Post #130380 by donhonyc on Sat, Dec 11, 2004 12:16 AM

I was also on the 'ground floor' to see the beginnings of U2 and it's actually a pretty cool thing to look back on all these years later. In fact I can't believe it was that long ago.

I remember first hearing "I Will Follow" in, believe it or not, the 80s teen sex b-movie 'Last American Virgin". As I recall I saw it at a midnight movie, probably around '82 or '83. From that point on I was a disciple of U2. The sound of "I Will Follow" was so weird and new to my ears then, that I thought I was hearing, and getting into a band that was so obscure nobody around town would know who they were except me. And they were pretty obscure there for a minute.

As I got deeper into U2 that year, I could hear that they had political and religious themes in their songs that, although I couldn't totally wrap my 16 year old head around it, I could sense that they had a positive message in their music a-la John Lennon, and I'm not just talking about religion or anything like that. It was just cool, positive political music to me, and I thought Bono was probably one of the most charismatic performers that side of Jim Morrison, who I was obviously too young to have seen, but was a big fan of also.

As I said, I saw U2 on the 'War' tour, with The Alarm opening up for them in the summer of '83. I was so obsessed with the band that a friend and I found out what hotel they were staying in, which as it turns out was near my house, and lurked around until we saw a chubby older guy with a U2 shirt and an Irish accent chatting with some people in the lobby. Sure enough it was their manager, and me being the unmannered, innocently rude kid that I was, I went up to him and asked if we could meet the band. His reply was..in an aggravated tone "Yes they're here, but they're tired. Wouldn't you want rest if you were tired?!" Then he went on to tell me that they would be at the venue later that afternoon, if I wanted to meet them, I could do so there. Sure enough we go down there and their bus pulls up, the door opens and out comes an actually pretty freakish looking entourage and then there's Bono looking like he just woke up. I had a 12" single of 'Two Hearts Beat As One" with me. Someone passed me a ballpoint pen and Bono starts to sign, but the pen had hardly any ink in it, so the autogaph is like half-signed/half-no-ink-imprint. Then TheEdge comes off the bus. He signs it too, and I said to him "hey, can I talk to you" because I'm sure I had some of what I thought were pretty serious things to say to him, but The Edge blew me off. He was friendly about it though. Something like..."I gotta go inside and sound check" or something like that. I can still picture him walking away from me and saying that at the same time. He was cool about it, but hey...I was a 16 year old guy...not a 16 year old GIRL. I'm sure I woulda been invited in to watch the sound-check if I was the latter, but that's show-biz. By the way, I still have the signed 12".

The show that night was still to this day, one of the most amazing shows I have ever seen. Bono was the first performer I ever saw that literally went into the audience. And he also did something that years later we would be calling 'crowd surfing'. Back then it was just "the singer was carried through the audience BY the audience" COOL!

I saw U2 again in '85 during 'The Unforgettable Fire'. They had gotten way more popular by that point and played a venue that was twice the size of the place I saw them originally. Bono was then regularly grabbing some random girl from the audience and hugging her on-stage as part of their show. The same thing he had done at Live Aid that year. It looked pretty sicere though...I must say.

After they released 'Rattle & Hum' I stepped off with U2. My interest had gone elsewhere, and quite frankly I thought they were getting a little too pretentious for their own good. They were also attracting a much larger mainstream audience and were no longer my underground heroes from 'War' days. People at the mall suddenly knew who U2 were. Back then, that was a very strange and dissapointing thing to me.

I still think U2 is pretty cool, and even in though they and rock music are commercial beyond commercial, U2 still somehow has maintained their integrity and don't come off as complete sell-outs. I thought Bono's politics were simply 'limousine liberal' shenanigans for a long time, but you know what? I think he actually beleives in what he's doing as far as that stuff goes, so that's cool with me.

Hopefully I'll get to see them on their upcoming tour. It would be good to see them live after all this time.

THE END ©2004 'this has been a rambling donhonyc production in association with Mark Goodson/Bill Toddman Productions'

[ Edited by: donhonyc on 2004-12-11 00:35 ]