“The Joshua Tree” is a milestone in rock music – but do you know all the background information about the making of the record, the difficulties in performing it live, and how Bono and colleagues came up with the new, American direction of “The Joshua Tree” in the first place?
U2: 13 Facts You Didn’t Know About The Joshua Tree
01. What is the Joshua Tree?
With the release of the “Joshua Tree” album, this “tree” became known worldwide. The “Tree” is not a tree, but a lily plant, named after the Joshua palm lily.
02. Where are you going?
Please do not get lost looking for the photo locations. Almost all of the landscapes and plants, including the lily, which has since been vandalized, are not in Joshua Tree National Park, but in the Mojave Desert and Death Valley.
The shot of the breathtaking range of hills for the front cover was also taken at Zabriskie Point there, photographer was Anton Corbijn. All locations are localized on fan sites online, with detailed Google Maps directions.
03. Red Hill Mining Town
The second single was originally not supposed to be “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, which is now revered as a ballad of desire, but “Red Hill Mining Town” – it would have been the only political song of the five releases. While the singles actually released revolve around the search for love and spirituality, “Red Hill Mining Town” deals with the British miners’ strike of 1984/1985.
Although Neil Jordan already made a video, the song was not released and only celebrated its live premiere at “The Joshua Tree Tour 2017”. Bono once lamented the high notes he couldn’t get on stage; Adam Clayton bemoaned the tempo making the song hard to sell in any setlist, calling it a “midtempo malaise”. The song will be released as a new recording for the new concert tour.
04. War in America
With “Mothers Of The Disappeared” U2 released the first of two songs from 1987, which revolved around Argentinian mothers whose children were kidnapped by the henchmen of the military dictatorship. Sting then wrote the second song about that affliction, They Dance Alone, which appeared on his album…Nothing Like The Sun that same year. He and U2 shared their South American experiences on the 1986 Conspiracy Of Hope tour.
“Bullet The Blue Sky” is considered the Irish’s most political song, having played it on every tour since 1987. “Let your guitar sound like war,” was Bono’s instruction to The Edge. His instrument became a bomber plane, Edge’s shrill wah-wah tones became a deadly-sounding charge. Originally intended as a criticism of the Reagan administration, which supported crises in Latin America, the piece is still credible to this day for all the conflicts that Bono deals with in the chant section of the song: Kosovo, Iraq, on the recent tour Syria. Most recently, Bono self-critically addressed his own presumption – believing as a pop star that you could change the world.
05. God is with them
“Where The Streets Have No Name” is the only U2 hit that was performed live almost every regular tour concert on the 1987 “Joshua Tree” tour, and then at every regular tour concert beginning with the 1992 “Zoo TV” tour. No wonder: “The evening can go really bad for us,” Bono once said, “but as soon as this song comes on, everyone has the feeling that God is suddenly in the hall.” The accompanying video is legendary, a reminiscence of the rooftop concert the beatles U2 stand on the roof in Los Angeles and get started, thousands stand below, the police eventually turn off the electricity.
06.Greg Carroll
“I’ll see you again when the stars fall from the sky”: Song number nine, the “One Tree Hill” that glides gently as if on wings, is still the secret fan favorite to this day. The song was dedicated to friend Greg Carroll in the album credits. The band met the Maori on their New Zealand concert tour in 1984, he became their roadie, he died at the age of 26, far from home in Dublin, a drunk driver hit the motorcyclist. In 2011, U2 performed “One Tree Hill” again after a year-long hiatus – Bono gave a speech on the anniversary of Carroll’s death.
07. Infinite Guitar
“The best tune I’ve ever come up with,” said The Edge. He didn’t mean the anthem game in “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” or “One.” It’s the sparse, ambient-esque tones in the fade-out of “With Or Without You,” the band’s first number one hit in the US. “I had to resist the temptation,” the guitarist later stated, “not to bring a solo at the end.” Throughout the song, Edge also uses the previously little-used “Infinite Guitar” sound: a struck note that moves lasts forever.
08. Roots
Before the conception of the album, Bono was hard on himself, suddenly rejecting the band’s past, which was also based on New Wave. “U2 lacks a musical tradition,” judged the singer. He sought solace in the blues and with Dylan; like new gas in the tank was the recording of “Silver and Gold” in 1985, later released as a B-side, in which Keith Richards and Ron Wood were involved.
09. Graffiti sprayer Bono
One of his most famous quotes, recorded in writing, led to a complaint of “wanton damage to property”. At a gig on the Joshua Tree tour in San Francisco during Pride, the singer climbed the backstage Vaillancourt Fountain and wrote on the brickwork, “Rock N Roll Stops The Traffic.” The artist behind the work, Armand Vaillancourt, wasn’t upset, saying: “Good. I want to shake Bono’s hand.” U2 then paid to clean up the well.
10. In Hell
Fans wonder about the enlightenment Bono is looking for in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. He used more phrases than ever before to reach the masses: “I Have Climbed The Highest Mountains”, “Burned Like A Fire”, “Cold As Stone”. The song provided U2 with their most cynical video: Bono and the band walk across the Las Vegas Strip, the singer is kissed by fans who “found what they were looking for” in consumer hell. A spokesman for the entertainment strip said the shoot was good for the city’s image.
11. Kicked off the album
With “Sweetest Thing” U2 hid one of their most popular little songs on a single B-side. “Damn, that piece should have been on the album,” the musicians later judged. A re-recording of “Sweetest Thing” topped the charts in 1998, number one in Ireland, number three in the UK.
12. Manson revenge
The 1987 “Joshua Tree Tour” setlist was interspersed with many covers. The Rattle and Hum album that followed a year later featured their live rendition of the Beatles song “Helter Skelter,” which inspired Bono to make his most famous statement to date: “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles; we’re stealin’ it back.”
13. U2 vs Indies
The band is partly responsible for the ruin of the small American SST label, which released records by Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü, among others. The band Negativland used a sample from “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in 1991 and, seen as worse, advertised U2 on their cover. Bono didn’t stop the lawsuit — the copyrights, the likelihood of confusion — and $70,000 in damages was too much for SST.
