Achtung Grandpa: Growing up and getting old with or without U2.

There was a piece in The Guardian today from a fashion designer advising what not to wear if you're a man over 50.

Crossing over to the wrong side of a half-centenary turns out to be a pivotal junction: you are forced to make decisions on what you should not, as opposed to should, be wearing. A lot of men entering their 50s fall into one of two camps (with a minority bridging the divide): those who have given up, and those who don’t know when to give it up, with the old me falling uncomfortably into the latter. I get that now.

As Diana might ruefully note, I'm 58 and blissfully immune to fashion advice of almost all types. However the headline still spoke to me, slightly repurposed: "What music to keep quiet about liking if you are over 50."

Just last week over morning coffee she heard me utter a stunning concession. At long last, I'd accepted U2's irrelevance in terms of new music in larger context. The band has been and will remain a great personal favorite, and in the wider cosmos perhaps second only to the more venerable Rolling Stones as a lucrative heritage act -- but that's still a back-catalog-driven phenomenon.

"Pride (In the Name of Love)" just isn't going to happen again. Ever.

Simple human chronology isn't the only factor in this development. Those of us over 50 periodically have trouble understanding that the world has moved on from the heyday of rock and pop acts heard everywhere from Tulsa to Tbilisi. Almost no one under the age of 50 listens to music in the same way as we do, just as my youthful Black Sabbath ears were tuned differently than my dad's Glenn Miller-tinged memories.

Songcraft is digitalized and hip hop rules. U2 itself is complicit in the confusion, recently trying so hard to remain cutting edge via bells, whistles and production gimmicks that in effect its best songs on the past two albums have been neutered, sabotaged from within.

The point? It cannot matter, since none of them could possibly be "With or Without You" in today's world.

Regular readers know that I mightily resist the temptation to settle comfortably in a classic rock format, and yet they also recall how important U2 has been to me over the years. It's not so much being a fan of the music as watching with ongoing fascination these four Irish guys almost exactly my age navigating a career, one that includes lofty achievements and plenty of missteps and screw-ups ... just like any of us.

As one fully capable of matching Bono for pretentiousness, it's funny. Mentioning the 10th anniversary of Bank Street Brewhouse was a painful reminder that NABC's 2009 downtown expansion was supposed to have been an album like U2's Achtung Baby -- and for me the experience turned out to be more like Oasis' Be Here Now, with craft beer substituted for cocaine.

(Or maybe the movie Heaven's Gate, to mix metaphors.)

At least U2 didn't break up, or have a member leave; new music is a probability, and another megabuck tour. Maybe the group will hire a producer like Rick Rubin and go back to the roots. Accordingly, now that I'm happily employed playing rhythm guitar for my new band, perhaps one of these days enough time will have elapsed for me to fully comprehend the way BSB was tantamount to a nervous breakdown.

Thus we arrive at a nostalgic detour. My favorite period of U2 was Achtung Baby and the subsequent Zoo TV tour. This 2011 review of the "deluxe" edition is a good place to start. 

This 2011 documentary explains the reinvention. 

This full concert from Glastonbury in 2011 shows how the band chose to present itself 20 years on from Achtung Baby.

I try to avoid these detours, but they'll happen ... perhaps with age, more frequently.

Achtung Baby and the greatest rock reinvention.

It was roughly three weeks before Christmas in 1991. My afternoon classes were over, and a brisk stroll into the old town landed me at the Zlaty Dukat restaurant for a dinner of pork, dumplings and draft Pilsner Urquell. Returning much later to my hillside residence hall, I stopped by the sliding glass window for mail call, and to say hello to the ever-friendly night porter. With a smile, the old man gave me a handful of letters, a shoebox-sized package, and a warm seasonal greeting in Slovak: “Veselé vianoce.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too,” I responded -- in English.

Upon closer inspection, buried deep in the box was the real prize of the day, a cassette copy of U2’s album “Achtung Baby.” It had been released only a short time before, and some of the tunes were just beginning to be played on Bratislava’s weird, joyful Rock FM radio station, a figment of pre-Communist imagination sprung amazingly to life two years after the Velvet Revolution. The signal was relayed to a local transmitter in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, and then came to rest on the FM band of my South Korean boom box.

Popping the top on a locally brewed Cassovar lager, I listened with rapt attention. Indeed, U2’s sound on “Achtung Baby” was different – very much so – but at the same time, the band was the same one I’d seen perform in Ireland during the 1987 tour backing “The Joshua Tree” album.

What in the hell had happened? It took me a while, but eventually it made sense, and when it finally did, I was hooked for life.

Twenty years have come and gone. I didn't spring for the Super Deluxe Edition of "Achtung Baby", just the remastered original album with an accompanying disc of B-sides, most of which I'd heard before. No matter. This essay-length review on Pitchfork by Ryan Dombal uses the re-release as an excuse to recall the context of a time, and indeed, Dombal does a fine job of it. In particular, his assessment of the subsequent Zoo TV tour's impact is spot on. Two excerpts are offered, but by all means, read the whole piece.

U2 Achtung Baby

[Super Deluxe Edition] Island; 2011
By Ryan Dombal; November 9, 2011

"If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City". "I think it's part of the deal. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back ...

... Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous-- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report".