Tree Roots: the story behind U2’s landmark album The Joshua Tree
How U2’s fifth album, The Joshua Tree, made four musicians from Dublin the biggest rock band in the world.
It began with the image of a desert landscape stretching as far as the eye could see, windswept and desolate, devoid of humanity and yet somehow inviting, even desirable. It was the sight of the vast interior of the United States of America, and it was what U2’s singer and songwriter fixated on as he began penning the lyrics to a set of songs that would change the course of popular music history.
Reflecting on the lyrics of the first four U2 albums, Bono – born Paul Hewson – came to realise that his words in those songs were more akin to sketches or paintings, rather than artworks that had properly engaged with scenes, characters and emotions.
It was an advanced form of procrastination that reminded him of his approach to schoolwork, where he’d do anything to avoid the task at hand out of a fear of failure. If you don’t appear to be trying too hard, he thought, you’re less likely to be judged. So just don’t try.
In 1986, however, the 26-year-old was filling his head with the words of great American novelists and thinking seriously about how to advance his craft. “With Joshua Tree, I decided I’d better write some lyrics,” he later noted. “I was reading more anyway so I was more awake to the word. I discovered a love for writers and started to feel like one of them.”
The three musicians of U2, too, were imagining wide open spaces and sounds that would suit.
One of the very first discussions the group had with co-producer Brian Eno was centred on the idea of making a cinematic record where each song would conjure a physical location in the mind of the listener.
The four young men had been bandmates since they began playing together in 1976 as teenagers attending a high school in the Irish capital, Dublin. Having formed in the wake of the punk rock explosion, much of the band’s early work was influenced by European contemporary music, which stridently rejected the influence of American artists.
As guitarist the Edge later said: “The Joshua Tree was the first album where we consciously went, ‘OK, we spent four albums thinking about Europe, Ireland, but let’s take a look at the roots of this form that we are inevitably a part of’. And those were all American.”
This meant exploring the blues, folk and gospel, and reading writers such as Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote. It was a concerted effort to look across the Atlantic Ocean and start to truly explore America – the land that, in the eyes of the Irish, was a vast source of ideas, aspirations and inspirations going back generations. In his notebook, Bono scribbled a working title: The Two Americas.
The group settled on a 200-year-old house named Danesmoate as the recording location, in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. With Eno and Daniel Lanois sharing production, as they did on 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, the band began developing the sketches of musical ideas that had emerged from live jams and while touring its fourth album.
The old house had a large drawing room with high ceilings and wooden floors, and that became the space where the musicians worked up their parts and recorded.
“We wanted to do the backing tracks live, as a band,” said bassist Adam Clayton. “When you hear that big drum sound on The Joshua Tree, it’s the sound of that room.”
Just before recording sessions began in August 1986, a shockwave of grief swept across the U2 camp following the motorcycle accident death of Greg Carroll, a 26-year-old Maori stagehand they met in Auckland who ended up moving to Dublin to work with the band. “It brought gravitas to the recording of The Joshua Tree,” said Bono. “We had to fill the hole in our heart with something very, very large indeed, we loved him so much.”
Having struggled to settle on an arrangement of a promising song since a rough demo was captured in 1985, it was at Danesmoate that the group unlocked its true potential early in the recording sessions.
Key to this was the Edge – born David Evans – experimenting with a modified electric guitar that produced infinite sustain when a note was played, like a violin. In just two takes, he added the spectral, wandering tones that fill the top end of a song named With or Without You, leaving Bono plenty of space to work with in the mid-range between the guitar and rhythm section.
The singer dug deep into his emotional life to produce its lyrics, which he described as a twisted love song reflecting on the difficulties he’d faced while being married in a touring band. Its wrenching lyrics concern the dilemma the singer felt between his commitment and the desire to run from it.
“That tension, it turns out, is what makes me as an artist,” he later noted. “Right in the centre of a contradiction, that’s the place to be … The most important line is probably ‘And you give yourself away’. It just flipped it and it releases all the mental tension, which is when the ‘Aah-aah’ (vocal melody) comes out. That is what giving yourself away is, musically.”
After Danesmoate, the sessions shifted to the Edge’s newly acquired house in south Dublin, which his young family had not yet moved into. There, fourth track Bullet the Blue Sky emerged from a stormy jam. Driven by a skittish drumbeat and a bassline that rumbles with menace, the Edge added flourishes of bluesy, dive-bombing guitars and Bono conjured nightmare visions of the unchecked power of American military intervention ruining lives in El Salvador.
Towards the end of recording, desperate for a song that would connect with audiences, the guitarist imagined being at a concert and tried to dream up what he’d want to hear his band play. His attempt at summoning the ultimate U2 live experience resulted in Where the Streets Have No Name, which he recorded as a rough four-track demo.
“I thought I had just come up with the most amazing guitar part and song of my life, but I was totally alone in a big house with no one to share it with,” he recalled. “I remember listening to the complete silence of the house for a few seconds after the music had stopped and then doing a dance around the room punching the air. Then I went home.”
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On its release in March 1987, the 11 songs that comprise U2’s fifth album made an immediate impact. It went to No 1 in more than 20 countries, including nine weeks atop the Billboard chart in the US. “We were no longer trying to conquer America,” noted drummer Larry Mullen Jr. “One moment you are on one side of the fence, the next moment you are catapulted to the other. This was something most bands only dream about. We were the band.”
The updraft of the album’s popularity – on the back of With or Without You, which became its first US No 1 single – meant that, as its tour extended from 1987 into 1988, the group was caught in a transition between being comfortable playing to arena-sized audiences and decidedly uncomfortable playing in stadiums.
The band had limited experience in venues of this scale, although it had made a major impression when it played to a packed Wembley Stadium in 1985 as part of Live Aid.
There, its planned three-song set – Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bad and Pride – became two when Bono left the stage in an attempt to connect with the audience for the benefit of the cameras. “We didn’t do the hit because I’d gone AWOL to try and find a television moment and forgot about the song,” he later said. “The band were very, very upset – they nearly fired me.”
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That was 15 minutes on stage, though; connecting with crowds in excess of 50,000 people night after night, for an hour and a half or more, demanded an entirely different skill set. By its own admission, U2 wasn’t yet up to scratch. “When we went outdoors in the stadiums, we didn’t have any tricks,” said Clayton. “We didn’t know how to do it. We steered away from video reinforcement, which was just happening at the time. We thought it would, in some ways, dilute the music … No matter how good the songs are, you’re still just a speck on the stage and you’re still dependent on the PA system. That was very, very frustrating.”
Situated at the drum kit, behind his bandmates, Mullen saw – and heard – it all, and agreed. “We were the biggest but we weren’t the best,” he would later say. “That was an awful thing to feel – to go onstage … when we were feeling like shit, that it wasn’t as good as it should be, that we really hadn’t done our homework.”
With more than 25 million copies of The Joshua Tree sold worldwide, the success of the album was both a milestone and something of a millstone for the musicians, as it exposed them to the glare of global celebrity and mainstream exposure. All that attention and scrutiny began to morph the group – especially its outspoken frontman – into caricatures, in the same way that desert heat haze can play tricks on the eye.
Looking back, its packaging didn’t necessarily help with public perception. The grainy, black-and-white photo shoot for the album cover, taken by Anton Corbijn on a trip to the Mojave Desert – where they encountered the curiously shaped desert plants of its title – captured four earnest and seemingly humourless young men.
That wasn’t close to the truth, as Corbijn elected only to press the shutter after they’d stopped smiling. But even those close to the band – including manager Paul McGuinness, who had represented U2 since 1978 – cautioned that they were in danger of looking like men too stupid to enjoy being at No 1.
It’s understandable, then, that the quartet would seek an escape from its past by describing the 1991 album Achtung Baby as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree”.
That decade would see the band experimenting with electronic, dance and industrial sounds, while the singer tried on a bunch of character masks such as The Fly, a leather-clad, wraparound-sunglasses-wearing alter ego who parodied the very nature of rock stardom.
For more than three decades, U2 has been a stadium band. It is one of very few to have not only reached that height but to have stayed there. Despite its shaky and uncertain arrival at large venues, the quartet has become accustomed to projecting its music towards the back rows, by incorporating ever more outlandish stage productions.
The coming Australian tour is its first visit to this part of the world since 2010, when, as part of the U2 360 tour, the quartet performed in the centre of stadiums while positioned beneath a gigantic, spider-like, 190-tonne contraption known as The Claw. It sold more than seven million tickets across two years and 110 shows, with a box office tally in excess of $US735m.
Offstage, however, the critical consensus and commercial response to its nine studio albums since The Joshua Tree has generally observed a downward trajectory. Its last truly great release was its 10th album, 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, which contained the hit singles Beautiful Day and Elevation.
Its song New York became an unintentional anthem of defiance and solidarity in the wake of the terrorist attacks on that city the following year, and the American public latched onto the vital work of these Irish musicians like a life raft. The quartet’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl in New Orleans in February 2002 – where Bono closed the set by revealing an American flag stitched inside his jacket – was a classy, unifying moment.
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From that point on, however, reactions to its new work ranged from indifferent (How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, 2004) to dismissive (No Line on the Horizon, 2009) and towards outright disdain, when its 2014 album, Songs of Innocence, was automatically added to the library of every iTunes and iPhone user on Earth, regardless of their desire for said songs.
It is perhaps that act of intrusion – which Apple chief executive Tim Cook spruiked as “the largest album release of all time” – for which the group has attracted the most discussion this decade, and precious little of that commentary was supportive or welcoming of the move, let alone understanding of the altruistic intent. Even for a band fond of grand gestures, this was too much, and it later admitted to a miscalculation.
Its companion album, Songs of Experience, raised few pulses on release in 2017; although it was the band’s eighth No 1 album in the US, it dropped off the Billboard 200 chart after just nine weeks. Despite its best efforts and its own protestations to the contrary, then, all evidence points to U2’s best work existing in the rear-view mirror, not the windscreen.
While this is undoubtedly a source of frustration for musicians who want to – have to – believe that tomorrow might yield songwriting gold or platinum, there is also no shame in fully embracing the past, especially when that rear-view mirror shows peaks unimaginable to just about every band that has ever formed. If U2 were to join acts such as the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac in the camp of contentedly – and brilliantly – performing its greatest hits, night after night, very few would complain about the dearth of new material.
When it began touring The Joshua Tree across the country that inspired its creation on the 30th anniversary in 2017, nearly three million people bought tickets to 51 shows in the US, Europe and Latin America. Although the artists at the centre of this juggernaut roll their eyes at any suggestion of nostalgia, it is clearly that sense of fondly revisiting the past that powers its popularity: its $US316m gross made it that year’s highest-grossing tour globally.
The months of toil and experimentation that led to finalising those 11 songs that changed millions of lives are by now a distant memory but perhaps there’s a moment each night when those four men from Dublin reflect on the creative breakthroughs, minute decisions and life experiences that led them there. And then they step onto the giant stage constructed inside a packed stadium, pick up their instruments, play those songs, and give themselves away.
The Joshua Tree Tour begins in Brisbane on November 12, followed by Melbourne (Nov 15), Adelaide (Nov 19), Sydney (Nov 22 and 23) and Perth (Nov 27).