rattle and hum
I love TV. I love watching those images flitter by and being swayed and moved toward the product of feeling, of emotion and in the end knowing that your thoughts are your own. I watched the U2 elevation tour and aVH1 show that followed. Great images and fantastic music. Visionary listening is what letting programs like that wash you with. Whether you like the music or images doesn�t matter because you�re still faced with looking at what moves you about those things…good or bad.
I remembered the first time I heard tracks from the Joshua Tree album. the pounding of �Bullet in the Blue Sky�, the soaring sound of �In God�s Country�. Shit I love that. I listened on a crappy tape deck while laying on the floor of my parents house. I borrowed the tape, never gave it back and kept my ear tucked to that tin-sounding 2 inch speaker.
Later, U2 was coming through town. They were selling $5 tickets of their new show and filling up Sun Devil Stadium for two nights. I wasn�t allowed to go but that was the only color portion of the multi-faceted Rattle & Hum movie. Damn I hated my parents for not letting me go.
I wasn�t so mad at them at the time until I saw the film. I watched every image knowing that what I was seeing was ground-breaking, it was revolutionary for my lifetime. It was the equivalent for us what Scorsese�s Woodstock film had been for my parent�s generation. I fell in love with driving 35 minutes away with a friend of mine to stand across the way and high enough to look into Sun Devil Stadium and imagine what it would be like to be part of that crowd. I had seen the movie so many times that I knew at what point in the song the helicopter shot would come up over the wall as the lights would blind the lens. I could plot exactly where that helicopter would come up, what people were doing when it did and how when those lights hit I wouldn�t squint because I didn�t want to miss anything.
About the time my Rattle & Hum tape had worn thin Achtung Baby surfaced. It was strange and dark and I found �Zoo Station� a bit disheartening. It wasn�t what Joshua Tree and it made me mad been but something made me listen, I couldn�t turn it off. First, the radio edits of the songs were everywhere and everyone knew them. My friends and I would sing �Mysterious Ways� and �The Fly� but when I was alone those rarely got played. Instead I listened to every tome of �Acrobat� and �Until The End of the World�. Novels written in short verse. �…don�t let the bastards grind you down�
I like to imagine the second verse of �Until the End of the World� as Judas talking to Jesus. �I took the money, I spiked your drink….I kissed your lips and broke your heart.�
The feeling those songs leave you with. The images that flow through when listening. It�s because of that feeling that I wanted to do concert video. There�s got to be a way of enrapturing the audience, adding an element they don�t bring with them but certainly leave with. Our team is charged with adding a new dimention to the standard �video wallpaper�. We�re not always going to get the creative throughput we�d like but for every bit we do we give back a portion of what made us want this livelyhood. I love music. Music and TV.
