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What Bono couldn’t have known back then was how “Red Hill Mining Town,” about coal miners on the edge of obsolescence, would still resonate. “Sing your heart out!” he said during the latter, which convinced you that 30 years ago U2 had composed the tune envisioning precisely such an experience. Sight and sound worked together effectively to fill the space, especially as songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You” led fans to join in with Bono. “Maybe the dream is just telling us to wake up,” he said, and that was the band’s cue to rev up “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the reliably spine-tingling anthem that opens “The Joshua Tree” with thoughts of tearing down walls and reaching out to touch a flame.įor the concert’s centerpiece, U2 moved to a much larger main stage behind the band, the screen displayed striking high-definition landscape scenes by the photographer Anton Corbijn, who’s managed U2’s visual approach for decades. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during “Pride (In the Name of Love),” U2’s song about King’s assassination.Īs the Edge’s guitar rang out to finish “Pride,” Bono did a bit of preaching himself, insisting that America’s current troubles aren’t insurmountable. The presentation grew more ambitious for a pair of tunes from “The Unforgettable Fire,” from 1984: “A Sort of Homecoming” had programmed elements accompanying the band’s real-time attack, and the video screen scrolled with excerpts from the Rev. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day,” both from 1983’s “War,” were raw and slashing, as though the band was back in a club (albeit one with a very expensive sound system). (Next month, the album will be reissued in a variety of deluxe packages - one way to make it to 26 million.) Later, before “Exit,” an enormous video screen showed clips from a real late-’50s television western depicting a shady character named Trump who tries to frighten the residents of a small town into building a protective wall.īono and his mates - guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., all on board since the late ’70s - were also trying to prove they’re still worthy of the stadiums they started playing thanks to the success of “The Joshua Tree,” which won a Grammy Award for album of the year and is said to have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.
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“Thanks for allowing us Irish into the country,” Bono said after “In God’s Country,” and it was clear the lead singer was referring both to U2 in 2017 and to the innumerable seekers who helped build the United States centuries ago. But the Dublin band didn’t present “The Joshua Tree” as a museum piece it wanted to connect the music to right now - to global anxieties about labor and immigration and the environment.
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Part of a world tour timed to commemorate the album’s 30th anniversary, the concert was explicitly looking back at songs inspired by the beauty - and the ugliness - of America in the 1980s. The members of U2 had much more than nostalgia on their minds when they performed their landmark 1987 album, “The Joshua Tree,” from beginning to end Saturday night at the Rose Bowl.