The raison d'être for U2's latest massive-scale summer stadium tour was ostensibly to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their best album, "The Joshua Tree." That's it. Easy peasy. For once, it looked as if the Irish rock quartet was finally willing to let fans enjoy a straight shot of nostalgia without a new album or some other kind of fresh twist, just like the Stones, McCartney and so many others have done in recent years.
At its first of two concerts at Soldier Field on Saturday, though — sold-out shows that drew Minnesotans in droves, despite rumors of a pending Minneapolis date — U2 failed miserably at that simple task of keeping it simple. But it triumphed by nearly every other standard.
All Bono had to do was let the selfie-taking revelers and hand-holding Gen X couples enjoy "With or Without You" without fussing over all the woes in the world. Wouldn't you know it, though, Johnny Do-Gooder found a way to tie his band's old material to current headlines, and spark timeless soul-searching questions in the songs.
The singer's modern take on the old songs started up even during the older, pre-"Joshua Tree" songs they played at the start of the show on a small, stark thrust stage.
Bono mentioned terrorist attacks in England and gun violence in Chicago in the opener "Sunday Bloody Sunday," and then he set up the show's thematic exploration of American idealism in "Bad," infusing it with snippets of Paul Simon's "America." As the 70,000 fans sang in unison to "Pride (In the Name of Love)," he rededicated the Martin Luther King Jr. tribute to "those who are still holding onto the American dream, and those who are letting it go."
Reissued as an expanded boxed-set just last week, "The Joshua Tree" itself was partly a love letter and epitaph to the drying-up American landscape the band saw circa 1987. On Saturday, though, Bono actually emphasized the good — some might say "great" — still left in America, pitching it as a fertile territory for freedom and brotherly love.
As the four band members walked from the small stage to the big stage to kick off the album portion of the concert, the droning intro of "Where the Streets Have No Name" started up in unison to a wow-inducing, football-field-sized wraparound video-screen showing scenes of a drive down a lost-highway in the desert.
Those video images — filmed by the band's longtime collaborator Anton Corbijn — were as integral as Bono's comments in making fans rethink the "Joshua Tree" material. After more footage celebrating the American landscape showed through "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for" and "With or Without You," the scenery turned grittier and more provocative in the "Bullet the Blue Sky," as Americans of varying age and race were seen donning war helmets and standing in front of a painted U.S. flag.
