I had heard bad things about Kings of Leon from other fan reviews so I didn’t go to my seat in the Fleet Center (third level—one takes what one gets). I walked around the place, taking in the atmosphere, chatting with the Amnesty International booth about Burma and with the ONE campaign volunteers about how many U2 fans have joined the campaign on the tour thus far (150,000!). But the driving energy of KofL drew me into the venue and I plopped down in an empty seat just up and left of the stage. They were so intense, driving from one song to another, that they reminded me a little of the Ramones. I actually enjoyed them, even if I didn’t know any of their songs and couldn’t for the life of me understand the lead singer. I liked their studied seriousness, their tight jeans on stick legs, their carefully messed up hair shaking back and forth to the beat as they forced their instruments up to speed. I smiled, thinking about mature band with spiritual resonance and roots mentoring and modeling life in rock ‘n’ roll for young band with spiritual resonance and roots (KofL is three brothers whose father was a traveling southern Pentecostal pastor, along with a cousin).
When they finished I enjoyed watching the U2 roadies swarm the stage, pealing away all the stuff KofL used. The stage, when set up for U2, was so clean with most equipment either under or behind the stage, whereas KofL had it all right there (and maybe that is the only place left to put their amps and whatever). I have never been to a U2 concert and no rock concert of any sort since, geez, maybe Rush in Seattle in the late 1980s. (Yes, I did have tickets to U2 in Seattle then, too, but didn’t go because of morals—I was in my own ascetic moment and thought that the ticket price was better spent helping homeless people. Now I’m more open to seeing how spending a bit of money on joy can be faithful, too.) So I walked around checking out the ellipse stage and all the gear, both on the stage, under it (stairs came up the back on either side of the drum kit) and above the stage where the cool bulb video screens I’d heard about were stored on huge rollers. Later, I found out they can be raised or lowered easily, and were throughout the concert.
While the arena was about 1/5 full during KofL and pretty dead in terms of energy, as the clock neared 8:40, the place was really filling up. I had pretty good seats, looking about straight on to the front of the stage, so I wandered over to my seat and watched. One after another, the U2 assistants came out to check guitars and basses, and then the drum kit. I looked down to the sound board and saw Joe O’Herlihy pulling his pants up and pacing around in front of two huge sound board panels.
Just about 5 to 9, the song I was waiting for came on with the sort of creepy, sort of attractive repetition of “Everyone, everyone” with each time pronounced differently. All of sudden the lights when down, the crowd stood up, and I saw bobbing flashlights walk in from the right of the stage. Next thing I knew, the opening low growl of Edge’s guitar on City of Blinding Lights came on and the video screens descended with glowing lights and confetti began pouring from the ceiling near the tip of the ellipse where Bono emerged singing “The more you see, the less you know . .” and the crowd was going nuts.
He walked around to the front of the stage as the ellipse lit up and the lighting was flashing. It was a much more dramatic beginning than I expected because I sort of thought COBL is a swaying, sing-songy piece and I’d come into the show hoping for Vertigo or Love and Peace or Else as the opener as has been the case at some shows. But this was spectacular. Vertigo came second, with Bono laughing and saying this is not a Spanish town, it’s an Irish town, and then counting in Gaelic to kick off the song. He worked the catwalk out into the crowd. Then right into the groove of Elevation and the crowd immediately took off with the Woo, woo, Woo, wooho, and Bono just let us sing for a bit, and then sang some of the song with us before the band finally kicked in. The Edge took his turn working the left side of the catwalk.
After guitar switches, a single video screen displayed the cover of U2’s first record, Boy, and the band launched into a really rocking version of The Electric Co. with the band sounding for the first time like they had the raw energy of the KofL. It was beautiful and the crowd seemed to know it and sing along pretty well. No lights, no gimmicks, just hard pounding drums and bass, grinding guitar, and great singing. Then, another surprise, I heard the unmistakable plaintive guitar rift that opens The Ocean. They changed some of the lyrics to fit singing it looking back 25 years (and I forgot how short the song is!)
Then they picked back up the speed with the up-beat opening song from 2001’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Beautiful Day. And here, the people really sang it out. The song ended with a brief cover of a song I don’t know from the J Giles Band with a reference to their singer, Peter Wolf, who was apparently in the audience. Bono then gave his “look to the future” speech suggesting that we’re living in a time of miracles and some of those doctors and nurses who are coming up with new medical treatments might be in the audience tonight, and that we should understand that science and religion don’t conflict, but rather God is inspiring such medical innovation. Perhaps the person who will cure cancer is here tonight, Bono said. And they launched into Miracle Drug.
This song was sung in a lovely way, followed by a touching rendition of Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own--really (I can’t believe he can pull out the emotion week after week). It ended with a sort of plea-prayer of longing, and faded out to dark.
After a wardrobe change, and picking up the headband Bono uses for this section, we heard the boom of the huge bass joined by fuzzy loud guitar that leads into Love and Peace or Else. Here, Bono and Larry came out to the tip of the ellipse to sing and whack a marching drum and cymbal. Towards the end, when Bono cries out “where is the love, love and peace” and Edge chimes in with the final wild guitar, Bono took the drum sticks from Larry who ran back around to the drum kit while a spotlight was on Bono, just whacking the drum, really whacking it hard, and the whole song cuts down to that. Boom. It was pretty cool, I think, and it stands as one of the highlights of the new songs. Then Love and Peace morphed into Sunday, Bloody Sunday and in the middle Bono gave a little commentary about his headband—three symbols, three religions, all true, all children of Abraham, and then he vamped a little prayer lament to Father Abraham, calling upon him for help with his children, and leading us in a chant saying “no more” to the hatred and violence. The third song in this set, Bullet the Blue Sky, seemed to here be a commentary on the war in Iraq, with the huge light screen video panels coming down and portraying an F-16 fighter plane as the band sang. Towards the end of the song, bono bulled the blindfold down and knelt down by the drum kit, hands held crossed above his head, pretending to be tied. The image of the Iraqi torture victims was unmistakable. After standing up, he felt his way to the mike to sing versions of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” and “These are the Hands the Built America” before finishing with Bullet. He then dedicated the next song, Running To Stand Still, to the proud men and women serving in the United States military. Staring with Bono on harmonica and Edge on piano, it set a really different tone. People sang really well and loudly on the “la la la de day, la la la la de day, la la la de day” section of the song, and the rest of it, too, for that matter.
What really caught me off guard, however, is the ending. The song is about heroin addicts in Dublin during a hard time, and how for some drugs seemed like the only way out of misery. So at the end of the song, after the feeling the needle chill and the drug entering to do its work, Bono has gone into a chorus of Hallelujahs that make sense in terms of the relief of the addict’s high. But here, as Bono moves into the Halle, halle, hallelujah, the UN Declaration of Human Rights begins scrolling on the huge main video screen and the crowd begins to cheer, and as they get to number three, a woman who seems to be east Asian reads the declarations, including numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6, with the last focusing on equality. And from there, the band kicks into Pride (In The Name of Love). In the midst of it, Bono got the crowd singing with him on the woo woo, oo oo’s and keep them going while he made interjections like a African American pastor, that Dr. King’s dream wasn’t just about the American dream, and it is not just a European dream, or an Asian dream, but it is a dream about equality for the whole world, and the journey of equality moves on, with everyone being equal in the eyes of God, and especially Africans.
The song never ends; it just morphs into the beginning of Where the Streets Have No Name with its plucky meditative guitar notes and Bono intoning connections between the bridge at Selma, important during the Civil Rights movement, to the mouth of the Nile, evocative of Africa’s antiquity, the journey of Equality moves in an expansive direction, growing into a vision of equality for all. Then, instead of the typical beginning primal scream whaaaaaaaoooooooooh at the start of the song, here Bono calls upon South African style shout, sort of like my old Anti-Apartheid tapes from The Joshua Tree era, and it went something like, ahhhh yeaaaa oooooh. And while this is going on musically, the light screens descended with, two with large outlines of the continent of Africa and three scrolling with the flags of Africa. When the band kicked into full gear on this song, I felt the emotional rise of the movement from Love and Peace or Else through to here overwhelm me and I felt like I was going to fly. This, to make the worship analogy, is like the climax of communion at the Easter Vigil, when so much else has built and built through layers of conviction, confession, prayer and song, finally to catch a vision of this heavenly banquet, this sacramental meal, where all are equal and all receive grace and mercy from God’s loving hand. Call me a sucker, or call me a true believer, but although I knew this was coming, I was not prepared for the overwhelming emotional release of this song (which I love, to be sure, but in this context it connected it to such a enormous and awful situation (extreme poverty in Africa) with a vision of healing and hope that just totally lifted my sights to what is possible. During the song, btw, Bono and Adam roamed the ellipse and met in the middle.
After the song, Bono gave a talk about what he’s after with the ONE campaign—he recalled being a boy in 1969 and watching the United States put men on the moon. He recalled, in a not very well disguised poke at today’s politicians, that John F. Kennedy said in the beginning of the 1960s that we’d put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he didn’t take any polls, but just led, and the world followed. That, Bono said, is what the ONE campaign is asking President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, etc. to do. Not to put someone on the moon, but to bring humanity back to earth. We can, he said, end poverty if we only have the will. Not all poverty, but certainly extreme poverty—the kind of poverty where a child will die because of not having a 20 cent immunization. Tonight, he said, we can say no to that kind poverty. Then he introduced “this thing called the ONE campaign and let people know they could text message their names to sigh up during the singing of One. We’re so much more powerful when we work together as one.
Then they sang a soulful version of One, which ended the set. Bono asked us to put our cell phones up and it was a sort of odd beauty to see literally thousands of cell phones light up all around the arena.
Then after much rowdy applause, they came back with their first encore set, a mini trip down ZooTV lane. Opening with a four video screen slot machine style spinning image thing, which included the “Flat Stanley” cartoon image that was part of the show in the 1990s, the band came out with Zoo Station, The Fly, and Mysterious Ways. While these were fun to see, it was almost a ‘wink’ set that said, hey, we know you might like this, even if it does not really fit a show built around earnestness and transparent expression of truth rather than the round about ironic portrayal of truth that was ZooTV. And they even playfully acknowledged this by pausing on the words LOVE and HOPE in the midst of their flashing endless mind-numbing words used during the ZooTV tour. Bono tried to dance during Mysterious Ways, but should have followed his advice from Vertigo, “they know they can’t dance . . . at least they know.”
The last set, the (for me MUCH anticipated) last encore set, was the best. It opened with an incredible version of All Because of You, with loud singing from the audience. Then a warm version of Yahweh, with Edge playing acoustic guitar and Bono sort of roaming the right side of the ellipse. Interestingly, however, he didn’t end on the line I like so much: “take this heart, and make it break.” It was something like, “take this heart, and make it whole.” Not the same, but it fit my image of the night, which was about a vision of wholeness, of healing our lives by recognizing our interconnection, our at-one-ment (those with theological training can read in the extra layer there.) So given my sense of this move towards healing and wholeness, plus my deep love of the song, I hit another emotional high point when I heard Adam dig into the bass line for 40. I’ve dreamed about singing How long, to sing this song, with 20,000 voices strong. Last night, I got my wish and it was awesome. As in previous concerts, the band left one by one, with much applause, but always a return to the chorus. And after Larry left, and the whole stadium was dark, we sang a few more times in a booming voice, 20,000 as one.
Now, I can say, I’ve been to church U2 style. While they may have not played their best show ever (as other reviews have hinted) it was easily the best concert experience I’ve ever had, and one of the most integrated in terms of the idea of the concert. I left both knowing in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul, that we are one and we must join the work of becoming one, and that we’ve got some great music for the journey.
