"My" Band

Say what you will about them, and there are those among you who will say some pretty nasty things, U2 is my band. It's not that I own every single they've ever produced, or that I have a collection of rare U2 EP's -- I don't. I've only been to see them once (which I'll get to later). I know people, like my former colleague at New Visions for Public Schools, Gwen Baker, who have seen them many, many times and could lay more convincing claim to them than I can.

That said, they are mine.

I can just hear the wincing now, particularly from my music biz friends like Jem Aswad and Ken Weinstein. From an "Industry" standpoint, I'm sure they're quite correct in pointing out that U2's time has come and gone, that they should gracefully step aside and make room for the Young Turks coming up behind them, and that they run the danger of becoming an aging parody of themselves.

Doesn't matter. They rock.

I've also heard many people trash Bono. They brand him pretentious and overrated as a vocalist. They suggest that his never-ending altruism in the third world is nothing more than self-aggrandizement at worst, Catholic guilt at best.

Could be, could be. Don't care. He's got soul.

Maybe it's just a personal thing. They came into my life just as it was opening up. I may have heard "I Will Follow" on the radio, along with the rest of the world, in 1980, but the first time I remember listening intently to the "Boy" album was with Roger Bodine as freshmen at Syracuse University. Both he and Jem were responsible for opening up my musical appreciation from the classic rock and top-40 I'd heard during high school. Both (especially Jem) had extensive record collections; thanks to his job at Desert Shore Records Jem's was constantly expanding, taking over his dorm room. That album sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. It touched me. It's on my iPod now, and when those songs come up, thirty years later, they still reach deep.

I got to see them live at Cayuga Community College in Auburn, New York on April 27, 1983. I had seen a few concerts by then, but not many. None of them came close to this one. To say that my friends and I got "caught up" in that performance would be an understatement. They took me somewhere else that night; the whole gym, which wasn't much bigger than my high school gymnasium, seemed to lift up from its foundations at one point. I was only twenty years old, so I don't think I realized exactly what was going on at the time. Looking back now, I don't have much more to offer by way of an explanation. All I can say is that I was moved by their music. I was transported.

It was shortly after this show that U2 exploded into superstardom with their performance during Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. A few years after that "Joshua Tree" came out, and I still list it as one of my Perfect Albums, a "Desert-Island Disc," I guess you could say, right up there with "Songs in the Key of Life," "What's Going On," "Pet Sounds," and "American Idiot." Because he has a memory like a steel trap, I'm sure he could tell the story better, but I recall sitting in a bar with Jem near his apartment on First Avenue and First Street in Manhattan and hearing the record for the first time. As I remember it, they played it all the way through, and the few of us at the bar stopped our conversations to listen and were generally astounded by what we'd heard.

U2 is now more or less considered a "classic rock" band. Unlike the Stones, the Beatles, or the Who, they don't belong to my parents' generation, or even my older brother's. I came of age in the 1980's and they were my soundtrack. As a result, I'll always think of U2 as "my" band, and will stubbornly keep cynicism out of the conversation. And I will always, always, look forward to what they will come out with next.