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Dave Hannigan: Work ethic of a showband is why U2 broke America in a way that proved beyond so many of their British contemporaries
As a 14-year-old in the depressing Ireland of 1985, it was invigorating to pick up Hot Press at Porter’s newsagent in Wilton Shopping Centre one Friday and read Niall Stokes describing U2 ’s electrifying debut performance at Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue.
By then, the cooler kids at school looked down their noses at the band but it was astonishing to think of them selling out the venue where Ali fought Frazier and so many others, storied home of the New York Knicks in the impossible faraway glamour of the NBA. The very idea of it was a bold splash of desperately needed colour across the canvas of our monochromatic lives.
On August 29, 1992, U2 became just the second musical act, after native New Yorker Billy Joel , to play Yankee Stadium. Evincing his showman’s touch for an ad-lib tapping into local lore, Bono lapsed into Paul Simon ’s Mrs Robinson and improvised his own line: “I dreamed I saw Joe DiMaggio dancing with Marilyn Monroe. ” The crowd went predictably wild.
There surely wasn’t much baseball played down Cedarwood Road on the northside of Dublin in his youth but, at the cathedral in the Bronx where a plaque to Joltin’ Joe stands in Monument Park, Mr Vox knew exactly the name to drop. Madison Square Garden. Yankee Stadium. For four fellas who don’t seem to have been athletically gifted in any way, U2 left an indelible sporting footprint in America.
Among other achievements to celebrate on their 50th anniversary, they have played, often more than once, Giants Stadium, the Boston Garden, the Oakland Coliseum, the Los Angeles Forum, the Staples Center, Saratoga Race Course, MetLife, Gillette Stadium, the Pontiac Silverdome, Ford Field, Three Rivers, Mile High, the Louisiana Superdome, the Houston Astrodome, and the Rose Bowl. To name a few.
This extraordinary quartet also starred at Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans, needing just three songs and a coup de theatre unveiling the names of the victims of 9/11 to create one of the most memorable of all halftime shows. During the interval in Game One of the previous year’s NBA finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers, NBC cut away live to the Fleet Centre in Boston to show U2 belting out Where the Streets Have No Name and Elevation.
As recently as 2018, footage of them performing American Soul was the promotional video for the annual college basketball festival that is NCAA March Madness. Aside from those sporting highlights, their touring history offers a trip through arenas whose names evoke entire chapters in the American story. They lit up the long-gone Joe Louis Arena hard by the banks of the Detroit river on a March night in 1985.
The Adolph Rupp, named for an iconic 1950s basketball coach in Lexington, hosted a barnburner the night before the 2001 Kentucky Derby. And then there was the Brendan Byrne in East Rutherford, carved out of the Meadowlands swamps to host hockey and basketball and to honour the only New Jersey politico who could not be bought.
It was there U2 delivered the longest-ever rendition of Bad, an 18-minute tour de force of a song that was my generation’s Stairway to Heaven. To run your fingers along their entire concert back catalogue is to realise they have put on a show at just about every serious sports venue in these parts. Indoor and outdoor. From the Cow Palace in Daly City, California to the Palace of Auburn Hills outside Detroit.
No field too big. No hall too small. The work ethic of a showband is why U2 broke America in a way that proved beyond so many of their British contemporaries. They put in the hard yards touring off the beaten track in the early stages, cultivating a fan base that stuck with them loyally thereafter.
The curators of U2gigs.com, a forensic accounting of their epic travels, document every concert they played around this country across more than four decades. One night they are in Louisville Gardens where a young Cassius Clay fought in the Golden Gloves, the next they are opening for the J Geils Band at Alumni Memorial Gymnasium in Knoxville, Tennessee. Veering far and wide from the east and west coast haunts traditionally favoured by their peers, they reaped the rewards.
On the War tour in 1983, they put in a shift at the Frank Ritter ice rink in Henrietta, New York, home of the Rochester Institute of Technology Tigers hockey team. Near the Canadian border, as off-Broadway as you can get, they played 17 songs, Bono climbed the speaker stacks, as was his wont, and invited a female fan on stage to dance.
Three nights later, he clambered into the rafters of a tiny basketball gym at Stony Brook University on Long Island, having driven 400 miles by bus and performed two more concerts on the long road south. In a world far removed from the private jets of their future, they grafted.
Having started out in small clubs, their diligence saw them move quickly from filling minor league indoor soccer arenas belonging to outfits such as the San Diego Sockers to selling out the larger homes of NBA teams. Then they graduated to cavernous NFL stadiums. The major leagues. None of that progress was accidental or inevitable.
They just worked as hard as any athlete ever did to reach the biggest stages in sport. Made it all the way to the show. Became the show.
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