Kicking the darkness

U2 called itself "The Hype" before it finally settled on its name, a moniker which certainly applied to their musical abilities circa 1976. "We formed a band before we could play our instruments," Bono said. "It's really like a street gang, you know, people who are joined by their sense of humor and their sense of what they are against more than what they are for. We were a pretty crap wedding band actually." That description pretty much held true for what Wes and I were trying to do. I had some musical training in my youth and knew how to read music, my Mom is an accomplished pianist. But the piano is not an electric guitar, in this case a natural-finish Peavey with a practice amp built into the case, nor does reading music teach you how to make music in a band. The music in our heads was so far beyond anything we could actually produce with our fingers, and putting that together with someone else who is having the same problems…well, it was often disastrous. Further, for some reason we didn't begin at cover songs. Most people, whether playing solo or with others, pretty much cover stuff, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones ("Satisfaction" was one of the songs used for tryout purposes in Larry's kitchen), Kansas, something. That just never appealed to us at all. It isn't like we made a decision or anything about it, we just never discussed covering other people's work. Instead, we just started at the beginning of everything. As I said before, being a band wasn't really what we were after, and so, looking back, we treated it rather incidentally.

There are a couple of essential things needed to make a band work, aside from actually having people who are willing to play. First, there's the music. You have to be able to make music. Today the big thing is sampling - a process of lifting someone else's bass line or chorus and splicing it into the mish-mash of other collected bits called a "song." In the words of Plato, lots of tekne but no arete; lots of tech but no art. Where is the talent? One avoids the formative discipline required by practice and performance, standing without thank you on the shoulders of those who have done the hard work. It is a loss of identity, a denial of the self and a denial of being. Anyway, I want to talk about the way we approached music itself before getting into the actual business of making noise.

Though our high approach to making music, coupled with a lack of funds and space, spelled an inevitable - if ultimately temporary - end to this entire affair, I am quite proud of our beginning. We wanted to find an authentic voice in music and not just recreate other models. Therefore, we went back ad fontes to the bones of music itself. I took a class on the development of polyphony in the West, and listened to a lot of chant. John G. gave me a few lessons in chord theory and had me memorize some basics like the circle of 5ths/4ths and the order of flats/sharps. John was in the process of hand-copying the score to a piece he had written for the completion of his Bachelors in Composition, and he would show me the completed pages and talk about parts and how they work together. Wes and I chewed this stuff into a developing discussion about theory and structure. I taught Wes the names of the notes on the Great Staff, and he went on to eventually score music for several plays. I also remember he read a book on orchestral composition by Rimsky Korsakov. We also read through some thick textbooks on the development of Western music….this kind of skips ahead a little, but during the summer of 1998, Wes and I were doing shift work for a glass manufacturer, working right on the shop floor pulling hot glass off a moving belt. Anyway, that job is so dangerous that they give you regular breaks. We would break along with a half-dozen other sweaty, scarred-up guys in this tin room just off the shop floor. There was nothing really to do but talk - which no one felt like doing - eat, play cards or read. There were magazines, Sports Illustrated and stuff (though Wes said to me later that he saw some guys smuggle porn into the mix), but Wes and I were hauling music textbooks. We would shout and sweat on the line for half an hour and then read about melisma, oblique motion and cantus firmus. And, of course, we studied The Joshua Tree.

One of the things going on in so-called "alternative" rock during this period, a movement in which U2 participated - if only in that those that listened to, say, The Smiths, 10,000 Maniacs or REM, also listened to them - was an impressionistic approach to writing pop music. I'm not sure if there is even a technical term for it. The Church is an excellent example of this kind of approach as well. Basically, the goal is not to stand out. Remember, rock music was still recovering from Eddie Van Halen. Even popular rock boasted screamingly fast electric guitar chops. Guitar Gods like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai were releasing studio albums. Anyway, the goal was not to stand out but to suggest, support, to color in and create a canvas, perhaps stepping out now and then to suggest a theme: the music never takes over. This is not to say it isn't doing anything. Like a good sonnet, the aim is to create levels of dialogue underneath the lyrical message. The Edge is a master. Listen to "Bullet the Blue Sky" and you note right away that he isn't doing anything incredibly difficult from a technical point of view, but he is using slide effects and laying out a humming, growling distored texture that gives Bono's anti-imperialistic screed the emotional teeth it needs. Larry Mullen's drumming adds its own urgency, as well. Everything is working together underneath what Bono is singing and saying. The message is the thing. "New Years Day" from War is also a fantastic example of this style - really amazing. The preturnaturally smooth and elegant distorted effects that Edge lays down in that song. I'm glued everytime I hear it. The earnestness itself doesn't come from a hyperactive dance beat or Bono screaming obscenities or anything. It is understated. Edge is tearing the guitar apart underneath the second chorus, but the mix puts it underneath so that the ear almost mistakes it for business casual. Along this same impressionistic line, the Edge also incorporated a delay effect right into the core of his sound. Go back to October, for example, and there it is in "Fire". Indeed, he ultimately popularized a whole new way of thinking about the electric guitar. He took the Stratocaster and made it a truly electronic instrument, capable of creating and shaping a limitless number of sounds and effects. I knew that this was the musical philosophy I wanted to bring to the table of our band-experiment. And, just to be a bare pragmatist about it, you didn't have to necessarily be good to play in this style. Impressionism was accessible when blistering chops or $2,000 worth of synthesizers weren't. The only problem was, it wasn't that accessible. You still needed decent equipment, and, at the time, Wes was playing on a 2-octave Casio.