FEATURE:
Looking for Mythical America
U2's The Joshua Tree at Thirty-Five
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ALTHOUGH I have already written about U2…
PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn
fairly recently (as Pop turns twenty-five very soon), I wanted to mark another album that celebrates an anniversary in March. Arguably their best work, The Joshua Tree is thirty-five on 9th March. A more widescreen, expansive and deeper than 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree is inspired by American and Irish sounds; a search for a sort of mythical America. Influenced by American experiences, literature, and politics together with spiritual imagery, it is one of the Irish band’s most affecting and interesting albums. I usually work my way to a review of an album I am highlighting on its anniversary. Before that, the U2 Songs website let us know the history of one of the all-time best albums:
“For U2, The Joshua Tree, their fifth studio album, released in the spring of 1987, came at precisely the right time. Though already hugely successful, particularly as a live act, there was a feeling abroad that they had not yet delivered the definitive, classic album. As Hot Press writer Bill Graham put it, U2 had been “surfing a wave” since their triumphant appearance at Live Aid: “Their Irish optimism, curiosity and adaptability gave them a special empathy with America… the chance for their breakthrough arrived just as their recording and songwriting skills reached maturity.”
The result of a new-found musical and personal exploration, these eleven songs made up U2’s strongest and most cohesive collection of songs to date. Epic in scope and unlimited in its ambition, the album and subsequent tour saw the quartet rise to the major league of international rock stardom. The Joshua Tree had it all: songs of love and loss such as “With or Without You” and “One Tree Hill”; politically inspired polemics like “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Mothers of The Disappeared”; gospel songs of hope and faith like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
The decision to return to The Unforgettable Fire production team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois on The Joshua Tree was easy. The pair had forged strong relationships with the band during the making of the previous album.
With the production team in place, the next question was where the LP would be made. The first three U2 albums had all been recorded at Windmill Lane, a high-spec facility located in a narrow street by the River Liffey in Dublin’s (then) dilapidated docklands. For The Unforgettable Fire they had taken the unusual decision to work at Slane Castle, the ancestral pile of Lord Henry Mountcharles, located thirty miles north of Dublin. Slane was a once-off, and there seemed to be little enthusiasm for returning to Windmill Lane; the band, and Bono in particular, had often stated their distaste for the “sterile” environment of recording studios.
Instead, they elected to record in Danesmoate, a two-story-over-basement Georgian mansion in Rathfarnham on the southside of the city in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. The house, a local landmark, was originally known as Glen Southwell after the family who once lived there. According to historical records, it was originally laid out with rustic follies, a viewing tower, and it even had a small stream flowing through the grounds. Curiously, the first recorded evidence of anyone living there is in 1787 — exactly two hundred years before The Joshua Tree was released — when it was occupied by a Capt. William Southwell. Danesmoate was familiar territory to at least one band member — the house was adjacent to St Columba’s College, Adam Clayton’s alma mater. So impressed was he with the house during the recording sessions that he later bought it for use as his own home and has since carried out extensive restoration work to the listed building.
For Lanois, Danesmoate offered the perfect location for getting down to some serious work. “It was a really nice set-up,” he recalls. “It has this large living room/drawing room, whatever you want to call it — a big rectangular room with a tall ceiling and wooden floors. It was loud, but it was really good loud, real dense, very musical. In my opinion it was the most rock and roll room of the lot. The castle [Slane] was a fun idea and everything but it was a massive place. Danesmoate sounded better than the castle. I think it was the best place of all the experiments we tried ‘cause we’ve always tried different sorts of locations [to record].”
What impressed Lanois most about the 200-year-old building was its unique sonic properties, particularly when it came to, what he describes as, “the low mid-range.”
“The low mid-range is where the music lives,” he explains. “In my opinion The Joshua Tree is a great rock and roll record, partly because of the beauty of the low mid-range of that room.”
Sessions began in earnest in early August 1986 with the usual U2 working method of a combination of sifting through tapes, re-visiting soundcheck jams, and trawling through Bono’s overflowing lyric book, as well as live jamming sessions. However, extracting new material from the band wasn’t always easy, as Eno later admitted on the Classic Albums TV special. “There were quite a few things in the bag, and that’s exactly where they were,” he recalled. “I remember everyone used to walk in with these enormous bags of cassette tapes, especially Edge, who somehow or other had managed to connect his to a black hole located somewhere around Dublin. Because once tapes were in that bag they never reappeared.”
Lanois arrived at Danesmoate about two weeks after the initial sessions had begun.
“As I remember it, Eno and I had decided to go in at different times,” he resumes. “Eno did a week or two and I went in and did a week or two. We did that on purpose. We said, ‘You go in and do some work with them and then I’ll go in and work with them and we’ll see what we’ve got.’ It’s a nice thing I like to do with Brian, which is to do something impressive for the other man (laughs).”
Despite the serious business in hand, the atmosphere was anything but tense, and the start of The Joshua Tree sessions had something of a vaudeville touch.
“The band were already there, playing in the band-room when I arrived at the house,” Lanois remembers. “I saw that there was a tray of tea about to be brought into the room, so I took the tray and walked in with the tea, just to get straight the fact that I was still in the trenches as the tea boy (laughs). I remember too that there was a bit of curiosity in the air because at the time I had a number one hit in America with Peter Gabriel (with the song ‘Sledgehammer’). Edge looked over at me and said, ‘Danny, you’ve got the number one hit in North America right now. You’re going to be a rich man.’ So humour is there right at the foundation of the sessions.”
A makeshift control room to house the tape machines, mixing desk and the usual array of outboard equipment was created by taking down the large doors to an adjacent room and replacing them with a glass screen. But in keeping with the relaxed, “non-studio” ethos of the sessions, rather than call it a control room, it became known simply as the “lyric room.”
“It meant we were able to jockey between the band room and what we called the ‘lyric room’,” Lanois explains. “At a certain point you’ve got to sit down and look at things like, ‘How are the lyrics looking?’ and stuff like, ‘That couplet’s great but you need another line here’ etc. Danesmoate was really good for that, you didn’t have to travel too far. As I recall, a lot of Edge’s guitar overdubs would happen in the lyric room too. For example the guitar, the infinite sustained guitar part on ‘With or Without You’ was done in the lyric room.”
Progress was swift at Danesmoate, and two of the key songs on the album, “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” were nailed relatively early on in the sessions. “That was a big help,” Lanois says. “Once you’ve got some strong songs under your belt you can relax a little bit and feel free to experiment.”
Also on board was Flood, who occupied the engineer’s chair during The Joshua Tree sessions. Initially recommended by Gavin Friday (he’d previously produced the Virgin Prunes), U2 had also been impressed by his work with Nick Cave.
Unusually, the songs were mixed as soon as they were recorded.
“It was house policy that we would do some really nice rough mixes along the way,” says Lanois. “The way I feel philosophically, is that mixes done along the way are just as much candidates as mixes in the end. Taking snapshots along the way will be your friend in the end, because sometimes you go too far with something and then you think, ‘Oh wait a minute, a couple of steps back, that was it!’.”
Not long after work began on The Joshua Tree, a distinguished visitor arrived at Danesmoate. Robbie Robertson, the former guitarist and chief songwriter with The Band had come to Dublin to work on his first solo album. Since leaving The Band, Robertson had devoted much of his time since to working in films, both as an actor in movies such as Carny, and on soundtracks to the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Color of Money. He was now keen to establish a solo career, with fellow Canadian Lanois in the producer’s chair.
Lanois: “I had started a record with Robbie but I had to leave because it was taking so long. I went to work in Europe, first with Peter Gabriel and then with U2. I felt bad for Robbie that his record wasn’t finished. So I said to him one day, ‘Why don’t you get out of Los Angeles, come out here and just visit for a couple of days?’”
Robertson arrived in Dublin in the middle of Hurricane Charlie, which resulted in the worst floods to hit the city in living memory. “There were cars floating down the streets,” he recalled in an interview with Hot Press, “…it was really frightening. Thank God these guys [U2] were up for some spontaneous combustion!”
Each member of U2, as well as Lanois, contributed to two tracks that would eventually appear on Robertson’s album, “Testimony” and “Sweet Fire of Love.” “It was all done in the band room,” as Lanois remembers. “We just put him in the corner and we all played together and it happened. I think we did well to get two songs in that short time — he was here for only about a week on the outside, with drinks at either end. You hope to maybe get one track and we got two. In my opinion, they’re the best sounding ones on Robbie’s record. The guys were so sweet and kind to him, they just opened the door and he was able to step into that world.”
As the sessions at Danesmoate progressed, Lanois began to note that each of the four members of U2 had made considerable advances in terms of their skills as musicians. This, he says, accounted for a more productive environment, with far less time wasted in trying to hone and shape the new material.
“On The Unforgettable Fire they were still kind of junior musicians,” he says. “Now they were better players and they had more knowledge. I was able to speak with Edge on a much more evolved level. You have to understand that when I came in to work with them on The Unforgettable Fire I was pretty much an educated musical mind. I don’t mean this to sound like I’m bragging, but hey, Danny Lanois went to school you know, while those guys had learned from the streets (laughs).
“The things I was talking to Edge about on The Unforgettable Fire, he knew what I was talking about on The Joshua Tree. We were able to fine-tune a record-making system. We could write out arrangements, do bar counts and say things like, ‘Now we’ll do the two-bar intro rather than the four-bar’ — that meant something to them at that point, whereas before it was mysterious. So they were able to fully comprehend anything that I would come up with in terms of lingo.”
As well as having better musical chops, Lanois says that he also detected a change in the personalities of each of the band members, who by now had hit their mid-twenties. “They were just starting to establish their lives,” he says. “It was a transitional time for everyone, a really great time of idealism and optimism. It was all about, ‘What could we do? What are Eno and Lanois going to contribute?’ They were a bunch of kids really and that’s what’s nice, thinking about it now. You can never repeat that as time moves on. There was a great balance; and the dedication was one hundred percent. The decorators had not yet moved in yet and you know, the cars were not as plentiful and the houses in France weren’t there. I’m not being critical of where things have gotten to now or anything — it’s just that when you talk about rock and roll, it’s largely about rolling up your sleeves and being there and wanting the best out of everybody and that’s what we had at the time.”
The sessions progressed through the autumn and winter of ’86, moving between Danesmoate and Melbeach, Edge’s newly-refurbished house by the sea in leafy Monkstown in South Dublin. The large house overlooking Dublin Bay, which was once owned by the Findlaters, a well-known Dublin merchant family, also became a key recording location for The Joshua Tree. “That’s where songs like ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ and what ended up as ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ were born,” Lanois recalls. “That was less of a rock ‘n’ roll room but we made it work. I think there were a lot of headaches, isolating people and having to build baffles around the place. The more that I talk about it, probably the bulk of the record was done at Edge’s house. Even though the Danesmoate sessions were the backbone of the tonality of the record — we got a lot of the drums done in there.”
According to Lanois, most of the mixing of the album was also done at Melbeach.
“If I remember correctly, Eno was not around much for the mixing, and I think Flood had to leave early as well, so Pat McCarthy came in. We were mixing at Melbeach on an AMEK 2500 desk and Steve Lillywhite was mixing back at Windmill on the SSL desk. Yeah, now I remember it — we didn’t have automation at Melbeach so that’s why we needed three guys at the console – it was more like performance mixing.”
While the album was being recorded, both Eno and Lanois pushed the band in the direction of older songs, particularly American roots music, for guidance and sonic inspiration.
Lanois: “We would always be referencing classics. Eno and I were always bringing in American records to listen to, and they weren’t contemporary ones by any means. We would always go back to listening to really good ‘feel’ records, soul records and I think that’s still to this day a great reference point for anybody. We were also referencing Morrissey and Johnny Marr — and their band the Smiths, that was a big reference for us and My Bloody Valentine as I recall were another big influence. We were fans of that textural guitar work.”
After the most intense and most productive period of recording in the history of U2, The Joshua Tree was finally completed early in the New Year 1987. By all accounts the final few weeks were frantic.
“It’s always stuff like, ‘Hey Eno’s leaving in a week, we’ve got to use him up and put him on things that can make a difference’,” says Lanois. “It’s really down to scheduling at a certain point.”
Lanois now says he clearly remembers the feeling of exhaustion among the band and the production team when the album was finally put to bed. “If I remember right, the only person who was left standing at the end is the Edge,” he laughs. “Everyone else is sick, overwhelmed, being carried out on stretchers and people have quit. Edge is the only man left standing because he’s the librarian in the band; he can actually still be level-headed after something like that. So he goes off and sequences the album on his own and sends it off for mastering.”
The eleven songs that eventually made the cut for The Joshua Tree showcase a band at the height of their artistic powers. More than any other U2 album before or since, they capture a feeling and a mood perfectly in tune with the times — and yet completely at odds with the prevailing musical zeitgeist. As Bill Graham wrote in 1996: “It’s the first conclusive evidence that the best young live band of their era had graduated as masterful pop mimics in the studio. With The Joshua Tree, their recorded work finally catches up and even outstrips their live reputation.”
“We approached arranging and producing each song like it was unique,” Edge told Hot Press, “We just hoped the album would have a sonic cohesiveness based on the idea that we were playing it. There was definitely a strong direction but equally we were prepared to sacrifice some continuity to get the rewards of following each song to a conclusion. I hate comparisons but like the Beatles at their height, in terms of unusual production techniques, we wanted to do what was right for the song”.
That was quite a lot of background and information, I know! The article also goes into detail about the songs on The Joshua Tree. Containing U2 classics, Where the Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and In God’s Country, it was a big moment for the band. Their best-selling album with twenty-five million copies sold worldwide, it is one of the biggest-selling albums ever. The Joshua Tree has been selected by writers and music critics as one of the greatest albums of all time. It is my favourite U2 album, as Bono lyrics and the band’s (The Edge – guitars, backing vocals, piano, Adam Clayton – bass guitar and Larry Mullen Jr. – drums, percussion) music is extraordinary! UDiscovermusic.com looked back at U2’s fifth studio album early last year:
“There was, indeed, an unforced and sometimes unadorned nature about the results, on which tints of folk music blended into the rock canvas, especially on the introspective, Dylanesque “Running To Stand Still.” The flavours ran from the blues to the biblical, and even the celebrated “With Or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which became their first American No.1 singles, burned slowly but surely.
The recurring spiritual themes were a perfect fit for the album’s visual imagery, inspired by a photo shoot with Anton Corbijn in the Mojave desert amid the unyielding, aged trees of the title, named after the Old Testament prophet.
Joshua was also home to the more confrontational and outspoken “Bullet The Blue Sky” and ebullient pieces such as “In God’s Country” and another in their expanding catalogue of anthems, “Where The Streets Have No Name.” There was sadness, too, in the album’s dedication to Greg Carroll, the group’s PA, killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin as the album was being created in July 1986.
“In The Joshua Tree, U2 fills in the sketches with sometimes breathtaking signs of growth,” wrote Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times. “Bono Hewson’s lyrics are also more consistently focused and eloquently designed than in past albums, and his singing underscores the band’s expressions of disillusionment and hope with new-found power and passion.” Rolling Stone said that the album “could be the big one, and that’s precisely what it sounds like.”
Britain’s fastest-selling album
How right they were. On its release on March 9, 1987, The Joshua Tree went platinum in the UK in 48 hours and sold 235,000 copies in its first week, becoming Britain’s fastest-selling album ever to that point. It topped the charts throughout Europe and positively tore through the platinum certifications in America, with four million shipments by the end of the year and the hallowed, rarely bestowed diamond certification, for ten million, in 1995.
Underpinning it all was the unstoppable force that was U2 on the road, now embracing stadia as well as arenas. Ninety-six shows, 11 countries and three legs, starting, as the tree took root, in North America in April 1987: five nights at the Los Angeles Arena, the same number at Meadowlands in New Jersey, then on into Europe through the summer, incorporating two mighty nights at Wembley Stadium
Then it was back to the coliseums and stadia of North America for another two and a half months. No one could ever say U2 did not become the biggest band in the world without putting in the miles, or the meticulous devotion to spectacular rock events.
Soon, MTV and BRIT Awards would precede their double-Grammy honours for The Joshua Tree, which also included Best Rock Performance. They were the first two Grammys in a collection that, to 2020, totals 22 trophies”.
Before ending this feature, I was eager to find a couple of reviews that were positive and had different things to say. This is what BBC said in their review of one of the best albums of the 1980s:
“It’s hard to imagine these days, but at one time the world didn’t belong to Paul ‘Bono’ Hewson and his pals. By 1987 the band had undoubtedly become stadium–fillers Europe, but it was America that was their heartland, and they were on the verge of cracking it wide open.
Having already establishing their cavernous sound with producer Steve Lillywhite, by 1984 The Unforgettable Fire had the band opting for the more ambient (and subtle) team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. It was a canny move that both allowed them more space to emote in the studio and also perfectly suited the student population in the States, reared on FM radio.
In time-honoured fashion the band toured the US like madmen, and by 1987 the bands’ American citizenship-by-osmosis had magically occurred. The Joshua Tree’s songs augmented their political stance with bigger subjects such as right-wing intervention in El Salvador (“Bullet The Blue Sky”) and the Mothers Of The Plaza De Mayo in Argentina (‘’Mothers Of The Disappeared’’) In other words, even if the world didn’t yet know it, U2 were now a global brand.
But it wasn’t mere posturing. The Joshua Tree, with its black and white Anton Corbijn sleeve set in Death Valley was a truly widescreen experience. The Edge’s arpeggios (here used to great effect on the opener, Adam Clayton’s rattling traps and Larry Mullen’s rumbling, single note runs were alchemically transformed by Eno and Lanois into pure Americana, complete with wailing harmonicas (''Trip Through Your Wires”) and endless references to deserts and water.
With the first three tracks all conquering the singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic, U2 were now here to stay. Unfortunately it also signalled a point where they began to take themselves a little too seriously (as evinced by their ponderous Rattle And Hum film). But The Joshua Tree – voted number 26 in Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time - 20 years on, it remains their finest moment to this day”.
I am going to finish with a review from AllMusic. Rather than go from scratch and complete a very different album to The Unforgettable Fire, U2 used that as a building block (for The Joshua Tree):
“Using the textured sonics of The Unforgettable Fire as a basis, U2 expanded those innovations by scaling back the songs to a personal setting and adding a grittier attack for its follow-up, The Joshua Tree. It's a move that returns them to the sweeping, anthemic rock of War, but if War was an exploding political bomb, The Joshua Tree is a journey through its aftermath, trying to find sense and hope in the desperation. That means that even the anthems -- the epic opener "Where the Streets Have No Name," the yearning "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" -- have seeds of doubt within their soaring choruses, and those fears take root throughout the album, whether it's in the mournful sliding acoustic guitars of "Running to Stand Still," the surging "One Tree Hill," or the hypnotic elegy "Mothers of the Disappeared." So it might seem a little ironic that U2 became superstars on the back of such a dark record, but their focus has never been clearer, nor has their music been catchier, than on The Joshua Tree. Unexpectedly, U2 have also tempered their textural post-punk with American influences. Not only are Bono's lyrics obsessed with America, but country and blues influences are heard throughout the record, and instead of using these as roots, they're used as ways to add texture to the music. With the uniformly excellent songs -- only the clumsy, heavy rock and portentous lyrics of "Bullet the Blue Sky" fall flat -- the result is a powerful, uncompromising record that became a hit due to its vision and its melody. Never before have U2's big messages sounded so direct and personal”.
On 9th March, U2 fans around the world will share their favourite songs from The Joshua Tree. A truly wonderful album that is still among the most adored ever, I think that it will be shared through the generations and still be discussed decades on. I heard it first in the 1990s, and I have loved it ever since then. I wanted to show my respect and love for…
A classic release.