In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Larry Mullen jr

  • U2- Rattle and Hum- Bono,The Edge, Adam Clayton

    U2- Rattle and Hum- Bono,The Edge, Adam Clayton

    “There’s a history of people from rock’n’roll going to Hollywood and never coming back,” U2 guitarist/songwriter The Edge reminded us in my classic rock interview regarding Rattle and Hum, the controversial loud love letter to an America that may have never actually existed. Maybe one of the reasons why U2’s Rattle and Hum  film and soundtrack album did not get quite the same critical worship that their preceding album, The Joshua Tree, had received is because all five U2 studio efforts to date had been conceived with the band’s uniquely Irish perspective. On the other hand, Rattle and Hum saw the gauzy media perceptions of American culture by my guests Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen jr jammed up against a Reagan-era reality that did not always ring true, confirmed in the songs “Desire”, “Angel of Harlem”, “When Love Comes to Town” with the immortal B.B. King, “Silver and Gold”, the John Lennon-inspired “God pt II”, as well as live versions of Joshua Tree favorites.

    When Academy Award-winning documentary film maker Davis Guggenheim’s ( An Inconvenient Truth, and my favorite It Might Get Loud with guitarists The Edge, Jack White, and Jimmy Page) U2 rock doc From the Sky Down aired on Showtime, you saw confirmed what U2 drummer Larry Mullen jr blurted out to me during our In The Studio classic rock interview: that the Dublin-based quartet nearly broke up in the Berlin recording studio after reconvening following their Rattle and Hum  first flirtation with the movie world.

    “We’ll always be that band that over-reaches, and we’ll take the hit for it,” declares lead singer/lyricist Bono in my classic rock interview.”It doesn’t matter. We want it to count, to make a difference. In the ’80s there were more determinable bad guys, and we were having a go at them. In the ’90s our music got a little more intimate, and the hypocrisy that we were having a go at was more our own. I’d like to think that it’s the same righteous anger.”  004990-U2-When-Love-Comes-to-Town-Rattle-and-Hum-1988

    “The Last Rock Stars!”, Elvis Costello proclaimed when introducing U2’s Bono and The Edge on Costello’s Spectacle tv interview series a few years ago, and while no one could have predicted it when U2’s documentary concert film and soundtrack album Rattle and Hum debuted in October 1988, it is clear now that the post- Joshua Tree period captured in the film, as well as in this week’s In the Studio interview, is precisely when the band was elevated into rock’s pantheon. But unlike the unseen and unheard passage of the Voyager 1 spacecraft from our solar system into uncharted interstellar deep space, U2’s reviews while crossing over rock’s “termination shock boundary” to superstardom were very public, plentiful, and contentious. Four lads from Dublin starting a fight? Unheard of ! –Redbeard

  • U2- War- Bono,The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen jr

    U2- War- Bono,The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen jr

    There is considerable revisionist history floating about as if there were these high expectations in March 1983 for Dublin quartet U2 and their third album, War. In actuality, in America all we had heard that showed real promise  were  two flashes of brilliance, “I Will Follow” and “Gloria”, albeit a year apart. With the rousing martial rhythms from Larry Mullen jr’s drums on the opening to “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, the tortured passion evident in Bono’s voice over The Edge’s stiletto guitar stabs on “New Year’s Day”, and Adam Clayton’s rolling bass on “Surrender” as well as “Two Heats Beat as One”, U2 declaring War  was a musical proclamation of a serious contender on the unfolding Eighties modern rock vista.

    But my ignorance then about the issues, the struggles, and yes, the violence which carved Bono’s lyrics and shaped the album’s sonics provided only a temporary respite from the harsh realities of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and Poland’s Solidarity Movement. I dare say that for most Americans pre-9/11/2001, the U2 song ”40”‘s refrain, “How long to sing this song, How long?” had a completely different meaning in 1983 for 15,000 suburban Denver yuppies at Red Rocks Amphitheater than it did for Dublin native Ken Aiken, who would emigrate to the US and help us pioneer XM Satellite Radio in 2000; or rookie London Metropolitan Police officer Patrick Moore, who I met as an exchange student in Memphis in 1978. Ignorance might have you believe that the continuing violence in Northern Ireland at the time of U2  War  was simply an ancient grudge dating back 300 years to when Englishmen Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange plundered Ireland’s Catholic monasteries, murdering the priests and raping the nuns in a slaughter that eventually killed an estimated half of the Irish population. Ignorance, plus the passage of time, could shroud the 1972 killings of 14 at Bogside Derry, or the July 1982 London Hyde Park and Regents Park terrorist bombings during the popular tourist attraction changing of the guard, which killed 11 plus 7 ceremonial horses.

    All that it took to lift the blindness of ignorance was simply my first trip to Dublin in 1988. I saw firsthand how real fear gripped these people in their daily lives, from an evil madness so insidious that it would not even be spoken of in conversation. This was the War  about which U2   wrote and sang in 1983 (watch the true story film Omagh to witness that evil actually looks and talks just like you and me).“For he is our peace who has made us both one, and broke down the dividing wall of hostility…And might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing hostility to an end.” Who do you think said that? Former British Prime Ministers John Major, Margaret Thatcher, or Tony Blair? Maybe Provisional IRA political Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams? Actually it was written 2000 years ago in a letter to the Christian church members at Ephesus by the Apostle Paul of Tarsus (Ephesians 2:14). –Redbeard

  • U2- New Year’s Day- 1987

    U2- New Year’s Day- 1987

    The 35th anniversary of U2‘s breakthrough album War   is looming next month, so to celebrate Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen jr returning In the Studio to recall the times, here is a live version of “New Year’s Day” from the 1987 tour. –Redbeard

  • U2- One- NYC Yankee Stadium 1992

    U2- One- NYC Yankee Stadium 1992

    Here’s U2 live in New York City’s original Yankee Stadium on August 30, 1992  performing “One”, the hit song on the Achtung Baby album which lends its name to one-derful humanitarian effort ONE.org. Become ONE for a better world https://www.one.org/us/blog/coronavirus-collective-global-action/ –Redbeard