New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
But what happened to "wrapping" the parking garage with apartments and other luxury amenities -- or did Cornerstone merely tithe the mayor's re-election slush fund and move on to a different town?
Redevelopment Commission secretary Adam "Where the Fix Is Always In" Dickey records Irving Joshua's strange musings on the possibility of the State Street parking garage's adaptive reuse (from the meeting of February 14).
Wouldn't you love it if Cornerstone came back with a recommendation to convert the parking garage into a farmers market?
Why is DNA opposed to having an intelligent community discussion about the farmers market and its place in a revitalizing downtown without resorting to the misconceptions and scaremongering?
Moreover, if we're paying engineering consultants to explore different uses for the parking garage, does it mean we don't have a parking problem, after all?
We need to hurry with the public art solution before Dogs Playing Poker wins -- again.
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.
The new U2 single is out, and an album will follow in December, but it comes at a time when one of Bono's most highly visible causes is morphing snake eyes.
From May 31 , 2012.
Bono will present Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi with Amnesty International's highest honor next month in Dublin, the Associated Press reports. Suu Kyi, who is heading out on her first international tour in 24 years, will visit Ireland on June 18th, a day after collecting her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. She was previously awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991 and Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience award in 2009, but could not accept either in person because she was under house arrest for 15 years.
Suu Kyi was elected to Parliament in Myanmar last month. She took office on May 2nd and began an international tour on Tuesday, beginning with a stop in Thailand. Suu Kyi won the 1990 election in Myanmar, also known as Burma, but the nation's military refused to hand over power and detained her until November of 2010.
The song "Walk On" was written about Suu Kyi and performed hundreds of times in her honor.
As rock bands set on changing the world go, U2 has actually followed through and done some tangible good for important humanitarian causes. That doesn’t negate the fact that, for many, its sermonizing on the mount can be a turnoff. I felt that during one of the last times I saw the band in concert, where the sight of 50,000 upper-middle-class concertgoers pumping their fists in solidarity for detained Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi left me wondering how many of these people had heard her name before Bono said it—or would remember it on the drive home.
Once she was an inspiration. Now, silent on the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, she is complicit in crimes against humanity
Few of us expect much from political leaders: to do otherwise is to invite despair. But to Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes. To mention her name was to invoke patience and resilience in the face of suffering, courage and determination in the unyielding struggle for freedom. She was an inspiration to us all.
Friends of mine devoted their working lives to the campaign for her release from the many years of detention imposed by the military dictatorship of Myanmar, and for the restoration of democracy. We celebrated when she was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991; when she was finally released from house arrest in 2010; and when she won the general election in 2015.
None of this is forgotten. Nor are the many cruelties she suffered, including isolation, physical attacks and the junta’s curtailment of her family life. But it is hard to think of any recent political leader by whom such high hopes have been so cruelly betrayed.
By any standards, the treatment of the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, is repugnant. By the standards Aung San Suu Kyi came to symbolise, it is grotesque. They have been described by the UN as “the world’s most persecuted minority”, a status that has not changed since she took office.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide describes five acts, any one of which, when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, amounts to genocide. With the obvious and often explicit purpose of destroying this group, four of them have been practised more or less continuously by Myanmar’s armed forces since Aung San Suu Kyi became de facto political leader.
I recognise that the armed forces retain great power in Myanmar, and that Aung San Suu Kyi does not exercise effective control over them. I recognise that the scope of her actions is limited. But, as well as a number of practical and legal measures that she could use directly to restrain these atrocities, she possesses one power in abundance: the power to speak out. Rather than deploying it, her response amounts to a mixture of silence, the denial of well-documented evidence, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.
I doubt she has read the UN human rights report on the treatment of the Rohingyas, released in February. The crimes it revealed were horrific.
It documents the mass rape of women and girls, some of whom died as a result of the sexual injuries they suffered. It shows how children and adults had their throats slit in front of their families.
It reports the summary executions of teachers, elders and community leaders; helicopter gunships randomly spraying villages with gunfire; people shut in their homes and burnt alive; a woman in labour beaten by soldiers, her baby stamped to death as it was born.
It details the deliberate destruction of crops and the burning of villages to drive entire populations out of their homes; people trying to flee gunned down in their boats ...
The author has made a decision.
This week, to my own astonishment, I found myself signing a petition for the revocation of her Nobel peace prize. I believe the Nobel committee should retain responsibility for the prizes it awards, and withdraw them if its laureates later violate the principles for which they were recognised. There are two cases in which this appears to be appropriate. One is Barack Obama, who, bafflingly, was given the prize before he was tested in office. His programme of drone strikes, which slaughtered large numbers of civilians, should disqualify him from this honour. The other is Aung San Suu Kyi.
Please sign this petition. Why? Because we now contemplate an extraordinary situation: a Nobel peace laureate complicit in crimes against humanity.
I make these observations as an observer from afar, and an unapologetic fan of Bono and his band. I'm painfully aware of First World problems of the sheltered and well-fed, like me, as opposed to problems in other places, which involved Real World death and destruction.
And yet, if the Nobel Prize were to be revoked, what about the song?
Day 114 ... Friday, August 7
Baltimore → Skibbereen → Cork. Meet Tommy.
Day 115 ... Saturday, August 8
Cork. U2 concert.
On Friday morning, Barrie and I rode a bus from Baltimore back to Skibbereen, then changed to another one bound for Cork City, completing the southern Irish circle commenced eight days earlier.
As midpoint of the band's Joshua Tree Tour, U2's concert would take place the following day at Cork's Páirc Uí Chaoimh, and our newspaperman friend Tommy Barker had told us we could bunk with him.
Tommy was a newspaperman (Cork Examiner) roughly our age, with a girlfriend (now his wife, I believe), a van and a rustic cottage outside of the city. I don't remember it having hot water; there was a well or spigot outside for washing up.
It didn't matter at all. We'd been sleeping on haystacks in a barn in Baltimore and drinking stout as if we'd never find it again, so luxury wasn't tremendously important at this stage of the game. We weren't sober often enough to know or care.
On Friday evening, roughly a dozen of Tommy's friends came over. Everyone brought a snack and a bottle, and as guests, Barrie and I naturally were treated far too well. There may have been a radio, but there wasn't a television, and entertainment was provided by conversation. The “craic” in Tommy's cottage was excellent.
For the uninitiated, the Gaelic word “craic” means the quality of life, the warmness of conviviality, discourse and entertainment – often, though by no means exclusively, as applicable to pub culture.
Later, after a few rounds, it was suggested that everyone sing a song, each in turn, individually, a cappella. I was completely stunned by the uniform high quality of the voices in the room. It came my turn, and although I'd resolved to sing a Fats Waller number, I passed, utterly terrified.
As usual, Barrie was resolute and undeterred. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ...
Naturally, his Janis Joplin cover was the hit of the evening.
Eventually we went to a pub nearby, somewhat of a village roadhouse almost. I have no idea how far we were from the city at this time, only that last call came and went, and we remained seated, drinking pints of Guinness, with winks and nods all around.
Good craic there, too.
I have a final memory of this Friday evening at Tommy's cottage. During the conversational portion of the evening, the natives had launched into a discussion about Ireland. Would the country ever improve enough that folks like them wouldn't be looking to move elsewhere?
This obviously isn't the place for a detailed examination of the history of the Irish Republic, apart from noting that at the time of my first visits in 1985, 1987 and 1989, the "Celtic Tiger" economic boom was nowhere near on the radar screen.
"Celtic Tiger" (Irish: An Tíogar Ceilteach) is a term referring to the economy of the Republic of Ireland from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, a period of rapid real economic growth fueled by foreign direct investment. The boom was dampened by a subsequent property bubble which resulted in a severe economic downturn.
Ireland in 1987 remained a place where many more people departed than arrived. The Irish diaspora originating in the early 19th century waxed and waned, but it never really ceased until the 2000s.
There always had been wealth in Ireland, from grand manor houses to verdant agricultural areas. In fact, even during the Great Famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food. This gives you some idea of the extent of Britain's culpability in the tragedy, because the wealth either was owned by the British abroad, or by indigenous Protestants who held the local levers of power.
Once the the Republic of Ireland was established, albeit without Northern Ireland, the situation was reversed. Now the Roman Catholic Church dominated, enforcing a rigid social conservatism, and resisting change.
The economy remained stagnant, and revolutionaries and their heirs retained political authority. When Ireland became a member of the European Union in 1973, it became a prime beneficiary of development funds. Gradually these investments made a difference, although it wasn't easy to see it yet in 1987.
30 years later, Brexit has made it complicated all over again. In 1987, at Tommy's cottage, Barrie and I were talking about our experiences in the Soviet Bloc, and finally someone spoke up: surely being in places like Bulgaria and Latvia had adequately prepared us for the scene in Ireland.
It made perfect sense at the time.
---
Tommy had to work at various intervals on Saturday, although he thought it might be possible for him to catch part of the U2 performance as a member of the press contingent. Just before lunch, he dropped us off in the center of Cork, and we determined a location at which to meet him following the show.
With five or six hours to kill, the pub crawl began. It's even conceivable that food was consumed. I remember it being a fine summer day, so at some point it was decided that buying beer to go might be a more cost-effective plan and lead to a picnic.
I'll never forget walking into some manner of jam-packed supermarket, seeing huge stacks of cans and bottles adjacent to checkout stations that were humming like hamsters on their wheels, and then realizing that almost all of the available products were either "extra strong" beers (more alcoholic than American malt liquor) or not beer at all, but hard cider.
As fast as Irish pounds could be exchanged for these beverages, they were flying out the door. It's about a mile and a half from the historic center of Cork to Páirc Uí Chaoimh, and by late afternoon a sea of youthful humanity was headed in that direction, on foot, lugging their Carlsberg Extra Strong Export Brews or Bulmers Ciders, and often pausing to rest, pass out, vomit or all three.
To Barrie, it was the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March -- irreverent imagery, though not unjustified given our own level of inebriation. We walked the walk, and the buzz eventually wore off, because there was no alcohol for sale inside the stadium.
My only major regret is that we didn't arrive early enough to see the Dubliners, which was to become one of my favorite bands of any genre. The Dubliners were the first of three bands opening for U2, and we found our seats just as the last of them, UB40, was starting.
When UB40 was finished, the roadies made their usual resets as the customary canned rock music could be heard. Then there was a pause, and Beatles tunes began playing with the volume noticeably higher. At once, the crowd stood and began singing along with the Fab Four. It seemed a cross between the national anthem and a church service.
The finale was John Lennon's solo cover of "Stand By Me," by Ben E. King, at which point U2 took the stage, finished the song, and the concert had begun. Here's the full set list from that sadly distant day.
Stand By Me (Ben E. King cover)
C'mon Everybody (Eddie Cochran cover) (last performance ever)
I Will Follow
Trip Through Your Wires
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (with 'Exodus' snippet)
MLK
The Unforgettable Fire
Exit (with Van Morrison's 'Gloria' snippet)
In God's Country
Sunday Bloody Sunday
People Get Ready (The Impressions cover)
Help!
(The Beatles cover)
Bad (with 'Walk on the Wild Side' snippet)
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the Name of Love)
Encore:
Bullet the Blue Sky
Running to Stand Still
With or Without You (with 'Shine Like Stars' coda)
Trash, Trampoline and the Party Girl
Out of Control (tour debut)
40
It never dawned on me until earlier in 2017 that there might be video andaudio bootlegs of U2 playing live in Cork at Páirc Uí Chaoimh on August 8, 1987. Of course there are, although the audio link has been removed owing to copyright infringement. I'm sure it's floating around somewhere.
Here is a video excerpt.
Less than a month after seeing U2 in Cork, I set foot in Sportstime Pizza for the very first time, unaware that by doing so, the next thirty years of my existence were being presaged. It's almost exactly a half-a-lifetime ago since Cork, and I remain a huge fan of U2, and we were there at ridiculous expense at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium in June, when the 30th anniversary tour of The Joshua Tree passed through Louisville.
---
The concert ended and we found Tommy at the appointed spot. I vaguely recall some manner of misadventure with the van -- engine trouble, or maybe we ran out of gas, but at any rate eventually the cottage came into view and we had a nightcap of Irish whiskey before collapsing on the couches.
On Sunday, it was back to Rosslare for the boat to France.
Arriving in Hungary thirty years ago for a stay that lasted almost the entire month of June, I had many potential activities in mind, but perhaps the last thing I expected to do was attend a big pop/rock show at the soccer stadium (Nepstadion; since demolished) in Budapest.
But that's exactly what happened, and for the whopping sum of $7.25.
For three decades, I've been grateful for the chance to see Genesis perform behind the Iron Curtain (June 18, 1987) and then later during my travels, witness U2 playing on the group's home turf in Cork, Ireland (August 8).
What I didn't know until moments ago is that U2 also played in Budapest while I was traveling in Hungary in 1987, on June 8, while I was reposing in the countryside.
SPOILER: Except it never actually happened.
Yes, Wikipedia lists the U2 Budapest tour date here and here, citing an off-line reference. I can find no other attribution anywhere else on the Internet, and as many refutations as you please, like here. It must have been ghosts. If a Wiki editor is reading, a correction is merited.
At the time, I was flummoxed to learn that Genesis was coming to Budapest.
Even in an era of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR ... even in Communist Hungary, where there was a tad more freedom to maneuver amid the East Bloc's subservience, and the term "Goulash Communism" was used to describe the Janos Kadar doctrine, "If You're Not Against Us, You're For Us" ... even as Magyar reforms permitted small-scale private ownership, which made things slightly more tolerable for social classes that officially didn't exist in Hungary ... the typical Western stadium-sized musical extravaganza was a highly unlikely occurrence, if for no other reason than a completely incompatible cost structure.
In other words, if a ticket to an Invisible Touch tour date cost roughly $25 in Western Europe and the United States, how could Genesis afford to reduce ticket prices to an affordable level in a Communist country given the sheer cost of mounting such a stadium-sized spectacle?
Following is the list of verified "western" shows in Budapest's Nepstadion between its construction in the 1950s and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
1965 – Louis Armstrong 1986 – Queen 1987 – Genesis 1988 – Human Rights concert: Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bruce Springsteen
Apart from the immortal Satchmo's peak Cold War appearance, which quite possibly was financed by the US State Department, there simply had to have been heavy subsidies to make the later concerts possible.
By extension, since Warsaw Pact currencies were essentially worthless, the subsidies surely would have taken the form of scarce hard currency -- American, British or German, or at least some form of barter. Proximity to Vienna also was a plus, though this wouldn't have mattered in places like Berlin.
That the Hungarian government was willing (and able) to negotiate such quality-of-life expenditures might well be regarded as a precursor of the end times, only two years down the road.
---
In 1987, Genesis was at the pinnacle of its 1980s pop phase, and while the group was almost ludicrously popular, perhaps it could have been "fashionable" only in a locale behind the Iron Curtain. It seems that Hungary was willing, Budapest was able, and Queen had broken the ice the previous year (see postscript below).
Genesis had Invisible Touch atop the charts, and the album was ubiquitous on the radio. It inadvertently became the soundtrack of my extended stay in Hungary. I'd packed a small portable radio and what I hoped were enough AA batteries to get me through the trip, intended for use in the radio and the Pentax flash.
In Sopron and Kőszeg, much of my evening hours were spent listening to a primarily German-language station called Radio Danubius, which I assumed originated in Austria. As it turns out, it was founded in Budapest in 1986.
Perhaps because Genesis was playing Hungary, Hungarian radio was playing Genesis. When I returned home and bought Invisible Touch, just about every song on the cassette (you read that right) was familiar.
On June 17, the day before, I took the subway to Nepstadion with the idea of surveying the landscape. I found dozens of Sealink trailers lined up on both sides of the "service" entrance, probably a hundred workers hard at it, and neither a gate nor security to prevent me from wandering inside the stadium and spending a leisurely hour watching the stage being built.
On the 18th, I met my new American friend Mike and we went to the show. At this late date, a review would be senseless, although it's hard to argue with the brutally frank approach at Allmusic.
At the same time, I was (and remain) an unreconstructed fan of Genesis throughout the band's evolving prog-to-pop career. The "pop era" Genesis took no chances and its stage show was formulaic; consequently, the group was savaged for doing exactly what successful show biz aggregations are supposed to do, which is give the public it's money's worth.
Genesis in Budapest wasn't avant garde. The show eschewed edgy, but the natives seemed to enjoy it, and so did I. Here's the song I'll always associate with June 18, 1987.
Genesis itself has a measure of ambivalence about the song "Abacab," off an earlier album and a staple of its 80s live performances. This version was filmed at Wembley Stadium in London two weeks after the appearance in Budapest.
At concert's end, public transportation had concluded for the day, with the exception of unfathomable night buses. It would be a four-mile walk back to my accommodation on the Buda side of the Danube, and Mike accompanied me part of the way, eventually peeling off toward his digs in Pest.
Everything was closed, and I recall it being bizarrely quiet at the stroke of midnight along a major avenue in a large European capital city. Then I heard a rumbling sound echoing through deserted streets, and stepped behind a statue to take a break and see what was happening.
Promptly a Soviet Red Army motorized column rumbled past. The Cyrillic lettering on the tanks and support vehicles contrasted with Hungarian on the signs all around me. The column was gone fairly quickly, and I've always wondered what it meant, although the most likely answer is it was moving from one base to another through the city during the least busy time of day.
Land of confusion indeed. It's always possible Phil Collins was more prescient than he's been given credit for.
--- Postscript ---
A DVD called “Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live in Budapest” was released in 2012. It grandly documents the very epitome of the now-discredited stadium rock genre, rewinding to the groundbreaking 1986 show at Budapest's Nepstadion, when seemingly every movie camera in the entirety of Communist-era Hungary was assembled in one venue to capture the rare spectacle of a Western concert behind the Iron Curtain.
This film is an essential gem, capturing the late, lamented Freddie Mercury and his band mates at their post-Live Aid pinnacle, on what proved to be their final tour. Footage is interspersed of Queen behaving as tourists. For me, it's a time capsule given that my visit to Budapest and the unexpected Genesis concert was only a year later.
As much as seeing Genesis meant to me at the time, after seeing the Queen film these many years later, I’d have chosen Queen because of Freddie Mercury. He was a one-off. Then again, so are we all.
U2's Pop Mart tour came through Prague on August 14, 1997. I was at Strahov Stadium for the garish spectacle of lemons, space ships and disco balls, frankly reveling in the pop culture excess, and contrasting it with the Czech Republic's recovery from excesses of a different sort.
I'm an unapologetic U2 fan, and to me, Pop was the culmination of my most favored phase of the band's existence. Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop make up a trilogy that continues to define the 1990s for me -- not that there weren't numerous other musical high points, some of which offer memories as cogent.
Pop capped a particularly tumultuous period in my life. I'm fortunate to have stuck with alcohol. My own career Pop came later, circa 2009, and I've yet to discover a professional follow-up mirroring All that You Can't Leave Behind. Maybe metaphors need to be mixed, and I'm due for "Rockin' in the Free World" instead.
I'll be there at Papa John's Capitalist Stadium in June for the complete 30th anniversary performance of The Joshua Tree, but if I had my druthers, it'd be the 20th birthday cycle of Pop songs.
Pop is a trashy, vulgar, spiritually insightful, heart-shattering record. It takes a vandal's thrill in deploying the self-declared world's greatest rock band to deface rock and roll. It shapes the echoing blips, tape distortions, and drum loops of electronic music into a political statement as substantial and tightly packed as a pipe bomb. It rummages through the refuse of modern pop culture and finds a God worth loving still. And its critical failure was a miscarriage of justice.
This review first ran in the April 1997 issue of Spin. To mark the 20th anniversary of U2’s Pop—originally released March 3, 1997—we’re republishing it here.
Out of this uncertainty, out of this very tangle, U2 have reformed their music again. On 1991’s Achtung Baby, they immersed themselves in noise; on 1993’s Zooropa, no bets hedged, they upended the record-making process. Now, on Pop, they just let various unpolished, inconsistent elements zoom, traipse, and scatter through space. And, because they are U2, they hope. At album’s end, on “Wake Up Dead Man,” as a Bulgarian village soprano valiantly tries to cut through the muddy air, Bono guesses that there must be order somewhere amid all this disorder. And he asks if he can rewind everything, “just once more,” and listens for clues.
All of that being said, here are the other things Pop is. Pop is the freakout and comedown at the end of their ’90s road, where they lost the battles of Zooropa and fully embraced rockstar trappings, the dirty glamor, the glitz and crassness. The album signaling U2’s last brush with unfettered and fearless experimentation. The album where the mingling of sex and religion from Acthung Baby continues, but is pushed into Pop Art overdrive while deepening the conversation: sin and materialism and indulgence are entangled with shaken faith. The album where they bred European textures with boom-times Americana, getting at something more real and immediate and sinister and shiny than those late ’80s ventures where they supposedly got closest to American themes. Almost written out of their narrative but pivotal to it, Pop is the album that remains most perplexing and fascinating and layered in a career of thoroughly analyzed classics.
As Bono said while discussing another underrated Pop gem, “Gone,” “‘Gone’ is a portrait of the young man as a rock star, trying to cut himself free from responsibilities and just enjoy the ride, the suit of lights, fame: ‘You change your name, well that’s ok, it’s necessary. And what you leave behind you don’t need anyway.’ But I think what this album tells you is that some things you can’t leave behind. That’s really it. It’s like the university professor who just can’t dance. Deep down we weren’t as shallow as we’d like.”
I suppose it comes as no surprise that the last few weeks for me have been surreal, a word implying a state of heightened non-reality, not unlike the sensation of a very weird dream.
Except you don't awaken from it, to coffee and renewed clarity. Rather, popular culture moves in mysterious ways, and experiences bleed into each other. The real and the unreal collide.
By mid-February, we knew my mother was dying. Around the same time, owing to Leadership SI activities and topical local debates, I was being immersed in information about the opioid addiction epidemic in Southern Indiana and related public health issues.
In the middle of it, a friend proposed that we attend the U2 show in June at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium. Tickets were purchased, and for the first time in years, I listened to the band's 1987 album, "The Joshua Tree," which will be performed in its entirety at the gig.
With all these things percolating in my brain, one of the songs unexpectedly grabbed me.
"Running to Stand Still" is a song by rock band U2, and it is the fifth track from their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree. A slow ballad based on piano and guitar, it describes a heroin-addicted couple living in Dublin's Ballymun flats; the towers have since become associated with the song.
I've known the story for years, and at first there was an obvious connection with the opioid discussion. The song kept floating back to me when prompted by news items about the proposed halfway house on Spring Street, or the city council's efforts to segregate treatment.
It's been a week since mom died, and yesterday the song started playing again in my head, as though somehow possessing renewed relevance. It occurs to me that "running to stand still" aptly describes what I've been doing to myself these past seven days.
Without thinking about it, I've responded to my mother's death just as she'd have done herself, by trying to wrestle mortality to the ground through sheer organization -- the communications, the notifications, the arrangements, the obituary, and the collating of archives.
All the while, I've been obsessing over all sorts of personal deadlines to finish this, read that, learn twice as much as before, and begin whole new projects without any clear plan to finish them.
Hamster, meet wheel.
The obvious problem with me trying to organize my way out of grief is that while she easily could manage it, I'm just lost in the weeds. My standard joke is that it's never been a problem for me to get organized, just to remain organized.
There is no neat and tidy conclusion to this rumination. I imagine that we all cope with loss as best we can, each in his or her own way. As such, I'm deeply thankful for your comments and condolences, especially from those who have recounted tales from the home economics classroom.
It stands to reason that this U2 clip from Werchter (Belgium) in July of 1982 would be familiar to anyone who saw the band in Louisville at the old Louisville Gardens just a few months before. I wasn't among them; the band only came to my attention with the release of War the following year.
35 years later, Jeffrey Lee Puckett picks up the story at the Courier-Journal.
U2's June 16 show at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium will mark only the second time the band has performed in Louisville, and you're forgiven if you can't remember the first.
That was March 3, 1982, and one of history's most iconic rock acts was just getting its start in America and opening at Louisville Gardens for the J. Geils Band, then riding a huge wave of popularity thanks to its "Freeze Frame" album.
Bono "bounded around the stage like a pinball on acid," according to the Courier-Journal's Michael Quinlan ...
When U2 next returned to Kentucky, the band was a certified international phenomenon. On October 23, 1987, U2 performed at Rupp Arena in Lexington during the second leg of the Joshua Tree tour.
I didn't attend U2's second Kentucky show, either, but this time there was a better excuse: I'd already seen them play in Cork, Ireland just prior to this, on August 8. Barrie Ottersbach and I were there at the Páirc Uí Chaoimh, having spent a glorious summer day draining pints of Murphy's Stout and watching the young kids vomiting from too much hard cider intake.
My only regret is not realizing the Dubliners were the first of three bands opening for U2; consequently, we took our seats just as UB40 was starting. Here's the set list from that sadly distant day.
Stand By Me (Ben E. King cover)
C'mon Everybody (Eddie Cochran cover) (last performance ever)
I Will Follow
Trip Through Your Wires
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (with 'Exodus' snippet)
MLK
The Unforgettable Fire
Exit (with Van Morrison's 'Gloria' snippet)
In God's Country
Sunday Bloody Sunday
People Get Ready (The Impressions cover)
Help! (The Beatles cover)
Bad (with 'Walk on the Wild Side' snippet)
October
New Year's Day
Pride (In the Name of Love)
Encore:
Bullet the Blue Sky
Running to Stand Still
With or Without You (with 'Shine Like Stars' coda)
Trash, Trampoline and the Party Girl
Out of Control (tour debut)
40
It never dawned on me until now that there might be video and audio bootlegs of U2 playing live in Cork at Páirc Uí Chaoimh on August 8, 1987. But of course there are. Here is an excerpt.
A month or so after seeing U2 in Cork, I set foot in Sportstime Pizza for the very first time, unaware that by doing so, the next thirty years of my existence were being presaged. It's almost exactly a half-a-lifetime ago since Cork, and that's scary.
I'm admittedly a huge fan of U2, and we'll be there at ridiculous expense at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium in June. I haven't seen the band live since 2002, indoors in Indianapolis -- between Cork and Indy was a show in Prague during the Pop Mart Tour in 1997.
The members of U2 are my age, and their journey always has been a source of fascination to me. In this fractured world of increasingly brief attention spans, U2 currently seems almost as unfashionable as Phil Collins (unfairly in both instances, I think), and yet the band also is among the last of the rock and roll dinosaurs able to sell out stadiums, albeit on the strength of rock anthems from the past, reminding us that the era of such songs uniting audiences is finished.
I lament their passing. There were many indefensible aspects of human life in 1987, but as Barrie and I watched the stage being set for U2 in Cork 30 years ago, the volume on the PA suddenly went up. Beatles songs began playing, and as though it were the national anthem, everyone stood and began singing along. We joined in.
If we've evolved past this point of communal communion, too damned bad for us.
For those who retain an interest in U2 and are familiar with the group's most recent release, this 15-minute podcast details the creative process behind one of the album's key songs. It simply would not sound the same if I were to sing about Baylor-Wisman Road.
10 Cedarwood Road is the address of Bono’s childhood home in Dublin. For the U2 song “Cedarwood Road,” Bono looked back to his life there as a teenager, when skinhead culture seeped into his neighborhood via the Seven Towers housing project …
With characteristic tone deafness, several Southern Indiana school systems (including NA-FC) are using MLK Day as a snow make-up day. I can't think of a better reason to skip class.
You've read it and heard it many times before: I'm Roger, and this is U2. We're the same age, and we've grown up together. These Irishmen unwittingly wrote lengthy portions of the soundtrack of my life, most prominently as accompanying my European travels. I'm an unreconstructed fan. Did anyone believe I wouldn't have a new U2 album in the top five?
You see, when you've grown up with something like this, your separate narratives eventually blend together. I'm only able to be as objective about U2 as I am about myself, and while my sense of self is fairly well formed at this point, there are inevitable blind spots.
The "free" release of Songs of Innocence was controversial, and reviews have oscillated wildly. I imagine the chats:
Critic: How dare they force me to accept free music.
Roger: #firstworldproblems
C: How dare U2 reinforce the scandal of unpaid musicians.
R: Well, actually they did get remunerated by Apple.
C: Exactly -- paid by Apple. See, fatally compromised by corporate ties.
R: Okay, you've got me on that one.
C: I have big problems with Bono's ego.
R: Old news; everyone does at this point ... but The Edge is forever cool.
C: Worst of all, it still sounds like U2.
R: Isn't that what it's supposed to sound like?
And so on, and so forth. But the net result is that everyone was talking about U2 ... and it doesn't require the reincarnation of PT Barnum to grasp the impact of "free" publicity.
Of the album reviews I've read, Irving Tan's at Sputnik Music comes closest to my personal point of view. It's all about the strength of the songs, and there are some good ones here.
Even after taking all of those weaknesses into consideration, the fact remains that Songs of Innocence ultimately feels like a crucial upswing in U2’s discography, especially since it comes at such a late stage in their careers. Now, I imagine that it will be rather difficult to make any sort of proper commentary on the strength of the commercial response to this album, given that most of us have already received it for a sum total of zero cents, but if nothing else, it is worth noting that U2 have contrived to put out a record that is capable of reviving the flagging levels of interest in their brand. In other words, this is the kind of album that could just make you believe in their legacy all over again.
One crucial aspect of the legacy to which Tan refers is this.
U2 are an outfit whose entire career arc has been defined by their ability to respond to periods of strife.
Once again, at the present time I resemble that remark. No Lines on the Horizon, U2's previous album, landed as Bank Street Brewhouse opened for business in 2009. Songs of Innocence comes a few months after we shuttered the kitchen, and I began brainstorming a different path forward.
"We wanted to make a very personal album," said Bono to Rolling Stone's Gus Wenner the day before Apple Live. "The whole album is first journeys – first journeys geographically, spiritually, sexually. And that's hard. But we went there." When viewed through that prism, U2’s thirteenth album represents a complete turnaround in the band’s compositional philosophy; the perfect antithesis to albums like Achtung Baby or Zooropa.
Art and commerce; bands and pubs. Aligned, yet again.
Not Bruno Mars and the Peppers, silly reader, but the best halftime show ever. Just bring back U2 every year, let the group play a whole concert, and then if it's still necessary (why?), then go ahead and play the game.
I'm an unreconstructed, unrepentant, unembarrassed fan of U2. I accept it as unimpeachably and undeniably axiomatic that the world is a better place when there is new music from U2. And The Edge ... well, The Edge remains bad ... as my friend Roz Tate would say.
This song has grown on me considerably. Maybe not a classic, but very encouraging nonetheless, with the long-awaited new album hopefully dropping in April. The guitar and vocals in the bridge give me shivers, perhaps not for what they are, but for what they conjure. That's enough for me.
I sometimes forget the extent to which U2's music has been accompanying me for more than a quarter-century. It has defined so many milestones, European trips, love affairs, business endeavors ... and as I've always pointed out, I'm the same age as the band's members. Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen are my lads, and my chronological contemporaries.
The trip in 1987 covered quite a lot of ground over a period of four months. It also offered the first opportunity to witness major musical concert events while traveling abroad: Genesis live in Budapest, Hungary in early June, and two months later, U2 in Cork, Ireland.
Genesis was at the pinnacle of its 1980s pop phase, and perhaps "fashionable" only in a locale behind the Iron Curtain, where Queen played a groundbreaking show the year before. The group's Invisible Touch album was ubiquitous on the radio, and it became the soundtrack of my extended stay in Hungary. The track chosen here is Abacab, off an earlier album, and a far better song when performed live. The dual drumming conclusion is classic.
On the other hand, U2 as yet was traveling an upward arc, somewhere in the middle of a year-long tour to support the band's Joshua Tree album. Like the Genesis gig, the concert was outdoors in a soccer stadium. My memory is decidedly pre-Zoo TV; the crowd was massive and reverent, and there was a spiritual vibe that later dissipated when U2 became iconic. "Where the Streets Have No Name" competes neck-in-neck with "Still Haven;t Found What I'm Looking For" in my personal lexicon of travel metaphor music.
This highly touted young band from Ireland was just hitting it big worldwide in the summer of 1987, when Barrie Ottersbach and the not-yet-Publican were trekking across Europe. We saw U2 perform at the soccer stadium in Cork, a show scheduled between legs of the star-making Joshua Tree tour. A month or so later, I set foot in Sportstime Pizza for the very first time, unaware that by doing so, a quarter-century of my existence (so far) was being plotted.
25 years later, this remains my finest worksong (with apologies to REM). Truly, I believe the best is what's next to come, although there are times when getting there seems like trying to find a street with no name.
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.
[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".
I feel like I've cornered the market on introspection here of late. Much of it owes to the opportunity to catch up on reading during the holidays, not only books but a backlog of magazines and newspaper articles. Fortuitously, Bluegill and I enjoyed a recent discussion along the general theme of mainstream musical and artistic occurrences versus those that are localized at the grassroots level. Several of these themes are starting to click.
It so happens that one of the books I'm reading is U2 by U2, an oral history of the band by the members themselves. I'm admittedly a huge fan of the group, and the fact that its members are my age always has been a source of fascination, but I'm trying to approach their testimony from the vantage point of learning how and why the creativity and talents of four local musicians in Dublin came to pass from micro to macro, from decidedly small time to impossibly huge.
What can be learned from their experience? One thing that leaps out at me is the group's collective insistence that they came to be what they are today precisely because they barely knew how to play their instruments in the beginning, and having no clear purpose beyond being members of a rock band, they instead did their own thing, in their own way, and learned the conventional musical language only after creating their own.
In turn, this thought echoes elements of my conversation with Bluegill, in that I expressed frustration with myself for being so preoccupied with transforming this blog into something approximating a newspaper that it seemed no longer available to me as a means of exploring other aspects of my existence. Bluegill helpfully referred to this missing element as the "being human" aspect, and as usual, he's right.
Even if local newspapers won't be what I'd like them to be, there isn't much I can do about it, and while I remain intrigued by the possibilities of blogs and blogging, my profession is beer, not journalism. Mind you, there is no desire here to forsake the editorial soapbox with regard to local politics and civic affairs; rather, there's a desire to place these into an overall context, and one way to do that is to continue writing and trusting my own instincts when it comes to what might be interesting for readers. If it's done properly, effective writing must include a component of forcibly peeling away layers of inhibition and scar tissue, and probing one's own inner recesses for fingerprints.
What could be more local than the contents of your own noggin? Comparatively, everything lying outside a individual is mainstream. Taking it a step further, into the larger circle of the community, and probing ...
How do I balance a local perspective with the conviction that I remain a citizen of the planet at large?
For as long as I can remember, it is a question that has prompted unrelenting internal debate, and there's no better illustration of the way it nags me than a brief consideration of the one thing that has confused so many people, friends as well as foes, over the years. The question comes out something like this:
Roger, how is it that someone like you who feels such ambivalence about America … an avowed Europhile, and a person who notoriously is unable to suffer fools … has lived in Floyd County his entire life – maybe traveling as often as possible, but not once moving away?
Good question. It confuses me, too. And so the interrogation proceeds:
How is it that someone taken to espousing local thinking in so many other ways fails to be better versed in local music and local art, and insists on looking abroad for inspiration?
How can someone with a “Red Room” think of himself as a capitalist?
And so on. Rest assured, these wheels spin constantly, glib answers are seldom glimpsed floating to the surface, and eventually the original question returns:
How do I balance a local perspective with the conviction that I remain a citizen of the planet at large?
All that can be said is that at some point early in life, I concluded that there was great personal value in certain areas of knowledge and ideas; that because my place of birth places a pathetically low value on education, these areas consequently are seriously undervalued here at home; and that there was a choice for me: Attempt self-growth and comprehension by playing the role of contrarian gadfly in the midst of localized incomprehension, or risk the relative happiness of placid normalcy in another place where most other people think rather like me.
Sore thumb or team player?
Hard-wired somewhere deep within my psyche is the conviction that it’s better to stay put and confront complacency and stupidity at home – to be a royal pain and a performance artist for my vision of truth whenever and wherever possible in an effort to illustrate to the few who are capable of understanding that it’s okay to be different – than to cut and run … to a blue state, or to Bamberg, or to a new career.
I don’t pretend that any of this is particularly noble, although serving as a beacon for various themes of disaffection has its merits. Like anyone else, I possess character flaws aplenty and my philosophical precepts are riddled with exceptions. At the end of the day, it’s likely that a majority of New Albanians would vote me off the island, just as if given the chance, they'd proffer the hemlock to Socrates if it meant not having to think about anything.
And that, friends, is justification enough for me in this new year. I can't really explain it, and I don't know where it's heading ... and that's the whole point.
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