The first album I was ever intimate with was U2's "Rattle and Hum."
By intimate, I don't mean "liked" or "loved." What I mean is this: The cassette tape was a constant presence in my stereo for the better part of a year in the late 1980s. I played it in the car, I played it in my room, I played it over and over and over again, singing along with — emulating — Bono's wails and snarls over and over again so much that even now, 30 years later, I can still perform much of the album if it suddenly appears on a sound system within earshot. Like Bono, I no longer hit the high notes quite so effortlessly, and the Gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" resonates now, in my forties, in ways it didn't when I was a teenager. But still.
It may seem odd that "Rattle and Hum" inspired this passion in me; it was U2's prior album, "The Joshua Tree," that launched the band into the pantheon of rock gods, and the follow-up live album — if I remember correctly — was judged a lesser effort. But you don't fully decide what music you find or finds you, especially in rural Kansas in the late 1980s, and the album's release in 1988 coincided with my sophomore year of high school. I was ready to be smitten with so much about life, and musically, "Rattle and Hum" immediately became what I loved most.
It's possible the competition wasn't really there. Again, I lived in rural Kansas during the pre-Internet age. It's possible I might've heard of bands like, say, the Pixies, and I remember a skater friend had a copy of an early Red Hot Chili Peppers, but my high school years were dominated by hair metal, Young MC, and this new guy named Garth Brooks. Later, I would envy friends who spent those same years listening to the Smiths. I'd never heard of them.
Next to "Cherry Pie," U2 seemed deep and authentic and they sang in overt ways about Christian concepts that, at the time, I'd only heard from Christian bands. At the time, too, Bono's perpetual smug righteousness - a trait he's carried forth into late middle-age - wore much better when he was in his 20s and I, a teen, was finding what I cared about. Yeah! Killing Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong! Apartheid is bad! Albert Goldman is an unethical book writer!
Some of the causes have aged better than others.
Two other good memories of the album: My senior year in college, taking a long road trip with my college band, and singing the album at the top of my lungs with Mike Yutzy. And a group of friends "borrowing" the college's digital projector to show the concert movie of the same name on the side of a dormitory.
I put the album on over the weekend for a short roadtrip — "Rattle ahd Hum's" running time being equivalent to about the length of a quick turnpike run between Emporia and Lawrence, Kansas. When "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" ended, my son offered a slow, sarcastic golf clap.
Punk.
I guess my passions won't be his, which is fine. I won't be 15 again, which is mostly good. But it was good to rediscover the album, to rediscover my Bono impression. I still haven't found what I'm looking for, either, but "Rattle and Hum" puts me a little closer to locating it.
