U2: Keeping the Faith
The Ramada Inn of Düsseldorf, West Germany, stands on the outskirts of town amid a host of low-slung corporate buildings: a tall, sleek, bloodless base for junior industrialists away from home. It’s hard to imagine a place farther removed from the gritty, red-brick bustle of U2‘s hometown, Dublin. Consider, then, the surprise of drummer Larry Mullen Jr. as he snacked on some biscuits and tea in the hotel’s bar one morning. There in front of him was Ronnie Drew, the craggy-faced singer for one of Ireland’s most popular groups, the Dubliners. The fiftyish Drew, rather an éminence grise of traditional Irish folk music, could hardly be mistaken for a rock & roll buff – yet as he pulled up a chair next to Mullen, he was quick to express his regard for the work of U2.
“Oh, you’re a great band,” Ronnie told Larry. “My kids just think you’re the greatest, have all your records, listen to them all the time. Yeah, the kids love ya.” They chatted briefly before Ronnie got up to leave. “You know,” he said gravely, “it would be a great honor if I could tell them that you bought me a drink.”
In America, their names are not household words, and their faces are unfamiliar even to some of their fans. They have yet to notch a Top Ten album or single. Only now are they beinning to tour arena-sized venues. But for a growing number of rock & roll fans, U2 – vocalist Paul “Bono” Hewson, 24; guitarist Dave “the Edge” Evans, 22; bassist Adam Clayton, 24; and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., 22 – has become the band that matters most, maybe even the only band that matters. It’s no coincidence that U2 sells more T-shirts and merchandise than grops that sell twice as many records, or that four of U2’s five albums are currently on Billboard’s Top 200. The group has become one of the handful of artists in rock & roll history (the Who, the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen) that people are eager to identify themselves with. And they’ve done it not just with their music but with a larger message as well – by singing “Pride (In the Name of Love)” while most other groups sing about pride in the act of love.
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On record, U2’s thunderous sound (developed with help from producer Steve Lillywhite) turned heads from the beginning. Instead of copping the straightahead squall of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, U2 cast the brash, heroic spirit of punk in a new image. Their sound was echoey and atmospheric, while their lyrics were more attuned to the grayer areas of human existence. In 1981, the band’s first LP, Boy, established a U.S. beachhead thanks to “I Will Follow,” a keening single that found a home on college radio. Boy’s successor, October, was written and recorded in a mad dash after Bono’s book of lyrics was stolen; it sold poorly.
U2’s American breakthrough came with 1982’s War, which marshaled the sounds of militarism – rat-a-tat-tat drums, savage guitar work, defiant vocals – in the service of pacifism, albeit a pacifism ready to wage moral battle with its enemies. Such songs as “New Year’s Day” (about the Soviet domination of Poland) and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (about a massacre of civilians by the British in Northern Ireland) became album-radio staples, and the LP sold over a million copies. U2’s live shows had always drawn fervent audiences, but now Bono solidified the success of War by crystallizing its messages onstage in bold physical images. His most memorable gesture was brandishing a white flag – what he termed “a flag drained of all color” – during “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” as if to say that in war, surrender was the bravest course. It was no wonder that War’s 1983 follow-up, a live mini-LP entitled Under a Blood Red Sky, also earned the group a gold album.
The band’s appeal doesn’t seem to be sexual: no member of U2 appears to have seen the inside of a health club or a New Wave haberdashery, and only Mullen could pass for a Cute Guy. U2’s strength, it seems, goes deeper. Like most rock & roll bands, U2 articulates, at top volume, the alienation that young people can feel from their country, their hometown, their family, their sexuality, Like some of the best rock & roll bands, U2 also shows how the alienation might be overcome. But unlike anyone else in rock & roll, U2 also addresses the most ignored – and most volatile – area of inquiry: alienation from religion.
“Sadomasochism is not taboo in rock & roll,” notes Bono. “Spirituality is.” Indeed, when religion in America seems sadly synonymous with political conservatism and with the electronic evangelism of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, U2 dares to proclaim its belief in Christianity – at top volume – while grappling with the ramifications of its faith. Each member is careful to avoid discussing the specifics of his beliefs (the perfectly amiable Mullen, in fact, customarily declines to give interviews), and the band’s musical message is hardly a proselytizing one. But even to raise the issue, to suggest that a person who loves rock & roll can unashamedly find peace with God as well, is a powerful statement. This is a band that onstage and offstage seems guided by a philosophy not included in such yuppie maxims as “feeling good” and “go for it”: not how might we live our lives (what we can get away with), but how ought we to live our lives.
Lofty goals – but while the promise of U2’s records has always been great, it is a promise that remains largely unfulfilled. In the past year and a half, U2 has found itself faced with several critical decisions: artistic, financial, personal, even patriotic. Each choice represented a test of whether the band could continue to articulate its message and fulfill its promise without drowning in contradictions. And while the outcome isn’t settled yet, U2 seems to have come through its a crises in good shape – due in large part, perhaps, to the band members’ willingness to acknowledge their own weaknesses.
“It interests me that I’m portrayed as some sort of strong man,” says Bono with genuine perplexity. “I don’t see myself in that way. I know my weaknesses. When I see the albums, I don’t see them as anthemic. I think that’s what’s uplifting, that’s what connects with people. I think people relate to U2 because they’ve seen us fall on our face so many times.”
Clad from head to foot in his usual color – black – Bono sat in the downstairs bar at a London hotel last November, merrily bouncing Edge’s five-month-old daughter, Holly, on his lap. In a few hours, U2 would head to Düsseldorf, where the band had been booked to perform at Rock Pop, a concert festival in nearby Dortmund that would be filmed and shown to much of Western Europe. The one-show tour would allow the band to rest up while giving it one more shot at breaking in West Germany – a land where Bono had once told a less-than-delirious audience, “In my country, it’s customary to clap.”
As Holly gurgled approvingly, Bono read aloud from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” U2 being the sort of band that takes The Oxford Companion to English Literature along on tour. His road-ravaged voice was clear and suitable melodramatic, but by the third stanza, Holly was grabbing for something round and shiny on the table in front of them. “Money,” explained Bono to the tot. “That’s what all the trouble’s about.”
He knew. At the beginning of 1984, the band not only had to hire a producer for the album that became The Unforgettable Fire, but it also began negotiating a new record contract. It was the latter choice that provoked more dread, “The greatest threat to the career of this band, or any other band,” Edge had declared, “is financial success.”
But choosing a producer to replace Steve Lillywhite came first. U2 had enjoyed working with Jimmy Iovine, who had offered to produce Under a Boold Red Sky for next to nothing just for the chance to work with U2. Paul McGuinness, the group’s savvy manager, liked Iovine’s commercially proven skills, but the band members chose the duo of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
“We decided that the music should decide,” explained Bono. “And we made some music, and we could see that it was a more abstract – dare I say it, ambient – record that we were going to make. And who better?” Who indeed? But Eno and Lanois kept U2 from harnessing its talents into compact, concise rock & roll songs and instead encouraged the group to preserve its more inchoate creations just as they were. Some of The Unforgettable Fire has an unfinished, slapdash quality, while other tracks – “A Sort of Home-coming,” for example – seem fussy and unfocused.
Few listeners, though, had anything bad to say about the LP’s stirring paean to Martin Luther King, “Pride (In the Name of Love),” despite a historical inaccuracy (he was assassinated in the evening, not the morning). Reaching the Top Twenty, it became U2’s most successful single ever and helped to boost The Unforgettable Fire – named for a series of harrowing paintings drawn by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – into the Top Fifteen. The LP was not the commercial smasheroo that some had hoped for, but that is quite all right with everyone in the U2 camp. They followed their muse, and they have no regrets.
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