From U2.com

 

It Was Twenty Years Ago

06.03.2007

 

http://www.u2.com/music/albumcovers/md_7.jpg

 

'A lot of the songs were ones that were recorded in Larry’s spare bedroom or Adam’s living room.' On March 9th 1987 U2 released an album called The Joshua Tree.

 

In the next few weeks we'll be turning the spotlight on The Joshua Tree, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its release.

 

First up, here' s what they were saying about the album, just after it was finished - long before anyone realised just how successful it was to be.

 

'The best thing about The Joshua Tree is that they can do ten times better than that"

Paul McGuinness.

 

'With each record we've always looked for some sort of location to inspire the tone of what we were doing and I think the desert is so many things to us. The desert was immensely inspirational to us as a mental image for this record.'

Adam

 

'Whereas with Unforgettable Fire there was a real continuity between all the songs, this is slightly different. It's an album of songs, each song saying a different thing, touching areas that we haven't touched before.'

Larry

 

'I think since really falling in love with America we've started falling in love with the music of the place. A lot of stuff that we didn't have time for when we first formed the group.... BB King, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Patsy Klein, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard - all these artists who are a million miles from where we were coming from.'

Edge

 

'The significant thing about the record for me is that I had to come clean as a word writer. Instead of trying to capture the elusive message of the music, which is what I'd normally try to do with my words, I wanted to speak out specifically but without a placard and without my John Lennon handbook.'

Bono

 

Listen to every track on The Joshua Tree, and watch the videos, HERE

So it was released 20 years ago yesterday :o

 

One of the greatest albums ever written and also one of the best selling with an estimated 25 million sold :D

The Joshua Tree : review

Friday 9 March 2007, by Corinne/Dead

 

 

 

6 Music’s Andrew Collins writes about The Joshua Tree’s powerful impact...

 

It’s March 1987. Terry Waite has been kidnapped in Beirut, rebels have taken the television and radio stations in Manila, and in Washington, the Irangate scandal unfolds. In Glasgow, Special Branch have raided BBC offices and seized tapes of a documentary about the Zircon spy satellite. Mrs Thatcher is in Moscow to talk disarmament with Mr Gorbachev. She also buys a loaf of bread and a tin of pilchards in a supermarket out of solidarity with ordinary Russians. A broom cupboard in London’s Knightsbridge is on the housing market for £36,000. We are very definitely living in the Eighties.

 

Into this troubled and troubling world, where ideology meets capitalism, protest meets tear gas, hedonism meets AIDS and Andy Warhol meets his maker (or so we’re told), comes U2’s fifth studio album, the first post-Live Aid, and one that will underline their claim to be the biggest band on the planet and make The Unforgettable Fire – released in 1984 and the first to road-test artful production team Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno – seem like a dry run.

 

It all seems so long ago now. Imagine a world in which albums come not in fiddly plastic cases but in gorgeous gatefold sleeves, all the better to capture the desert panoramas of photographer Anton Corbijn. Imagine a world, in fact, where albums have a side one and a side two, necessitating a trip from the bean bag to the hi-fi to flip them over. And where Bono is not yet regarded in certain sections of mainstream society as “a dickâ€.

 

To really appreciate what a magnificent achievement The Joshua Tree was, we must rebirth ourselves. In my case, it’s back to college, and to the halls of residence in Battersea, South London, I should have moved out of as a third year art student, but hadn’t. It was to a boxy study bedroom identical to this one that I had returned with my mint copy of The Unforgettable Fire as a wide-eyed first year, its ambient, impressionistic, full-blooded sound like central heating that bitter cold October. The weather outside the window was, of course, all the better for wearing long Oxfam overcoats – perhaps the defining garment of the mid-80s: frugal, practical, yet slightly cinematic with the collar turned up. (U2 albums still come out in the autumn or winter, as a rule.)

 

I had fallen for the English “raincoat bands†in a big way out in the provinces before venturing to London for higher education – the Cure, the Banshees, the Bunnymen, Teardrops Explodes – and although U2 were geographical outsiders, the minor-chord, melodrama in which they traded fit snugly. We didn’t call it “indie†in those days, but this music, big as it was, came from left field.

 

Just as it’s an increasingly tough call to explain how vital and life-changing the Stones were in the 60s and 70s to a generation who know them only in their wrinkled, self-parodic dotage, it’s getting harder to sell U2 to kids who only know them for retreating hairlines and ambassadorial photocalls. But The Joshua Tree captures them in their absolute prime, building on the experimentation that, on The Unforgettable Fire, allowed some fresh air into their trademark sound. It was Bono who, in 1982, had described guitar, bass and drums as the “primary coloursâ€. Eno added a fourth.

 

Opener Where The Streets Have No Name comes floating in on a plangent wave of Eno – the subtlest of intros that as a reward is constantly talked over by radio DJs – building up into an insistent rattle over which Bono croaks from the pit of his soul, banging on about reaching out and touching the flame. Overfamiliarity has probably robbed this of its original power – likewise I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For – but listen again. The Sex Pistols claimed ironically to “mean it, manâ€, but if it’s rock music that beats with the same heart as the best soul, you’ve come to the right place. It’s a fiercely romantic album, with a fire in its belly, and when the time’s right, Bono is more than capable of killing his idols. On the most abidingly visceral cut, Bullet The Blue Sky, against a queasily discordant Edge riff, a stalking Clayton bassline and a restless Mullen beat, Bono rails against his beloved Uncle Sam, at the time wreaking covert havoc in Central America, slapping those dollar bills down. Red Hill Mining Town is its transatlantic twin, this time taking a marriage broken by our own miners’ strike as its theme. (It might have been de rigueur to don the flying picket’s donkey jacket in the 80s, but at least U2 had their own slant on this ugly episode in the history of industrial relations.)

 

Because the big tracks are so well known, it’s a treat to revisit some of the supporting players – the ones even fans sometimes forget – the distant Exit, the harmonica-fuelled Trip Through Your Wires, the almost jaunty One Tree Hill, and Mothers Of The Disappeared, which might have come off a movie soundtrack.

 

It’s too easy to say you had to be there to appreciate the glory of The Joshua Tree, but it’s necessary, I think, to move away some of the archetypes that still dog U2. Yes, he wore a cowboy hat and a waistcoat with nothing under it, but for the record, Bono was growing his mullet out into a shoulder-length bob by 1987. Yes, they were plundering the dressing-up box, but they were in their late twenties! They were having the time of their life.

 

We can see The Joshua Tree in context now. We know that U2’s next album, Rattle & Hum, was to be their first curate’s egg, the first to really divide critics and get up noses. We know that their love affair with widescreen, mythic America would almost blind them to what they got together in Larry’s bedroom for in the first place. We also know that four-to-the-floor stadium rock music would soon become deeply unfashionable within the pages of the inky music press (and it was inky in those days), as rave culture took hold and redrew the battle lines.

 

But for an instance, U2 had the world in the palm of their hand. None of the irony that would dog them in the 90s, less of the piety that still puts people off them, and more of the wonder. They had such a profound, moving, mobilising, even politicising effect on the young, grant-assisted, long-haired me, I will probably always love them, like the old Stones fans love the Stones.

 

The rebels were smoked out in Manila, house prices in the South East of England continued to spiral, and the President of the United States talked his way out of Irangate by claiming ignorance. How the world has changed in 20 years.

 

This date in Deal history: The album that spawned a dealmaker

 

March 9, 1987: Irish rock band U2 released "Joshua Tree," the album that would ultimately propel it to superstardom, and would eventually allow lead singer Bono to become a private equity dealmaker.

 

The album, the band's fifth, is widely considered its best — and often cited as one of the greatest rock albums of all-time. A month after it was released, the band began a worldwide tour that started in U.S. arenas, then transitioned to European arenas and stadiums. As the album received more acclaim — not to mention more airtime on U.S. radio and MTV — U2 was able to add a second U.S. leg to the tour, but this time it sold out stadiums. The success from this record earned the band members a king's fortune. While most rock stars eventually turn to alternate careers, such as acting (or in Ted Nugent's case, wild boar hunting and pig farming), Bono would seek a second career as a private equity magnate.

 

Joshua Tree's wild success also would lead to dramatic changes in the record industry. In the late 1980s, most mainstream record labels were producing so-called "Big Hair bands" that were known for power ballads, or pop-music acts that featured teenagers like New Kids on the Block and Tiffany. In the years between Joshua Tree's release and U2's next studio album, "Achtung Baby" (1991), major record labels would begin to seek out entirely new forms of rock. In turn, big hair bands and teen pop idols were replaced with so-called grunge bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam and rap such as NWA and Public Enemy. Through the 1990s, record labels would continue to take risks on new acts and styles of rock music looking for the next big hit that would pay as handsomely as Island Records' bet on U2.

 

Eventually Island's and U2's successes would lead to the attention of larger labels. By 1989, PolyGram, a unit of Philips, acquired the label and its catalog. As PolyGram accrued a larger stable of super bands through the 1990s — often through additional acquisitions — larger labels again took notice ultimately leading Philips to sell the label to Universal in 1998.

 

Perhaps the wheeling and dealing with the various record companies is what led Bono to consider his second career as a private equity dealmaker. In 2004, Bono shocked not only Hollywood, but also Wall Street when he joined PE veteran and former Silver Lake Partners founder Roger McNamee, and former Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello to form his latest act: Elevation Partners. His new band has gone on to raise a $1.9 billion fund and attract additional talent from blue-chip PE firms such as Blackstone Group and Merrill Lynch & Co. While there is no guarantee that private equity dealmaking will help Bono make more than U2's next platinum hit, one thing is certain; it sure beats Nugent's pig farm.— Matthew Wurtzel

 

Bill Clinton's favourite album of all time apparently. :huh:

 

 

But still not as good as Achtung Baby. :lol: