U2 @ TCF II: Fulfillment

Once down inside the arena, the chariot race to find the best spot was on. Our concert veteran acquaintance had counseled us that, at numbers 978-980, we could still find ourselves about three rows deep on Adam’s side, the lesser desirable of the guitarists. Edge’s side would fill up quicker.

“Last tour I was three rows deep on Adam’s side,” I mention, “and he and I had a connection.” No one’s buying it. “He’ll probably remember me.”

But there are other alternatives. As usual, there’s a walkway out away from the stage, creating an inner circle and an outer circle. One option, the concert veteran insists, is to stand with your back to the walkway so that when Bono and the Edge come out on the catwalk you’ll be able to turn around and have a tremendous view of their nostrils.

The way to the inner circle proves to be a maze. No, come to think of it, I’ve seen passageways like this before—it was rather like the stockyards: steel bars along the sides creating an alleyway, steel ramps beneath to prevent you from tripping, workers in special uniforms with assorted paraphernalia in their hands to keep you moving and orderly. Beneath our feet, in fact, there was no grass to be found anywhere. Interlocking aluminum paneling, grooved to insure we won’t lose our footing should the forecast prove true, covers every inch of TCF Bank turf. This will be no Woodstock mud fest.

After we’ve wound our way around the maze, we find the inner circle to be disappointingly full. We’re half a dozen rows from the stage, even on loser Adam’s side, and the back walkway is already three deep. People are sitting down, claiming spots. We make camp, sitting Indian style in a triangle to maximize space on the aluminum grooves. This is the non-turf we’ll be defending for the next two hours.

Before things get really crazy, I’m out to get a t-shirt. The selection has dwindled by this time in the tour, but the price has remained the same from 2005: $30 for a t-shirt; $40 for a fancier t-shirt. I get a safe, gray, $30 version and one glance at the collar reveals something about the price: Made in Tanzania of 100% African cotton. Good academic that I am, I’ve read Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, so I know intellectually how hard it is to get around the corners that America has on the cotton market, that China has on the textile market. This t-shirt, if I can believe the tag, is consistent with the band’s ethos, a minor but important detail.

African cotton T-shirt in tow, I find things a bit tighter back at the stage. When my wife disappears to the bathroom for twenty minutes, I start to get antsy, convinced that the gentleman who’s wormed his way in front of me will soon fall backwards over my head. However, when she returns with a Dino’s gyro, I’m calmed a bit. We strike up a conversation with some early twenties near us. “How’d you get into U2?” I ask

“I found my dad’s album, the Joshua Tree—and I mean real album, vinyl. That and— ” I’ve forgotten who else, some 70s band, Led Zepellin perhaps—“and I was hooked.” Just as I suspected. This is a family inculcation thing.

And we wait. And it fills up more. There are people all up in my space and I don’t like people all up in my space. A mother and daughter creep in behind us. More family inculcation. I try to make myself bigger. No way am I letting some snot-nosed brat cute her way up in front of me. My wife talks to her, she’s 11. “This is her fifth U2 concert,” my wife tells me later. “She said, ‘I’ve been listening to U2 since I was born.’”

“Well, I’ve been listening since I was 12 and I’m much more discriminating,” I think.

We’re six rows deep. I look up to my right, and there’s Jason Lief, fellow professor, wearing a Twins hat. He’s at least three rows closer than I am. “When did you get here?” he yells over to me.

“2:15,” I say. “When’d you get here?”

“5:30,” he says.

Oh, he’s one of those, I think. “Oh, you’re one of those,” I say. A worm. The last three hours are looking like a lot of wasted time.

The first band, Interpol, is good. They’re dressed in semi-formal black that says, “we could be preppy but we’re rockers so we’ve turned up the sleeves on our button-down shirts and have grown our hair long/mussed it up”; the bassist and keyboard player look disinterested to me. I cheer, nod my head as if, “yeah, I get this music,” but I don’t. I stopped trying to catch lyrics to songs I didn’t know only about two concerts ago. My wife points out a woman going nuts about 25 rows up on the side. Weed—actually, speed. I cheer when they’re done. Unfortunately, the chunk of people in front of me weren’t here to see Interpol, and they don’t split once Interpol’s done like I had hoped.

It’s at least another hour wait after Interpol, with roadies swarming the stage, dissembling and assembling, plugging and checking. Finally, there’s only two left, both blond and oldish, and they won’t leave. After the end of every background song, the crowd roars in anticipation. Then another background song begins.

“What will they open with?” I ask my sister-in-law. She has no idea. She doesn’t know the new album. No one knows the new album. Early this morning, I read an MPR story that says U2 was best in the War album when they were a small-venue band. But with Joshua Tree, said the writer, they packaged their sound for something big and that was bad, the downfall of U2. Then with Achtung Baby, said the writer, they remade themselves. Then trended down. Then trended up with All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Then down. Now still down, said the writer, with No Line on the Horizon. But this is said to be a whirlwind tour, said the write, so he as going to splurge and go to the show.

Basically, if I can read between the lines, when U2 were just upstarts, on the make, when the writer and his snobby friends could be in a small selective group of fans that did not include people like Nicole Retzer, Anne-Marie Lee, and me, they were okay. Since then, not so much.

Reading around a bit more, I found someone in the Minneapolis Star Tribune celebrating the Zoo TV tour, when Bono played the playful, crazy rocker and pulled the camera up to his crotch and other rocker-appropriate stunts. I was there and 16 and it shocked me. But that’s two votes for Achtung Baby, zero for No Line on the Horizon.

But now I’m thinking of opening song possibilities. On the Elevation Tour, U2 opened with “Elevation,” a song I couldn’t stand—“A mole, digging in a hole, digging at my soul now going down—” but that they thought had the pop to be a single and an opener. On the Vertigo Tour they opened with “City of Blinding Lights,” followed immediately by “Vertigo.” They also closed with “Vertigo,” their most singley single since “Beautiful Day,” the song that made the decade for the band.

I think of songs that would fit the mold for opening acts from this album. I like the grinding intensity of the song “No Line on the Horizon,” while “Get on Your Boots” was their single of note from the album, but “Magnificent” has some of the most energy on the album, the one I would like to hear them open with. But “Magnificent” is no crotch-to-the-camera song. “I was born to sing for you,” the song says in verse 2. “I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up/ And sing whatever song you wanted me to/ I give you back my voice/ From the womb, my first cry, it was a joyful noise.” And the final cry of the chorus: “Justified till we die, you and I will magnify/ The Magnificent.”

But no one knows this album.

Dr. Brian Walsh, visiting my poetry class to expound on the music of Bruce Cockburn, also said something interesting about U2 relating to this album, No Line on the Horizon. Walsh is convinced that the Christian impulse of U2 is kept artistically in check by their unbelieving manager, Paul McGuinness, that McGuinness pulls the plug on anything that loses its cutting edge pop-artsiness and keeps U2 relevant. Walsh insists U2 can’t afford another No Line on the Horizon, it’s too Christian, too much of a popular failure.

When the background music finally fades midsong, it’s time. We see them approach first on the video board above. They’re in the building. There they are, larger than life. Where are they? Where are they?

Finally, they come on stage and apparently Bono has read the MPR article too: the opening song is “Even Better Than the Real Thing” from Achtung Baby. In fact, the first four songs are from that album, and I think I’ve flashed back to 1992.

But then the elements kick in. On “Mysterious Ways”—a song that seems to be about the mysteries of the female species but sneaks in the line “the spirit moves in mysterious ways” near the end—while Bono is out on the catwalk, it begins to rain lightly, a seeming rain of blessing.

About two songs later, it really starts to rain. We’ve brought ponchos, but everyone seems to agree that we’re going to weather this thing, Woodstockesque. When it starts to pour, I say screw it, and pull out the ponchos. One of them rips after five minutes so I’m the one left to soak.

Oh no, I think. This Minnesota crowd is going to bail. The last two indoor arena crowds, except for the people in the front of the stage, the real diehards, have been, at least in my opinion, lackluster. Primarily white, well-insured, Scandinavian Lutherans like their U2, but they like it sitting down. I keep scanning the arena throughout the show and almost no one leaves. Perhaps it’s due to the influx of New Mexicans like Doris, perhaps it’s due to the elements themselves, perhaps it’s the financial investment, but the crowd is piqued up to the top row.

Bono is piqued too. The elements and crowd response makes him improvisational. He splices in clips of the show tune “Singing in the rain,” and even digs up “Purple Rain” by Minnesota-product Prince. He introduces the lads as forces of nature/supernature: Larry is thunder and lightning, Adam is an earthquake, Edge is angels wearing beanies. Who’s left? “And then I heard the voice of God…” Bono says. We get the joke and we like the joke, like that he’ll acknowledge his own reputation and primary shortcoming.

Throughout the night, Bono is aware. He pulls the apparently up-and-coming rapper K’naan on stage, a man of Somali heritage who once called Minneapolis home, and they do a rendition of “Stand By Me” which Bono dominates. Still, Bono has done what Bono does best: share the stage in a way that makes U2 benefactors in a positive way, using music to point us to a world event that Bono wants us to pay attention to, the hunger crisis in the horn of Africa, which Bono addresses later in the show.

Later, Bono and the Edge perform an acoustic version of “Stuck in a Moment,” a song originally dedicated to INXS front man Michael Hutchence after his suicide; tonight it’s dedicated to the troubled but talented Amy Winehouse, found dead at 27. U2 are all over fifty now, past, it would seem, the traps of fame and popularity. Yet when it comes to artists in the arena of pop music, U2 is still able to say, “This is our crowd, this is the community we are a part of,” and for that reason, I think, they are still able to bear tremendous witness in that community. The performance comes off tremendously empathetic.

It’s pouring. And the show continues. At one point, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politician who was under house arrest for years, addresses us on the video screen. She’s been freed but thousands like her have not. Won’t we continue to raise our voices, she implores, to speak for freedom? After this, U2 plays the song written for her, “Walk On.” It’s a song that makes you believe, the last song before encore.

As the night winds down, the band seem genuinely impressed at the crowd. At times, during the first part of the rain, I could swear it was otherwise. Edge looked like he was asking himself, “What am I doing at 50 in the rain? I could get pneumonia.” Larry’s tour around the catwalk—he’s supposed to come out and play the bongo for one song—was at best a hurried walk before he repositioned himself under his umbrella. Still, by the end, they all seem loathe to leave. They look around as if to say, “Wow.”

Personally, I’m good with it. I’m soaked to the boxers and I know this can’t go on forever. Bono has been as authentic as I’ve seen him. The last two concerts I thought he was faking it a good portion of the time. This crowd has performed equally well. I’m only disappointed by the set list, which has included only three songs from the new album. On the Vertigo Tour, they played eight songs from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and even Lief agrees—and he’s a theologian—that this album is better. That is to say, it’s more meaningful, less pop-py. It also, apparently, was a total flop.

This would also explain why, after hearing over a year ago that the band was set to release another album close on the heels of this one, that album is nowhere in sight. The album was to be called “Songs of Ascent,” a direct reference to the psalms, an album I can only believe was to be even more, well, spiritual than No Line on the Horizon.

As I left the stadium, soaked, my fingers pruned, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The show was a great show for the masses, unforgettable to many, a spiritual experience for some, but personally, I felt the band rub up against forces greater than themselves—namely market forces and age—that reminded me just how human U2 is, how human I am.

But perhaps that’s exactly what I love about them. No matter how big and grandiose—and, I might add, filthy rich—they’ve managed to remain four lads from Dublin, still on a journey, still looking for something but spreading a very human message of hope along the way. I expect they’ll try to remake themselves next album, and I won’t like it. But I still believe in what they’re trying to do, a very human endeavor.

Walk on, lads, walk on.