Summer Solstice FUN!

Posted on June 26, 2018 by mochi

U2

We took the girls to see U2 at the Boston garden of Friday. It was their first big concert and the first time I had seen U2 in 31 years. Ambiana and Jakobi who do not like any of the classic rock and artists that I play, really like the latest U2 album “Songs of Experience” and would even ask me to put it on so when we found out that U2 was playing in Boston on the summer solstice we felt the time was right to introduce the girls to a large scale arena concert.

My brother Chuck brought U2 into our world when he returned from a summer exchange program in England with a bunch of Lp’s including U2’s first album “Boy” which contained the single “I Will Follow” that we wore out the grooves on the record playing it over and over. Their 2nd album “October” he got because it was featured in a Christina magazine. We both really liked their music and when they came to Detroit’s Grand Circus Theater in support of their third album “War” in the winter of 1982 we got tickets and went.

The show was rousing and very inspirational with stirring performances of New years Day, Two Hearts Beat as One and Sunday Bloody Sunday. For the latter Bobo trailing a very long mic cord made his way into the balcony where we were seated and joined us arm in arm for the chorus. They ended the concert with “40”, a Psalm from the Bible translated into song leaving the stage one at a time, first Bono, then the Edge and Adam Clayton until only the drummer Larry Mullen Jr, was left holding down the beat as the crowd sang the refrain…”How long? How long to sing this song” after he left the stage the crowd continued to sing for a good five minutes.

We were hooked. We are Irish on my mom’s side and we felt an kinship with the guys in U2 who were only 4-5 years older than us. Each album they released afterwards we immediately acquired and immersed ourselves in the music. I saw them again in 1984 at the Worcester Centrum with my friend Roberta on the Unforgettable Fire Tour and there again in 1987 again with Roberta and some other friends for the Joshua Tree tour. By then they were no longer our personal soundtrack but had crossed over into mass stardom. I saw them one more time on the Joshua Tree tour in NYC where I had moved after college. Rattle and Hum, their live album and concert film of the same name was the soundtrack to my immediate post college years when I was deciding in what direction to take my life.

When “Achtung Baby” was released in 1992 I was living in Cleveland and on the cusp of a change. U2’s sound had changed, they had given up the rabble rousing rock of their early LP’s for a glammed up sound with a new more flashier image. I would not follow, I liked the album but it did not speak to me as the earlier ones did and as I moved to Alaska and the next phase of my life U2 was no longer the soundtrack.

I gave a cursory listen to the CDs that followed; “Zooropa” had its moments, “Pop” left no impression, I really tried to like “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”, and “How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb” was more like an add for Apple. In 2009 they released “No Line On the Horizon” and for the first time in almost 2 decades a U2 album spoke to me. I appreciated 2015’s “Songs of Innocence” but it was not until last years “Songs of Experience” that I truly loved a U2 album again.

The show was heavy on spectacle,a giant LED screen bisecting the arena and a satellite stage connected to the main stage by a ramp beneath the LED screen but somehow U2 managed to make it all intimate. The girls loved the show as did Colleen and I. Bono didn’t make it into the balcony with us this time but that was ok, it was still great to share a band I loved in my youth with my girls who are on the cusp of their own journeys..