U2

U2 in America before their American turn. “The Joshua Tree” was born in one of those magical middle grounds that in rock history have often served as the humus for masterpieces. All the more so when, as in this case, it springs from the creative tension between two opposing visions. In the U2 of 1987, riding high on success, frontman Bono Vox, fresh from a moving encounter with Bob Dylan, wanted to explore the roots of American rock (as would happen more radically later on “Rattle and Hum”), while his guitar-wielding counterpart The Edge preferred to consolidate the wave expressionism of the previous “The Unforgettable Fire”, which had propelled them into the Billboard Top 10 for the first time.

For the four Irishmen, in short, it was time for crucial choices: Rolling Stone had already anointed them “the best band of the Eighties”. But to leap to the top of the charts worldwide they still needed one more, decisive step. A step toward Joshua's Promised Land. In the shadow of that giant cactus growing in Death Valley, named Joshua by the first Mormons who arrived in America.

"The Joshua Tree" is their pilgrimage toward the eldorado of rock: "Outside it's America", Bono announces programmatically on "Bullet The Blue Sky". A journey brimming with youthful wonder, tempered by the expert guidance of two studio gurus like Brian Eno and his protégé Daniel Lanois, to whom the "non-musician" had already entrusted the co-production of the splendid "The Unforgettable Fire" three years earlier. But it would be wrong to speak of a break: U2 don't disown their European moods, if anything they crown a coherent trajectory that, from the post-adolescent bluster of "Boy" and "War" and the live consecration under the blood-red Colorado sky (the epochal "Under A Blood Red Sky") and on the London stage of Live Aid (1985), had led them toward a more complex rock, one that partially abandoned the guitar-driven frenzy of their early days in favour of more calibrated, experimental songs, with lyrics increasingly steeped in social and political engagement. A path that ran against the grain in the vainest decade of all, and in some ways similar to the one followed by R.E.M. on the other side of the Atlantic. "The Joshua Tree", then, was nothing more than the right occasion to finally bring into focus an evolution that had been under way for years: U2 were no longer the kids with hearts on fire playing "Gloria" on the Dublin docks (quote by Paolo Sforza), they were a mature band, ready to take on the burdens and the glories of stardom. Even at the cost of alienating a few die-hard fans from the early days.

But musically, there's really nothing to fault in the eleven songs of "The Joshua Tree". Built around the "rhythmic" phrasing of The Edge's guitar, with its arsenal of reverbs, powerchords and delay, the songs shine for the sharpness of their arrangements and melodic power, gaining an epic charge that nonetheless stays at a safe distance from the rhetorical excesses of the years to come.

The album's original title was meant to be "Desert Songs", and not by chance: America's wild, boundless spaces provide the dominant backdrop to a compendium of reflections, stories and invectives that steers the sacred fire of their early years toward more articulate songwriting, capable of blending the raw-nerve essentiality of post-punk with blues and roots-rock textures, without giving up a pop instinct that translates into a handful of irresistible choruses. And the desert between Nevada and California is also the setting for the striking black-and-white booklet, enriched by Anton Corbijn's photographs as well as all the lyrics.

The first half of the record is an impressive run of hits, starting with the opening of "Where The Streets Have No Name", to whose perfecting - according to Eno - half of the entire album's recording sessions were devoted. A rock-anthology-worthy intro - the fading organ, The Edge's six-note delay arpeggio, Larry Mullen's martial drumming - sets the stage for one of Bono's most memorable vocal performances, with the lyrics' spark also credited to him (a trip to Ethiopia with his wife after Live Aid). The frontman himself, however, revealed another meaning behind it: "In Belfast, depending on the street where someone lives you can tell not only their religion, but also how much money they earn - even which side of the street they live on. So I started writing about a place where the streets have no name". A video-documentary showing the band's surprise performance on a Los Angeles rooftop, with traffic thrown into chaos and the police caught off guard, would also help fuel the song's success.

La folgorazione dell’ouverture si stempera nell’andatura ciondolante di “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, altra prodezza vocale di Bono, stavolta alle prese con un gospel dagli accenti biblici, che si interroga sulle difficoltà della fede (“Ho parlato la lingua degli angeli/ Ho tenuto per mano un diavolo/ Era calda nella notte/ Io ero freddo come una pietra/ Ma non ho ancora trovato quello che sto cercando”). Completing the killer opening trio is the enormously successful – even beyond its actual merits – single “With Or Without You”, a sort of “rock bolero” halfway between love-story and religious confession, which creeps in unassumingly before taking off into a climax built on the strains of The Edge's “infinite guitar” (the guitar with adjustable sustain), showcasing Bono's vocal acrobatics.

Having ideally closed the prologue with the raw "Bullet The Blue Sky" – a denunciation of Reagan-era America's imperialist policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador, punctuated by Adam Clayton's pulsing bass and The Edge's riffs mimicking the roar of war planes – the album then reveals an even more surprising second half, with lesser-known tracks that are often all the more evocative. Take the semi-acoustic blues of "Running To Stand Still", which, following in the footsteps of the ever-enduring "Bad", works by subtraction, stripping the arrangements down to the bone (a slide guitar, a few electric-guitar flourishes, a handful of piano phrases, the closing harmonica) and leaving centre stage to Bono, to narrate the desolation of Dublin's heroin addicts among the Seven Towers, the seven blocks where junkies would go to shoot up. Emotion with the barest of trimmings, as in the wonderful "One Tree Hill", dedicated – along with the whole album – to Greg Carroll, the band's roadie, who died in a motorcycle accident in Dublin: the hill of One Tree Hill near Auckland, New Zealand, the young Maori's native land, provides the backdrop for a heartfelt tribute to the lost friend, with Bono's aching vocal flourishes enriching a deeply personal lyric, brimming with emotion and lyricism.

Picking up the thread of political protest instead are two heart-stopping ballads: "Red Hill Mining Town" and "Mothers Of The Disappeared". The first stands alongside the British miners targeted by Margaret Thatcher, set to the notes of a heartfelt electric ode ("The lines are long/ And there's no going back/ Through fields of steel/ Through hands of steel/ And heart of stone/ Our labour day is come and gone/ And you leave us here to wait/ In Red Hill Town"). The second, cradled by the patter of rain and Eno's synth as well as Edge's acoustic guitar, is a hypnotic elegy paying tribute to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the memory of Argentina's desaparecidos.

But there's also a return to the epic sense of endless spaces and the American desert: subdued amid the blues-country harmonica vibrations of "Trip Through Your Wires", and at its most evocatively powerful in the blazing riffs of the stunning "In God's Country" — the dark side of the star-spangled dream, delivered with rock'n'roll swagger and an intro strikingly similar to that of "Where The Streets Have No Name" — and perhaps it's no coincidence: the original demo of the opening track, discussed by The Edge in the documentary "It Might Get Loud" (2009), apparently sounded roughly like that.

The apocalyptic jam-session of "Exit" — the story of a religious serial killer inspired by Norman Mailer's novel "The Executioner's Song" — ultimately shows how even U2 had absorbed the lesson of Patti Smith's psychodramas.

"The Joshua Tree" seals U2's most creative period, one that would also yield a string of extraordinary "B-sides", later collected in the anthology "The Best of 1980-1990/ The B-Sides". To name a few: "Spanish Eyes", "Sweetest Thing", "Love Comes Tumbling", "Silver And Gold", "Walk To The Water" (this last one an absolute masterpiece, containing — by Bono's own admission — his finest vocal performance ever), many of which were the actual B-sides of "The Joshua Tree" singles. It's an album that catapulted U2 to the top of charts worldwide, selling over 20 million copies and setting the rock standard of the decade. But not only that: thanks to "The Joshua Tree", Bono and co. became permanently woven into the world's collective imagination. This was confirmed by a famous Time cover that same year, 1987 (an honor previously granted only to the Beatles, the Band and the Who). It was America's way of returning the love shown by these young men with hearts on fire who once played "Gloria" on the docks of Dublin's harbor.

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01/09/2013