Bob Dylan - Oh Mercy

The 1980s were not kind to Bob Dylan.  He ended the 1970s having made a good album (Slow Train Coming – 1979) after his conversion to Christianity.  The rest of what followed wasn’t so good.  He recorded six more albums [Saved (1980), Shot of Love (1981), Infidels (1983), Empire Burlesque (1985), Knocked Out Loaded (1986), Down in the Groove (1988)], only one of which was any good [Infidels].  He toured with the Grateful Dead in 1987, from which emerged an album [Dylan & the Dead] that wasn’t very good either.  But during this time Bob Dylan injured his hand in what he called a freak accident.  He had lost inspiration.  He didn't feel any connection to his own songs.  He wanted to retire.  He never expected to write any more songs.  In 1988 there was a flicker [and a very funny one at that] of Dylan at his best.  It came in the form of a very funny spoof of Bruce Springsteen on the first Traveling Wilburys album – Tweeter and the Monkey Man.  Then one night, alone at his kitchen table, the muse found him.   He started to write twenty verses of a song called "Political World."  It was the first of about twenty songs [by his estimate] he would write.

Before he knew it, Dylan had a bunch of songs.  One night while having dinner with Bono, Bono asked Dylan if he had any unrecorded songs.  He showed Bono what he had, and told him he wasn't sure if he was going to make any more records because doing so didn't come as easily to him as it had in the past.  Bono recommended Daniel Lanois to Dylan.  Lanois had done some pretty remarkable records – Peter Gabriel’s So, U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, Robbie Robertson’s self-titled solo debut.  Lanois liked to work in New Orleans.  He recorded his own Arcadie there.  He did the Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon there.  That album had two Dylan songs - With God On Our Side and Hollis Brown.  Dylan heard his songs done the Neville way, as recorded by Lanois.  He liked what he heard and hired Lanois.  When it came time to record Oh Mercy, Lanois set up a little studio in a Victorian mansion near a cemetery in New Orleans.

Dylan described the recording of What Was It You Wanted in great detail in Chronicles.  He wrote a lot about that particular song, but what he said about it could be applied to all of Oh Mercy - "The way the microphones are placed makes the atmosphere seem to be texturally rich, jet lagged and loaded - Quaaludes, misty.  It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like a gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous.  Danny's sonic atmosphere makes it sound like some mysterious, silent land.  The production gyrates and moves with all kinds of layered rhythms..."  It definitely doesn’t sound like a 1980s album [electronic drums, synthesizers, no bass, etc].  There’s a lot of reverb on Oh Mercy, but at least it’s applied to real instruments played by real musicians.

Political World - This was the first song he wrote for Oh Mercy.  It originally had twenty verses.  It's a one-chord vamp (Fm#) with no chorus, no bridges.  Each verse starts with the phrase "we live in a political world..." and then he lists everything that he sees is wrong with this political world.  It starts Oh Mercy with a fairly fast tempo, but after listening to the rest of the album it turns out to be only one of two songs that don’t wallow in Daniel Lanois’ murk.

Where Teardrops Fall - This ballad is a three-chord country waltz.  It has a slide guitar part that sounds like George Harrison [it isn't him - it's Daniel Lanois playing a lap steel].  Rockin' Dopsie and His Cajun Band recorded this one.  It has a surprise ending - a saxophone solo!

Everything Is Broken – The other up-tempo song on Oh Mercy, this is a list of broken things in Dylan's world.  "I thought of all the best things in the world, the things I had a great affection for.  Sometimes it might be a place, a place to start an evening from and go all night, but then these places become broken, too, and can't be pieced back together… Something just breaks and gives no warning.  Sometimes your dearest possession.  It's beastly hard to fix anything."

Ring Them Bells – Dylan goes to church.  This is something I would have expected him to do during his Christian period [i.e. before Infidels].  But this one song is better than his three Christian albums put together.

Man in the Long Black Coat – Of all the songs on Oh Mercy, this one is the one that best evokes the atmosphere of swampy mystery that is Louisiana.  Not all is well where the song takes place.   This song is full of Southern imagery - Crickets are chirpin' the water is high… a soft cotton dress on the line hangin' dry…African trees bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze…There's smoke on the water…Tree trunks uprooted beneath the high crescent moon.  The music is as swampy as it gets on Oh Mercy.  Who was this guy, and why did the woman in the song run off with him?

Most of the Time - This is a song about an ex-flame from long ago that he still can’t get out of his head.  He tells his listener that he’s doing fine without her “most of the time.”  But is he really?  I don’t think he is.  The Oh Mercy version of this song sounds like it could be from a U2 album, which isn’t surprising given the Daniel Lanois connection.  There’s an alternate version with just guitar/vocal/harmonica on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 – I like it better.

What Good Am I? – Dylan’s examination of self-worth doesn’t really do much for me.  This song is at such a languid pace that I think Dylan discovered a cure for insomnia.

Disease of Conceit - According to Dylan, "events might trigger a song - sometimes they might start a motor."  The event in question here was Jimmy Swaggart getting caught with a prostitute.   It’s an “ok” song, but I could do without it.

What Was It You Wanted – Dylan wrote at length about this particular song in Chronicles - "If you've ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about.  It doesn't need much explanation…  Songs like this are strange.  They don't make good companions."  What do I think?  He could be asking his audience what they expect of him.  He could be asking a lover the same question.  The lyrics are ambiguous enough to keep you guessing to whom the question is being asked.

Shooting Star – This is a simple song about lost love, a theme Dylan returns to many times on subsequent albums.  It’s an excellent ballad, and pretty too.
Dylan had more songs for Oh Mercy than he needed.  Four songs emerged on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs.  One is tempted to play Monday morning quarterback and judge for himself whether Dylan chose the right songs to comprise Oh Mercy.

God Knows and Born in Time - Early versions of these songs were recorded for Oh Mercy but later re-recorded for Under the Red Sky.  The outtake versions on Tell Tale Signs are very good.  Why Dylan didn't include them on Oh Mercy is a mystery to me.  Perhaps his problems with making records were so acute that maybe he knew he had an abundance of good songs for Oh Mercy and saved them for later.  That being said, these versions are better than what came out on Under the Red Sky.   

Dignity - demo first recorded with just Brian Stoltz, Willie Green and Malcolm Burn.  Numerous takes were done with Rockin' Dopsie and His Cajun Band.  The more they recorded it, the less satisfied Dylan and Lanois were with the results.  Dylan said "an ambience of texture and atmosphere" was what the song needed, but those qualities eluded them for Dignity.  "Whatever promise Dan had seen in the song was beaten into a bloody mess."  It's a shame they abandoned the song.  The finished version on Greatest Hits Volume 3 would have fit right in with the rest of Oh Mercy.

Series of Dreams - The catalyst for writing this song was the death of Pistol Pete Maravich.  This song has plenty of ambience created by four guitar players.  This also appeared on Greatest Hits Volume 3 as well as the first installment of Dylan's Bootleg series.  It too would have fit nicely on Oh Mercy.

At the time of its release in 1989, Oh Mercy was widely acclaimed by critics as a return to form.  But as Dylan said in Chronicles, good reviews are nice but they don’t sell records [I’m paraphrasing].  It’s a pretty good album, but I think with a couple of additions and deletions it could have been better.  What would I delete?  I would delete What Good Am I? and Disease of Conceit.  God Knows and Born in Time would slot fairly well in their place.  Dignity and Series of Dreams would be even better, but they didn’t finish them in time.  Series of Dreams could have been a good way to finish the album, but it didn’t.  If Dylan & Co. had finished those songs, Oh Mercy could be mentioned in the same breath as Blood on the Tracks or “Love & Theft.”  Instead, Oh Mercy is just Dylan’s best album of the 1980s.  It proved that creatively Dylan wasn’t dead yet.  It is worth having in your Dylan collection.

Peter Gabriel - So

So is Peter Gabriel’s fifth studio album since he departed Genesis in 1975.  I’ve been listening to his music for over 30 years, and this album is quite unlike the others he had done until this point.  There are many adjectives to describe Peter Gabriel’s work prior to So:  creepy, moody, paranoid, murky, unorthodox, angry, claustrophobic, brooding.  Those words don’t apply here.  Daniel Lanois’ production gives all the instruments room to breathe.  It provides an ambience one doesn’t hear on other Peter Gabriel albums.  There are loud songs, there are quiet songs.  Instead of all gloom and doom like the “Melt” album or Security, there’s some happiness to be heard on So.  Could it be that Peter Gabriel was having fun for once?  There are songs on this album that everybody can like.  That doesn’t mean that Peter Gabriel “sold out” – he hasn’t.  There are still some somber bits [Don’t Give Up, Mercy Street], his experimental side is still present [This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds), We Do What We're Told (Miligram's 37)], but there are bits of levity as well [Sledgehammer, Big Time].  Absent [for this album anyway] are the long soundscapes like The Family and the Fishing Net [Security], as is the eerie mystery of Intruder [Melt]. 

Red Rain grabs the listener right away.  After making four albums without any “metal” [cymbals and hi-hats] on them, the first thing you hear is Stewart Copeland’s hi-hat.  Immediately you know this isn’t going to be a typical Peter Gabriel album.  The sound of Tony Levin’s fretless bass is unlike anything I’ve ever heard on a PG album – you can hear it, and you can feel it. It isn’t buried in the mix like on previous efforts, and it isn’t a keyboard bass.  Having heard what Tony Levin could do with King Crimson [Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair] I thought his talents had been sorely underutilized – not so with Red Rain.  What is it about?  For years I thought “red rain” was a metaphor for nuclear fallout.  This was the Cold War after all – the Russians had their missiles in Europe, and Ronald Reagan had his.  And having read about it, it seems I wasn’t too far off the mark.  Peter Gabriel said it was about an “apocalyptic dream” that he had, and he created music to match the mood.  Red Rain is a very dramatic piece, and a great way to open an album.

Red Rain

Sledgehammer – Who knew that a white English guy could pay such a loving tribute to the Stax sound?  The subject of this tribute?  Sex!  The song is full of clever turns of a phrase ["You could have a steam train / If you'd just lay down your tracks" and "Open up your fruitcake / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be"].  The Claymation video from the guys who created Wallace and Gromit is probably the best video ever made.  Its popularity on MTV [I think it is their most-played video ever – a record that’ll never be broken since they don’t play music anymore] no doubt helped So’s sales rocket into the stratosphere.  A big bonus – Memphis Horns alum Wayne Jackson plays on this.  Nothing says “authentic” like a Stax tribute with one of the original Stax horn players.

Sledgehammer

Don’t Give Up – PG’s take on what it feels like to get laid off and how worthless one feels when he does.  Kate Bush is wonderful, singing as a wife trying to keep up his spirits.  He’s full of despair, she provides hope.  This song reeks of Daniel Lanois’ ambience [a good thing].

That Voice Again – More excellent bass work from Tony Levin.  I like how the song alternates between major chords on the verses and the chorus and minor piano chords on the bridge.  What voice is he hearing anyway?  Is it his conscience, or is it like Magnum PI’s “little voice” that always warned him of danger?

Mercy Street – Dedicated to poet Anne Sexton.  PG wrote this after reading Anne Sexton’s posthumously published poem 45 Mercy Street.  This piece of ambience is a very dark and haunting song.  The guitar sounds like something Andy Summers would do on Ghost in the machine [Secret Journey, specifically].  Guitarist David Rhodes nailed Summers’ sound perfectly, just not as loudly.

Big Time – Son of Sledgehammer.  The way the CD is sequenced, this song is in a good place to follow the somber Mercy Street.  Where did that funky guitar come from?  Who are you, and what have you done with the Peter Gabriel I knew?  Underneath the dance music there is scathing commentary about conspicuous consumption.  This is biting satire at its very best.  Lyrically this song is the complete opposite of Don’t Give Up. This song has one of the coolest basslines one will ever hear on any song anywhere because drummer Jerry Marotta hits the strings on Tony’s Levin’s fretless bass while Tony Levin did the fretwork.  Both are credited with “Drumstick Bass.”  Years later Tony Levin would invent Funk Fingers, which are essentially drumsticks you can attach to your fingertips.  I’ve seen him play with them – very cool.

Big Time

We Do What We’re Told (Miligram’s 37) – “We do what we’re told” – wash, rinse, repeat.  Very robotic, this hypnotic trance leaves me wondering how it would continue if hadn’t stopped after only 3 ½ minutes.

This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds) – Written with Laurie Anderson, who also appears here.  Is there really a song here?  Not that it matters because it sounds great on headphones.  It sounds very mechanical to me, like the “song” that came immediately before it.  I think it has the same trance-like qualities of We Do What We’re Told (Miligram’s 37).

In Your Eyes is a rarity in the Peter Gabriel songbook – a love song.  I read somewhere it started out as a poem to his then-wife Jill.  Cameron Crowe made an excellent choice when he picked this song for the Jon Cusack boom-box scene in Say Anything.  Senegal’s Youssou N'Dour provided a vocal in his native tongue.  I have no idea what he’s singing, but for 41 seconds as the song fades out he sounds like he’s expressing unbridled joy.

In Your Eyes

So is a rare album in that there’s nowhere you need to hit the “skip” button on your CD player [or iPod or any other MP3 player of your choice].  I can’t even make that claim for any Beatles album.  It sounds like it was made in the 1980s, but I can’t hold that against Peter Gabriel because this album sounds great.

U2: From the Sky Down

“What people are doing when they’re forming a band is they’re forming what an anthropologist would call a clan.  It’s a group of people who may not be genetically related but share interests of some kind, and have pledged loyalty to each other.  I think men in particular have a kind of instinct in for banding together and being in a group together.  Most of the identity of that group is formed by a “separateness” from everybody else.”  – Brian Eno, 2011

“Making Achtung Baby is the reason we’re still here now.  That was the pivot point where we were either going forward or ‘is this our moment to implode?’” I thought to myself ‘this is it – we’ve come to the end of the road’ – band breaks up over ‘artistic differences’ – classic cliché.” – Bono, 2011

2011 marked the twentieth anniversary of U2’s Achtung Baby album.  To commemorate this anniversary the band released a super deluxe version of the album.  The documentary U2: From the Sky Down is included as part of this mammoth box set.  This documentary was made by Davis Guggenheim, the same man who made It Might Get Loud.  This documentary chronicles captures a band which faced an existential crisis.  It is a fairly thorough look at the making of Achtung Baby.  What is especially good about the documentary is all the participants from those events that occurred twenty-two years ago aided in the making of the film.  U2: From the Sky Down is told from a first-person point of view, not by an outsider looking in.

The first half of the documentary is a brief history of U2, from the very beginning until they made The Joshua Tree album and the subsequent Rattle and Hum movie.  When they made The Joshua Tree, this was their big artistic statement.  This was the time when they were a very popular band and suddenly they became a HUGE band that had to tour stadiums so that all the people who wanted to see them live could do so.  Then they got this idea – let’s make a movie!  Perhaps they had visions of making their version of A Hard Day’s Night, which captured the zeitgeist that was Beatlemania.  Rattle and Hum was like a home movie a four guys looking to discover American music, and a joyless home movie at that.  Bono said they had lots of fun making the movie, but that fun was never captured when the cameras were on. They thought it would be ‘interesting’ to watch them ‘discover’ American music.  They knew nothing of the blues, knew nothing of country music.  It didn’t occur to them that their naiveté wasn’t as interesting to us as it was to them.  The reviews of Rattle and Hum were scathing:

When self-importance interferes with the music – NY Times

It’s a tad early for the band to be lobbying for admission to the pantheon – Washington Post

Rattle and Hum is the sound of four men who still haven’t found what they’re looking for – Rolling Stone

The guys in U2 were a bit shell-shocked.  Bono’s wife told him “you’ve gotten so serious.  The boy I fell in love with was so full of mischief, so full of madness.  You were a much more experimental character – what’s happened to you?”  Ali Hewson nailed what was ‘wrong’ with U2.

“A group is a collective ego in a sense, and that ego is very easily offended.” – Brian Eno

As long as I’ve been following this band [since 1983], U2 have been critical darlings.  But with the perceived pretense of Rattle and Hum, it was “open season” on U2.  Music critics are renowned for building up musical acts, only to tear them down again.  U2 was no exception to this rule.  This was their first time of getting extreme negative feedback from their critics, and they were unsure how to take it. According to Bono, the band was exhausted and thought they’d ‘run out of steam.’ He said that “‘you start to believe what people are saying about you.  You start to think ‘maybe this is the end.’”  By the time they played a hometown gig on Dec 30, 1989, Bono told the audience ‘We have to go away and just dream it all up again.’”  “We looked like a big overblown rock band running amok…When we were kids, 16-, 17-years old, gone to see the Clash in Dublin, this was ‘the enemy.’   Have we become they enemy?  We hadn’t created any great crimes against humanity or art. All we had done was been a little self-conscious and overblown.”  The answer to the band’s problem – “Let’s get a big fuckin’ chain saw and cut down the Joshua Tree!”

They wanted to go to Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin, where great things happened, like David Bowie’s Low and Heroes and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.  They felt that just by being there, the “greatness” of what had happened there previously would just ‘magically’ visit upon them.  Inspiration was lacking, as was the “greatness” they thought would visit them.  Bono - “We felt as we walked into this place ’well, you know, it’s so full of greatness, that greatness will visit with us.’  So we’re there, and greatness is nowhere to be seen.  Greatness has left the building, it seems, years ago.”

Before they went to Berlin they all had a sense that something was “not quite right,” that they were all on completely different pages.  It was like “each man for himself,” which betrayed the concept of a band.  There is a nice piece of animation that was very illustrative of what was happening to U2 at the time.  As the time the Berlin Wall came down and the separation between East and West was disappearing, walls between all the band members were coming up, and communication was lacking.  There were musical walls coming up within the band.  After Rattle and Hum, The Edge listened to and was influenced by the work of KMFDM, the Young Gods, Einstürzende Neubauten.  He was into that “machine age music” that took the humanity out of things. He also liked what he heard from what was called the “Madchester” scene.  Bono told his interviewer the first album he bought for Ali [his girlfriend then, now his wife] was Man Machine from Kraftwerk.  Bono and the Edge were in the same musical headspace, but Larry Mullen went the other way.  He went back to classic rock.  He liked Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Blind Faith.  He liked to hear Ginger Baker play.  How does one reconcile such disparate tastes in music?  U2’s method of songwriting up until this time was that of getting together in a room, jamming together, and seeing what comes out the other end.  Suddenly, Bono and the Edge worked on stuff together beforehand, and awaited input from the rhythm section.  Adam Clayton said this method gave him a sense of abandonment that led him to some unpleasant places.

U2 flew into Berlin the night Germany reunified in October 1990.  They were on the last jet to land there while it was still a divided city.  Knowing there would be celebrations all over the city to mark the momentous occasion of German reunification, the band set out to join such a celebration.  What they found was something quite the opposite.  They ran into a bunch of people who wanted the wall to go back up.  They were a grim bunch.  They soon found out they were in the midst of a demonstration to put the wall back up!  They ended up in the Palast Hotel – everything was brown.  The walls were brown, the carpeting was brown, the furniture was brown.  The weather was cold and gloomy.  It was a depressing place.

Why Berlin?  There was a lot of experimental music, avant garde music that was coming out of Berlin in the early 1990s.  Berlin was a place the band perceived where a culture collision was going on.  They’d heard about Hansa from Brian Eno, who had worked with David Bowie during his “Berlin” period.  Their engineer [Flood] had worked in Berlin before.  They wanted to get away from Dublin in order to become more focused to make a record.  Away from Ireland, the members of the band didn’t have the domestic issues [family] to deal with while they were making a record.  The Edge played a solo acoustic version of Love is Blindness.  While this is playing you hear the story of Edge’s bad times.  He was going through a marriage breakup.  For him, leaving Dublin for Berlin was a refuge, a distraction from his failing marriage.  He wasn’t in a good, positive headspace.  Adam Clayton described the time in Berlin as going down a lot of blind alleys, a lot of friction, a lot of tension. 

Nobody was happy.  Within the band Bono and the Edge were trying the hardest to try new things.  The idea was to do something rhythmic, something rooted in dance club culture.  They were trying to find their way into dance music that wasn’t clichéd.  Larry was the most resistant and questioned why Bono and the Edge were taking the musical direction they were taking.  Larry had no idea that The Edge was using a lot of loop and drum machine elements, and the hard part was trying to mesh that mechanical sound with his own live playing.  There was a lot of tension, a lot of grumbling.  They felt like they were getting nowhere.  And then…

My favorite part of the film happened when they played back a rough mix of Mysterious Ways.   Edge threw in a new bridge he was trying out and it had this chord sequence – Am-D-F-G.  Bono was reading something when he heard this chord sequence, and he had the same reaction I did when I first heard it.  He suddenly whipped his head around and his reaction was “hey – I know those changes.”  Apparently they all had the same reaction twenty years prior, for that was the moment that the elusive “greatness” they had been seeking, that they had been praying for had finally found them.  The Edge had another chord sequence – C-Am-F-C.  Daniel Lanois asked the Edge to play the two chord sequences together.  Voila! A new song was born – One.  Bono said a way to get through writer’s block was to write a bittersweet thing about division, about disunity.  U2 were definitely in that state, but coming up with that one song [no pun intended] proved to them they could continue as a band.  They stayed in Berlin for two months, then went home for Christmas.  At least they left Berlin with two things – Mysterious Ways and One.

Adam Clayton described the Berlin experience as a “baptism of fire.” It was something that they had to go through to realize that the “thing” they were looking for wasn’t in a particular geographic location.  The “thing” they were looking for was inside them, not in some other city.  They just simply had to put the work in, figure out the ideas and hone them.  Back in Ireland, things finally began to click.  Bono had an epiphany – if we’re being accused of megalomania, why not confound his critics by inventing a character that was the complete opposite of his serious, unsmiling, pompous and pretentious public persona?  Bono described it as sort of judo, to use the very thing that is attacking you against those doing the attacking.  Here comes “The Fly.”  There was this over-the-top character, wearing leather, wraparound black shades, jet-black hair, and a very distorted voice.  Bono said that if he was going to go into the gutter, he wanted some body armor [The Fly] to protect him.  He could sing about all the personal stuff he wanted, but since it was a character and not Bono that was doing the singing he could just say that he was ‘playing a part.’  There was a film clip of him in full Fly gear where he’s telling the interviewer that he’s ‘learning how to lie, learning how to be insincere.’  For his ‘Fly’ character, he took Lou Reed’s sunglasses, Jim Morrison’s leather pants, Elvis’ jacket and a little of his haircut, and poof! – instant rock star!  With this device, the band discovered they could have fun.  They could make people laugh.  They didn’t have to be quite so earnest. 

Brian Eno had this bit of insight into U2 - “They’re very, very loyal to each other, and they’re really, really kind to each other.  It’s no good to have somebody ‘not well’ in the unit or ‘not happy.’  The others don’t say ‘hard luck, mate, we’re carrying on.’  The others say ‘ok, we’ve got to get that person happy again.  We’ve got to draw them back into the circle.’”  It’s this attitude that accounts for the band’s longevity.  I don’t think they wouldn’t have lasted this long otherwise.

There’s a quote from Bono that Guggenheim uses twice in the film [so it must be important], so I’m thinking that this is the central theme to the film.  It sums up what U2 went through to create Achtung Baby - “You have to reject one expression of the band first before you get to the next expression.  And in between, you have nothing.  You have to risk it all…”  What he’s saying is that in order to enjoy the ‘fun’ U2 that came after Achtung Baby, you need to exorcise the ‘preachy’ U2 that came before.   I think there’s a bit of truth to that.  When I go back and see Rattle and Hum, I’m annoyed to watch Bono’s posturing and hectoring for social justice.  Just put me in the ‘shut up and sing” category.   When I see a rock show, I don’t want to be lectured to.  Apparently that occurred to them as well, because now when I watch a show like U2: 360 I can watch U2 without cringing or without wanting to reach through the TV and strangle Bono.

And there you have it.  This film might not interest you if you’re not a fan of the band or their music. I am quite sure that if you’re only a casual fan, you won’t be interested in the pangs of rich Irish rock stars.  But if you’re a fan and can’t get enough of all things U2, you need to see this.

U2 - Achtung Baby

In 1987, U2 released The Joshua Tree. It had lots of hits. It became one of the biggest selling albums of all time. The group was the biggest grossing concert draw on the planet. Then something happened. They decided to film The Joshua Tree tour as it crossed America. The film that was supposed to document the band “discovering” America came across as self-indulgent navel gazing to some critics. They were criticized for being self-important, self-righteous, pretentious and bombastic. And some of that was true – Bono on-stage banter can be self-righteous, and just downright annoying. Toward the end of their tour in 1989, Bono announced at one concert that "we have to go away and ... dream it all up again." That they did, but what led up to these guys having to come up with something different?

The Unforgettable Fire [1984] –After the first three albums produced by Steve Lillywhite [Boy, October, and War], U2 went in another direction and hired Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The songs were more like soundscapes of ambient experimentation. Bono described the album as “a beautifully out-of-focus record, blurred like an impressionist painting.” The lyrics don’t sound like they’re focused on anything in particular, as if they are works in progress. The title track takes its title from a traveling art exhibition about the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the song isn’t overtly anti-nuclear. A keyboard-driven song, it sounds “big,” somewhat cinematic like a miniature movie. I’m not sure what it’s about, but it sounds great. I think that was the whole idea of the album anyway – new sounds. The Edge played more keyboards than before. The guitar isn’t as forward in the mix as before. A Sort of Homecoming was inspired by the works of poet Paul Celan, who wrote that “poetry is a sort of homecoming.” It sounds like a lot of guitars played at the same time, just slightly out of phase of one another to give the guitar sound a “shimmering” effect. Bad is reportedly about heroin addiction. The lyrics are so obtuse I’ll have to take Bono’s word for it. Elvis Presley and America is a lyric improvised o the spot and it sounds like it – it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Pride [In the Name of Love], the most “normal” sounding song on The Unforgettable Fire, is a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. It’s the only song that seems to have any sort of focus.

The Joshua Tree [1987] – Also produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, this album has hard-hitting sound with strict song structures. Most songs were recorded “live”. American and Irish roots music influenced the music. Unlike The Unforgettable Fire, these songs are focused on very specific things. Lyrically the album echoed the band’s political and social concerns – faith [I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For], drug addiction [Running to Stand Still], the death of a friend [One Tree Hill], government brutality [Mothers of the Disappeared], social injustice [Red Hill Mining Town], Reagan’s foreign policy in Central America [Bullet the Blue Sky]. This was a “serious” album.

Rattle & Hum [1988] – This one was produced by Jimmy Iovine. It combined live tracks from The Joshua Tree tour and new studio tracks. Some of the studio tracks sounded like they could’ve been on The Joshua Tree [Desire, Hawkmoon 269, Love Rescue Me, Heartland, All I Want Is You], others further explored their new-found fascination with “American music” [Angel of Harlem, When Love Comes to Town]. One song sounded unlike anything else on the album – God Part II. The live tracks paled in comparison to those presented on Under a Blood Red Sky and Wide Awake in America. By now they were the biggest act in the world, but they were unsure of themselves. Larry Mullen Jr. once remarked “we were the biggest, but we weren’t the best.” It’s no wonder after this experience they decided to have a re-think about what direction to take their music.

With Achtung Baby, U2 got away from being so serious. Bono said that on this album he wanted to explore the subject of sex and fidelity. He wanted to get away from those outside concerns to subject matter that was more personal. Not only was the subject matter different, the sounds the band made were very different. They began using synthesizers, distortion, and electronic beats derived from alternative music, dance music, and hip-hop. The Edge began to use a variety of effects on his guitars that made them sound like they were other instruments. I’ve seen his pedal board from that time. There were so many different pedals because each song had its own unique sound, I often wondered how he could remember which effect went with which song. This was before he got a computer to keep track of such things [to see said computer, watch It Might Get Loud]. Not only did The Edge’s guitar get the electronic treatment, so too did Bono’s voice. That can be heard from the very first song.

Zoo Station - The first song—Zoo Station—blasts open with a barrage of elec­tronic sounds and distortion. Bono's voice is processed so heavily, it barely sounds human. If you strain you can make out what he's saying: "I'm ready, ready for what's next." I guess what was next was freaking out your audience by putting out something like this that is radically different than anything you’ve done previously.

Even Better Than the Real Thing – what would that be? Oral sex perhaps? You tell me…

One - This is the best song on Achtung Baby. It’s probably the best song in their whole catalog. A common interpretation of "One" is that it is sung in the voice of a son who is HIV-positive confronting and reconciling with his conservative father. But there’s more to One than that. While recording Achtung Baby the band split into two camps – the rhythm section [Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton] were more conservative. Bono and The Edge wanted to get more adventuresome.  Things were getting so bad for them they seriously thought of breaking up U2 and calling it a day. The band was having trouble communicating, they were having trouble getting songs down on tape. One such time was during the recording of Mysterious Ways. The Edge figured the song needed another section and goes to the piano in the big room to come up with a middle eight. After playing for a while he has two possible parts and isn't sure which one would be better for the song. He played both of them for Lanois and Bono to see which they prefer. They liked them both -what would it be like if The Edge put them together? The Edge started playing the two new bits in the studio, and Larry and Adam picked up on it and played along. Inspired, Bono got a brainwave - "Is it getting better, or do you feel the same? Is it any easier on you now that you've got someone to blame?" It went from there and became this wonderful song. The only effect I could detect on Edge’s guitar was a Leslie speaker, but very subtle, not in a George Harrison kind of way.

Until the End of the World - Mat Snow wrote in Q magazine that this song was a dialog between Judas and Jesus. The Edge confirmed that, saying "there's an Irish poet named Brendan Kennelly who's written a book of poems about Judas. One of the lines is, 'If you want to serve the age, betray it.' That really set my head reeling. He's fascinated with the whole moral concept of 'Where would we be with­out Judas?'

Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses - this was one of those especially difficult songs the band recorded. According to Adam Clayton, "It's a great torch song, with melody and emotion, but I don't think we ever captured it again and we have never really been able to play the song live."

So Cruel - Thematically, it deals with unrequited love, jealousy, obsession, and possessiveness. On an album dominated by Martian guitars, this one is a piano song.

The Fly – I love this song. It could be Zoo Station’s twin. The guitar sounds are just unreal. It sounded nothing like anything I’d heard from U2 before. The drums sound like Larry Mullen Jr. is beat the shit out of garbage cans, and Adam Clayton has a very thick-sounding bassline holding down the bottom end. His tone on this song would bring a smile to Jack Bruce. According to Bono, "I always felt like 'The Fly' was this phone call from Hell. You know, with the distorted voice and shit. It's a call from Hell—but the guy likes it there! 'Honey, I know it's hot here . . . but I like it!'

Mysterious Ways – I love this one too. She moves in mysterious ways… It’s got a Middle Eastern vibe to it that sounds very cool. Having seen the video, I’ll never hear this song without seeing the belly dancer, who I think is The Edge’s wife [she wasn’t before the video shoot]. Given their earlier work, I never thought I would utter “U2” and “belly dancer” in the same sentence, but here it is.

Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World – like Mr. Horse used to say on Ren & Stimpy, “no sir, I don’t like it.”

Ultra Violet (Light My Way) – meh…how many times can you say “baby baby baby light my way”? Apparently if you’re Bono, you can’t say it enough. Zzzzzzz…..

Love Is Blindness – the final song. Not sure what to say about it except that I like it.

Author Bill Flanagan wrote a book about touring with U2 during this period. In his book, U2: At the End of the World, he writes:

“The last three songs face the big issue of how couples begin to reconcile the suffering they force on each other. In "Ultra Violet" the singer pleads with his love to light his way home, only to find that "the day is as dark as the night is long." The couple crawl into bed together, unable to sleep. He marvels at his own hypocrisy: "I must be an acrobat to talk like this and act like that." They decide that if they can't sleep maybe they can speak their dreams out loud and (Bono's quoting Delmore Schwartz here) "begin responsibilities." The album fades out with the conclusion that "Love Is Blindness," the inability to distinguish day from night.”

That’s a better explanation than anything that I can come up with so I’ll go with it. I’m sure there are many who will disagree with what I’ve written about the other songs, but that’s just my opinion.

Achtung Baby definitely broke the U2 mold. This album turned them into rock stars, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Until this album came out, I thought Bono was so serious all the time that he wouldn’t recognize the punchline of a joke if he tripped over it. Happily, Achtung Baby proved me wrong. Subsequent albums, Zooropa and Pop come too mind, continue the work begun on Achtung Baby. To these ears, U2 seems to make like-sounding albums in groups of three, and with Achtung Baby they started something that for them was a pretty radical departure. After Pop they reigned in the experimentation somewhat and got back to making some more serious music. But thanks to what they’ve done with Achtung Baby they showed what was possible, and they still incorporate some of the musical elements from this work into their current work. Achtung Baby is a truly significant work that deserves every word of praise thrown its way.