Loosen our lips

Melody is the essence of song. I wish we’d have known that. Every other element in music, every technique, every period of music, everything -- including lyrics! -- exists to set off and enhance melody. As Bono confesses in “Stuck in a Moment” (All That You Can’t Leave Behind): “I'm just trying to find / a decent melody, / a song that I can sing, / my own company.” If only we’d have figured this out sooner! Wes and I were so interested in the revealing possibilities of music, that we did not pay attention to the simple straightforwardness of the art itself. Melody is the keystone, the meta-narrative, the crux. That is why we were afraid of it. It seems comic now, but the very thing we longed for we also feared. “The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound that opens our eyes.” But, then again, there is a more basic aphorism -- call it a struggle with limitation: instruments do not play themselves.

Now Wes is a singular personality when he puts his mind to something, and he had put his mind to the piano. Night after night he sat in his bedroom, hunched by the light of a cheap desk lamp over that little Casio. I had given him a nice copy of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in C minor – the Pathetique -- and it wasn’t long before Wes could play a hauntingly beautiful Grave-Allegro di molto. Wes taught himself enough music theory to piece it together. First he memorized the right hand and then he memorized the left, going measure by measure. That Casio was too small and too crude to allow the use of both hands. After school, I often found him in the music room putting treble and bass together and working up beautiful and often complex pieces of his own.

I was involved in a parallel process with the guitar. I owned a Harmony classical guitar, which my Dad purchased in the 60’s from a pawn shop, and the above-mentioned Peavey. Neither could hope to approach the sound or manipulative ease of a Fender or Gibson, but I was determined to make this work to our advantage. The limitations of the instruments would lend uniqueness to their sound, and force methods of “musical extraction” that would go untried using an expensive rig. In the absence of a whammy bar, I learned to physically bend the instrument, grabbing heel and stock and pulling or pushing them against each other. Lacking the subtlety of chorus effects, I learned to strum higher up the neck, emphasizing the midrange, or lower toward the bridge, heightening the timbre and brightness of the tone. I tried different tunings, and experimented with different styles, from finger picking to straight-up power chords. I also put aside the plectrum and played with a basting brush I borrowed from the kitchen. The sound in my head was always more like a watercolor wash than a wicked roundhouse, and the soft bristles of the basting brush, sweeping across several strings at a time and mixed with open chords pushed that Peavey a little closer to the goal.

As usual, U2 was a big help. Realizing their own limitations, they used all sorts of clever tricks to amplify their sound and give it a unique flavor. Wes and I watched their music videos as well as the footage of their concert at Red Rocks very closely. In all of these, the central concept of musical impressionism, the centrality of the music rather than the instrument or individual virtuoso, stood out. Let me go through a few examples. In the course of 20 minutes, the Edge might play his Flying V, then switch to a distressed looking 12-string (which you can hear beautifully in “Second” off War), then put both down and play a motive on electric piano. I watched him use dampening effects, produced by placing the fingers of the left hand over the strings to produce percussive effects. You can hear him do this in the beginning of “Vertigo” (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb), or, acoustically, throughout “Running to Stand Still” (The Joshua Tree). By combining this with harmonic overtones, he could create a rushing cascade of sound. You can hear this in the opening and during the verses of “New Years Day” (War). The Edge also uses a bottleneck-slide – a bottleneck-slide! – and not for acoustic blues but for lead riffs in distorted, effects-laden rock music ("Gloria" October). Again, the entire band was committed in their early, poor days to this post-punk impressionistic spirit: the sound is the thing, do whatever it takes to get it. Larry Mullen would tie things or place things on his drum kit, like a tambourine on the high-hat, to produce different sounds. Bono learned to play rhythm guitar and the harmonica. The four of them plugged everything at one time or another through the Edge’s digital delay, including Adam Clayton’s bass. Everyone joined in where supporting vocals were needed. They even grunted like savages in “Indian Summer Sky” (Unforgettable Fire)! A free hand or foot was possibility wasted. This was music made whole cloth from body and soul. “Cantare amantis est”, says St. Augustine, singing is a lover’s thing – and we stole every trick and technique we could find. But it is one thing to learn, and another to put into practice with others. And, like everything else, Wes and I started out back-end first.