In its 41-year history, U2 had never headlined a music festival in the U. S. until Friday night at Bonnaroo.
When U2 took the stage at Bonnaroo Friday night, they essentially touched down from another stratosphere.
The first sound the band made? The unmistakable drumbeat and guitar chimes of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” — a song that thousands in that audience have adored for decades.
But let’s put all of that pretense aside for a moment.
At Bonnaroo, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers had the rare chance to feel like a brand-new band.
In their 41-year history, U2 had never headlined a music festival in the U. S. until Friday night at Bonnaroo.
Since the late ’80s, they’ve headlined their own concerts at stadiums and arenas: preaching to the converted on a massive scale.
But at Bonnaroo — just their second festival ever, in fact — they performed for an audience filled with twenty-somethings. It’s a sight they’ve rarely seen in the 21st century.
That made Bonnaroo a particularly unusual stop on the band’s current U. S. tour, in which they’ re revisiting their 1987 landmark album “The Joshua Tree.” And strangely, the song arc they’ ve worked out for this tour is an inspired fit for newcomers to the band.
Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. took the stage with literally no fanfare — no stage light directions, no introduction, no video screens. (I actually had to interrupt a conversation some fans next to me were having, telling them, “Hey guys! U2!”)
And that was the norm for the first three songs: “Sunday Bloody Sunday, ” “New Year’s Day” and “Pride (In The Name of Love) , ” all songs from the band’s early years, when they, too, were in their teens and twenties.
Then, the band’s custom high-definition video screens came alive, with transfixing imagery tailored for each song of “The Joshua Tree.”
At this point, the band had the entire massive field in front of the “What” stage in sync with them, from the peaks and valleys of “Joshua Tree” tracks “I Still Haven’ t Found What I’ m Looking For” to “Mothers of the Disappeared.”
“These songs belong to you now, ” Bono exclaimed in the midst of “With or Without You.”
And man, those songs — whoever owns them — sounded fantastic, ringing out crisp and clear on the Bonnaroo grounds. And it’s all the more impressive knowing that many of them were truly generated with just one guitar, one bass, one drum kit and one, um, Bono.
There’s only one Bono, of course.
He punctuated these 30-year-old tunes with remarks that re-framed their focus to contemporary issues. During “Pride” — a song about Martin Luther King, Jr. — he told the audience, “”Some people may think (his) dream is dead, but not at Bonnaroo tonight…but maybe the dream is just telling us to wake up.”
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“One Tree Hill” was dedicated to the eldest daughter of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who died last month at age 52.
“This next song is about a friend of ours that was stolen away from us far too soon, way back then, ” Bono said. “And I’ m sure a lot of people here at Bonnaroo have had a similar experience. Tonight, we want to sing it for Lily Cornell. Her dad had an epic heart.”
He also had the U. K.’s city of Manchester — which recently endured a terrorist attack at a concert — on his mind, as well as London.
Through an encore of post “Tree” tunes — from “Beautiful Day” to “One” — he dedicated the evening to “The rolling hills of Tennessee, “
And before they took their final bow, Bono cracked a joke he’d probably been saving for months.
“What an extraordinary thing Bonnaroo is, ” he said. “Thank you for naming it after me.”
