Anyone walking into my office Friday was likely to get a dose of U2, the Irish band that's been rocking with the same four members -- Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. -- since 1976.
Seeing U2 in concert has been on my bucket list since before I even knew what a bucket list was. Last Wednesday night in Tulsa, that list got one item shorter as the band I've enjoyed since the mid 1980s opened its Experience + Innocence Tour at the BOK Center. My wife, Sheryl, and I were in no danger of having Bono's sweat slung on us, as our seats were of the nasal hemorrhage altitude, but I didn't care.
It was an incredible 2 1/2-hour musical and visual experience. Gauge that reaction against what the band didn't do: They didn't play "Where The Streets Have No Name" or "I still haven't found what I'm looking for," two songs essential to fans of their songs. While I would have loved hearing those songs live, Wednesday nights concert left me with no regrets. I found myself wishing I had also bought tickets for Friday's night's show in St. Louis, by I was limited by work demands, my bank account and, oh yeah, my apparent misplacement of my personal jet.
It was as political a rock concert as I've ever been to, which undoubtedly might turn off a casual concertgoer whose notions run to the contrary of the band's perspective. Fans, however, know Bono and his bandmates have never been shy about using their music and their live performances to speak to larger, meaningful issues. In this concert, they masterfully related the experience of "the Troubles" the Northern Ireland of their younger years to their heartfelt adoration of America and concerns about violence and division in this country.
From "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," a song about the British troop's killing of 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to the performance of "American Soul," "Get Out of Your Own Way" and more, these Dubliners issued a call Americans to devote themselves to remaining what Ronald Reagan described as a "shining city on a hill."
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it," Reagan said in his 1989 farewell speech to the nation. "But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."
Bono and Ronald Reagan? That's an unlikely pairing. But both men, in my estimation, shared a love not just for the American experience, but for what Bono once described as an American that "is an idea, a contagious idea ... that inspires the world."
Maybe we're in times that raise questions about our own connection to that idea, but Wednesday night's concert sounded a hopeful note that the light from the shining city hasn't been extinguished.
As I departed downtown Tulsa and drove two late-night, stormy hours back home to Fayetteville, I left entirely satisfied with my U2 experience.
Commentary on 05/07/2018