on the singles, or on the Under a Blood Red Sky film. They accept the rhetoric that War is a very brash record, but on that LP is a song called "Drowning Man," which is the most intimate musical piece. The Unforgettable Fire is a very intimate album, and a very personal one. "Pride" was the odd song out, and if someone judges the album by that one single, then he's missing out. I take it as a compliment if someone says that we're making grand statements, but I'm not just interested in that. As a writer I'm now more concerned with complexities and gray areas than I ever was. We made black and white statements in a particular period in the group's history, when we kind of went through the John Lennon Handbook; Lennon wrote a song called "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

MUSICIAN: There are plenty of comparisons between the Beatles and U2 these days.
EDGE: I don't know if there really are any significant comparisons to be made, beyond the fact that, like the Beatles, U2 is a band. Otherwise, I don't know... There's a guy who argues that there is a twenty-year cycle to everything, and that The Joshua Tree and Sergeant Pepper are exactly twenty years apart! [laughs]
BONO: When we were kids, everyone wanted to be in the Beatles. Now we are! [laughs] I'm only kidding! THAT'S A JOKE! In the 80s, which is a barren era, we look back at the 60s as a great reservoir of talent, of high ideals, and of the will and desire to change things~ We're turning the 60s into the twentieth-century Renaissance, and trying to relive the period. Therefore people want to turn U2 into the Beatles.
LARRY: The only good thing about the references, for me, is that the Beatles, like us, didn't take themselves too seriously. They had a laugh, made music seriously, and that was it. We're not spokesmen for a generation.

MUSICIAN: So let's talk about the music. "Where The Streets Have No Name" is a classic introductory album track. It really sets the pace and the context for the rest of the album.
BONO: I thought that the intro sounded like an orchestra tuning up. It was a treatment of an Edge keyboard line.
EDGE: Yeah, Brian [Eno] did one of his Russian things on it. It was a natural choice for the beginning of an album, and we actually tailored the intro for that position. Had we put it elsewhere on the record we would probably have shortened it, because a lot of U2 songs start out longer than they finally end up. But we loved the way it evolved, so we left it as it was. To be honest, though, when you're making a record the running order just develops, as the songs tend to give us clues when we're working on them.

MUSICIAN: But there does seem to be some kind of a structure to The Joshua Tree, although perhaps it's a rationalization after the fact. The first two tracks are "transcendent" songs, and they're followed by love songs and more socially oriented material.
BONO: There is a beginning, middle and end to the LP. I actually object to the fact. that we had to put it on two sides- I'd have liked it all on side one, and nothing on side two.
EDGE: This side one/side two business isn't something we subscribe to, although we used to take advice like "Stick anything that's going to keep radio happy on side one, and put all the experimental, interesting stuff on side two."
BONO: "Running To Stand Still" was always meant to be followed by "Red Hill Mining Town" and that's one reason for having the CD- although I'm not a big CD person myself. I like the crackles.

MUSICIAN: What do you consider the highlights of The Joshua Tree, with the benefit of hindsight?
LARRY: The inner sleeve, basically!
ADAM: I think the power of "Bullet The Blue Sky" is something we never conjured up before. That's what I like.
EDGE: But whenever I hear that track I think about how far it could have gone. As a guitar-player I'm only barely getting into that style. The guitar-playing is much better live than on record, where I was only exploring the possibilities.

MUSICIAN: Was the guitar multi-tracked?
EDGE: It was a live take. The guitar break towards the end has an overdub on it, but the basic track is live. We should get into this now, because it's a classic example of this kind of recording. When we were planning this record, one thing we wanted to do was to take up where we left off with The Unforgettable Fire in terms of recording techniques- getting the sound of a live performance. There is no way that recording each instrument in a separate acoustic environment, and, trying to blend them back together again, from tape, is going to get the same result as musicians playing together. You don't get the sound of the room, you don't get the chemistry. So we did The Joshua Tree in Adam's house, in my house, and also in the "live" room here in Windmill Lane. Everybody was in the same space, playing with eye contact and a great deal of feeling. The sound of "Bullet" is the sound of U2 playing in a room. It is essential for that song that we have that feeling. It's the same for a lot of the other tracks too, like "Running To Stand Still."
BONO: I tend, as a word-writer, to think in terms of a running-order. It would be on my mind a lot. The whole process of U2 involves four people, and we all have different opinions. Side two would have been different if I'd had my way. I wanted it to go further into the swamp. There was a very different piece before "Exit," and a gospel song to go before that. I had this idea that we should start with U2- with "Where The Streets Have No Name"- and then dismantle U2 during the record, and be left with nothing recognizable as us. This didn't completely come to be, because in the end we took decisions on the strength of the songs. I would battle more for the big idea, for the structure of the whole record, but in the end what we went for- dare I say it- was the Beatles' idea that each song has its own identity.
EDGE: The music is so different from anything we did before, in terms of where the music sprung from. If we'd taken that notion to its extreme people wouldn't have known what was going on. It would have been quite good to see people totally floored by it, but we also wanted to present what we felt was the strongest material.

MUSICIAN: Do you consider your music primarily as art, entertainment or a vehicle for meaningful messages- be they spiritual or social?
EDGE: I don't think we ever consider anything other than 'This is a song we want to write." No one ever says "This is great entertainment!"
ADAM: You're talking about all the things that make up a song- you can't separate them.
BONO: The people who try to do that are those who are on the outside looking in.
We're on the inside, and we can't see in front of our noses. To try to turn us into prophets- or for that matter wanting to put us on in Las Vegas- is missing the point.