In God's country, with U2

A young man discovers America, guided by an Irish band

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette U2 illustration.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette U2 illustration.

In the lonesome vastness of the American Southwest, the sky pours from some unseen spout overhead, spilling out the bluest blue toward the horizon.

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette U2 illustration.

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The Joshua Tree U2

The scrubland country to the sides is different shades of white sand and tan, dotted with sickly green shrubs gasping for moisture, and rust-colored mountains and cliffs in the distance.

The road slices through this hardscrabble land of nothing, a charcoal gray ribbon taking travelers somewhere, anywhere, but here.

This is the blank canvas that is America. No sounds. Just the endless drone of rubber on the interstate. A steady, soothing, thump-thump under the wheels when the pavement breaks.

Here, in the wilderness of the Southwest, driving Interstate 10, is where I found myself in the fall of 1996, zooming toward Joshua Tree National Park, simply to see a Joshua tree, all because of U2's album The Joshua Tree.

Who knows how the thought occurred. Or why. I was not in college, working construction, 20 going on 21, pondering what the future might be.

Driving west from my Mississippi home into the unknown all alone, seeking adventure -- it just seemed like the thing to do.

...

Arriving 30 years ago March 9, The Joshua Tree was a groundbreaking work that transformed four lads from Dublin -- vocalist Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. -- into international superstars, knocking Mikhail Gorbachev to a corner of a Time magazine cover and earning U2 the title of "Biggest Band in the World."

The album was the epic work the band so desperately wanted to create. The Edge told Rolling Stone recently that following the band's fourth studio album, 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, the quartet looked at "American [music]."

"We looked at the blues," he said. "We looked at the New Journalism. I remember that myself and Bono were reading Flannery O'Connor, the Southern writers. It was a conscious effort to look across the Atlantic and to start to explore America."

The result is what The Edge called "a very broad, Cinema­Scope kind of record."

Indeed. The Joshua Tree is a widescreen album, capturing hues of sound that pass before its lens. It is a record that projects a sense of place, somewhere out there.

To celebrate the work's 30th anniversary, the band is visiting the United States this spring for a series of The Joshua Tree 2017 tour stops, with the band playing the 1987 album in its entirety.

I wouldn't call the 11 songs and 50 minutes of The Joshua Tree U2's best work. I'm partial to 1991's Achtung Baby, the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, as Bono has said, and a classic among the best musical works ever.

But The Joshua Tree is one of my favorite albums of all time; an album that sounded unlike other music a preteen in a rural Mississippi town heard in 1987. The album wasn't hair metal; it wasn't teen pop; it wasn't country.

No, The Joshua Tree was something entirely different -- an introduction to music beyond what my older brother listened to, what my parents listened to or what classmates and I awkwardly slow-danced to at parties.

The album was the sound of what was coming.

This change in direction begins with those first few notes of The Joshua Tree's intro song, "Where the Streets Have No Name," with its opening synthesizers arising like dawn over a barren landscape and the chiming guitar of The Edge.

There's a tripwire of bass guitar, the rolling thunder of drums and the tune explodes. "I wanna run, I want to hide," Bono sings. "I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside."

The track moves with an unexplainable urgency. The song is open. It calls: There's an adventure somewhere out there and a land full of wild possibilities and unknown probabilities.

Even 30 years on, the album's second track, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," still hasn't connected with me, although the song contains one of the best couplets on the album -- "I have spoke with the tongue of angels/I have held the hand of a devil/It was warm in the night/I was cold as a stone."

The track is still a little too fleeting for me, although it's the song where listeners should start realizing The Joshua Tree is a complete band effort, from Bono's gospel vocals and The Edge's loopy guitar effects to U2's crack rhythm section.

This effort all comes together on "With or Without You," with The Edge on Infinite Guitar, creating ambient sustain -- being stingy with expensive, singular guitar notes -- and Mullen Jr.'s giddy-up drums pacing the song.

The monumental songs on the album never stop coming.

"Bullet the Blue Sky," a take on the United States' military intervention in 1980s Central America, is the song where Bono directed The Edge to "put El Salvador through an amplifier." Bono sneers through a mixture of biblical imagery and secular violence, and the music is coiled, angry and ready to strike, with the drumming like a blast from a .50-caliber machine gun.

There's not a false step on The Joshua Tree, an album crammed with nods to American music and culture, from Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas soundtrack and Bob Dylan to Norman Mailer's 1980 novel The Executioner's Song and electrified harmonica blues.

Even "Red Hill Mining Town," the one song from the album never played live, and "In God's Country," which is not a favorite of the band but a personal favorite, stand out. The latter unfolds like a breathless rush, cascading like a flash flood across the desert floor, with the reminder: "We need new dreams tonight."

The Joshua Tree is 11 songs and 50 minutes of anthemic, driving desert rock by a gang of 20-something urban dwellers from Dublin -- and perhaps the greatest "American" album of all time.

...

It was more than nine years after the release of The Joshua Tree when I hit the road. The route from Mississippi to Joshua Tree National Park was simple: head west on Interstate 20 then Interstate 10. Turn north once in California.

Out there, in the desert Southwest, pockets of civilization stand like skirmishers on a picket line against the encroaching rugged land, and there are few remembrances of society, beyond the accoutrements of the road. Mile markers, counting down to a destination. White reflector signs, warning that the road is all that matters.

I bounded 600, 700 or 800 miles across the country in daylong drives on the trip, but stopping often, including one evening to witness the sun set in the desert of southeastern Arizona, with the fiery orange blob melting into the horizon, shooting up dazzling blues, yellows and reds. Elsewhere, in the darkness just short of Tuscon, Ariz., I left the interstate on some lonely back road, stopped my truck, turned off the lights and sat on the tailgate and saw the Milky Way as a sparkling white stripe traced across the blackened sky.

I stood on the dead-fish laced shores of the Salton Sea and saw the multicolored Salvation Mountain. And I walked into the wilderness and spotted a Joshua tree, in Lost Horse Valley in the national park, nearly 1,750 miles from my home, the very purpose of my trip.

The joke was on me, though. The actual Joshua Tree -- which is no more -- was more than 200 miles north of the park, located off California 190 between Sequoia and Death Valley national parks. Of course, at the time, that knowledge was unknown to me.

Still, I saw a Joshua tree, perhaps not the Joshua tree. I'd accomplished my goal. More than two decades later I'm still not sure what that was. To become another soul who wanders in the desert for purpose? Or, on the opposite spectrum, to get lost?

Perhaps I just wanted to go on a long drive, listen to some music and see a Joshua tree, an ugly yucca plant so named by mid-19th-century Mormon explorers because it reminded them of Joshua, the successor of Moses, with the tree's outstretched limbs either guiding the travelers westward or offering a prayer up to the sky.

That's all there was to the trip at the time, but 20 years later there is so much more.

Somewhere, out there in that remote territory surrounded by unlovable trees with weirdly twisted branches, I learned a great deal about music and about America, with The Joshua Tree guiding me.

...

It's vital, for me at least, when driving long distances that the soundtrack matches the landscape.

Driving to New Orleans, the music is brass bands or boogie woogie piano by James Booker or Professor Longhair. In the Mississippi Delta, it's the blues, of course, or Al Green, Otis Redding and the like. Elsewhere, driving to Colorado for instance, it's Widespread Panic or the Grateful Dead.

Every time I drive home to Mississippi, when crossing the grand river, or just some state line, the tune is Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)," timing the crossing so David Byrne's opening line, "Home, is where I want to be," is sung just as I cross back over into the land of my birth.

The music should melt into the landscape. If you're fortunate, and it's the right song, the right spot, it's goosebumps.

On that drive to Joshua Tree National Park, the euphoria of song and landscape matching barely ever left, with the country and the music blending into one. There were other albums I listened to, but I kept coming back to The Joshua Tree.

I wanted scenery that mirrored photographer Anton Corbijn's black and white photographs from the album, and music that could fill that lonesome sky, and here was U2's lush fusion of Irish-bred rock with the aura of America -- a bridge, as Bono once said, between "the mythic America and the real America."

I was discovering a piece of America with The Joshua Tree on constant repeat. And The Joshua Tree is the sound of the Irish rockers also discovering America, unveiling America and falling in love with America and its passion. Its complexities. Its unruliness.

It's an album about the endless possibilities of what America could be. And what it already was. About the greatness of America between its two shining seas, about tearing down walls, reaching out and touching the heart of America.

It's also the sound of doubting America. Of looking behind the curtain and seeing the dirty, gritty side of America, the death of the American dream and disagreeable politics.

The Joshua Tree teaches there is a dark and bright side to America. It's important to always remember that. Then and especially now. There are two Americas, but they are the same. And we should always be discovering them and attempting to bridge them.

Looking back, I learned all that on that Mohave Desert sojourn, with The Joshua Tree -- the sound of America -- the soundtrack to my journey. There's a lot to learn underneath this gaping American sky.

Style on 03/12/2017

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