“Hello Bonnaroo. We're the U2 group, a boy band from the north side of Dublin.”
With that characteristically goofy understatement, Paul David Hewson introduced his band to the first American festival crowd they'd played for in more than three decades. U2, currently on a tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their monumental breakthrough record The Joshua Tree, headlined Bonnaroo's What Stage on Friday night, ripping through all 11 of that album's tracks along with eight other set-list staples. With recent stops at the Rose Bowl, Soldier Field and other stadiums across the country — many of them sold-out — Bono & Co. are likely the biggest headliners ’Roo has ever landed. So big that, even with Bonnaroo's massive main stage and high capacity for production, the band couldn't bring along many of the stage elements they've been using on this tour. But what they did bring, of course, was 40 years' worth of impossibly polished, outsized post-punk hooks and Bono's famously Americanophilic optimism.
Before the band took the stage just after 11 p.m., Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes quotes rolled by on the What Stage screen as The Waterboys' “The Whole of the Moon” issued from the stage speakers. The group took their positions quietly, and before anyone seemed to notice, the house music cut and they rocketed into “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” as banally monikered drummer Larry Mullen Jr. played that iconic four-on-the-floor beat and The Edge paraded out onto a catwalk that stretched into the crowd. For their opening trio of non-Joshua tunes, U2 played without the massive screens illuminated — just four dudes, the same four dudes it's always been, playing “Sunday,” “New Year's Day” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” as cleanly and precisely as they ever have.
Then, with the Joshua songs came the Joshua production — red-tinted shots of the American Southwest during “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “With or Without You,” men and women donning combat helmets in front of an American flag, a woman in an American flag bikini spinning a lasso. Joshua Tree is, of course, U2's ode to America, a country that — as Bono told the crowd — "the whole world sounds off about … because the whole world has a stake in [it]." He said that tunes like “Red Hill Mining Town,” a song inspired by the U.K.'s National Union of Mineworkers strike in 1984, feel more relevant now than perhaps ever before. Clips from a ’50s TV Western called Trackdown played on the screen, with characters condemning a con man by the name of Trump — “Trump, you're a liar,” they called out at the snake-oil salesmen's suggestion that he could keep the town safe by building a wall. (Yes, it's a real episode.)
But there were moments of levity as well, like when Bono called the harmonica an instrument “invented in Germany, perfected in America and murdered by an Irishman” before blowing on the ol' mouth harp during the dour and austere “Running to Stand Still.” He also thanked Bonnaroo for naming the festival after him — good one, Dad — and dedicated “One Tree Hill” to Chris Cornell's daughter Lily before closing out the band's main set with Joshua Tree's last two songs.
The band didn't retreat from the stage for long, returning moments later for a five-song encore that began with fireworks-punctuated renditions of “Beautiful Day” and “Elevation.” There were more vague and grandiose outbursts of idealism, of course — those are Bono's stock-in-trade, after all — ahead of show-closers “Vertigo,” “Ultra Violet (Light My Way)” and “One.”
Many of the ’Roosters near us during the set were quite clearly U2 first-timers — we heard some criticism that the production was “too cheesy,” that Bono's hopeful outbursts were “too preachy.” But this is a band — an institution, really — known for grand, sweeping gestures, for blowing rock 'n' roll up to a magnitude of 1,000, filling arenas and stadiums with earnest sentimentality and calls-to-arms to “scare the shite out of our elected officials.” Maybe it was broad, maybe it was sentimental. But if there's a decades-strong arena outfit that better embodies Bonnaroo's mantra “Radiate Positivity,” we sure as hell don't know who it is.
See our slideshow for more photos, and see our full recap of Bonnaroo 2017 Day Two.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
