A boy tries hard to be a man

Now when I say we put a band together, that’s wrong. We did find a bassist and a drummer (and there was even a failed attempt at a sound man.) Wes and I had both been doing the autodidact with piano and guitar for at least a year or so. Perhaps I will get into this aspect of things at another time – but when it came to putting a band together we didn’t actually want to play anything, like you might get some people together and just have fun making music. No, we were on an archeological dig. We were trying to find something, something that glinted out from the margins, and in this The Joshua Tree played a central role. Our bellies were painfully swollen with life, though neither of us knew anything about babies. The Joshua Tree was our nurse, our midwife, helping something new come into the world, or, maybe a better way of saying it, helping our world come into something new.

It may help at this point to know something about U2. U2 started out as a punk band in the mid-70’s. Larry Mullen Jr., 16, a drummer, wanted to play dances, and posted a note on the school bulletin board at Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School. Auditions were held in the kitchen of his house. David Evans (the Edge), Adam Clayton and Paul Hewson (Bono) joined with a few nameless others - who the heck cares about that. The important thing is that this group of teenagers were caught up in what everyone else was caught up in, music. They didn’t know anything about it, really, but the punk-era was all about doing in the face of raw-ignorance. That was a lesson Wes and I missed – we needed a poet-megalomaniac like Paul to pull our bookish curiosity out into the open. You can’t forget, too, that U2 is the name of a spy plane, something we know about, but that has secrets. It flies high in the atmosphere, above the clouds, and comes back down to earth with secrets about human beings and governments. Music is like a secret, and Wes and I knew it. Today the locus of the secret has changed, the wardrobe becomes a door in a wall or something. Today it is, “What is the Matrix?” That’s code for the usual questions: Who am I? Who are you? What is this all about? Can it be different than it is? Computer networks hint at this same kind of thing, but I think it is a fools gold to a large degree. Music comes out of the soul. You can look sideways through it and see something, close your eyes and almost touch something. That’s what brought those guys together in 1976, and it was the same thing for Wes and I.

Now the problem for any artist is figuring out how to talk. You get started trying to talk, and you want to talk, but you don’t know what to say. You’ve got this sickness welling up in side you, and no idea how to get well. It is sweet pain. Drowning in meaning, yet also in frustration, like when you have forgotten something important and can’t remember what it was. Now, U2 is world-class. People will be listening and studying them 100 years from now – 200 years. They were speaking already with Boy, their first album, but the language is amateur. It needs focus, self-awareness and control, aspects that didn’t begin to kick in until The Joshua Tree. As Bono said in an interview in 1988: “…I think that with this record U2 has begun to run.” That’s exactly what Wes and I wanted to do, we wanted to run. We were desperate to run. And so, we listened.

Oh, incidentally, there is at least one reason why Boy had something there already. The reason why Paul Hewson could already, at 18, begin saying something about being that was larger than himself, kind of like Emerson’s essay "Self Reliance": “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius.” His mother died in 1974, when he was 14. To put it bluntly: he realized at an early and formative age that no one gets out alive.