U2's The Joshua Tree

U2's The Joshua Tree (1986)

Back in 1987, I just graduated eigth grade. I was never much into music by myself. I owe much of the start of my musical taste and appreciation to my eighth grade bud, Eric Reeb. (I have no idea where he is now.) I moved that year too, from Bolingbrook to Somonauk. I spent the last week of eighth grade at Eric's house while my family moved early and settled in at the new house that my parents still live in to this day. (And Morgan's plane just landed a few hours ago and she will be staying a week by herself with Grandma and Grandpa. She'll probably get to sleep in my old room.)

My mom bought me a boom box for eighth grade graduation. All it had on it was a double deck tape player. The first tape I had was a copy of one of Eric's, The Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill. Everybody was listening to that then. If you didn't know all the words, you weren't cool-it was odd. That album and The Violent Femmes song called "Add It Up" you had to know all the words. The first tape I bought, once I moved to Somonauk, at the old Wal-Mart in Plano, Illinois, was U2's The Joshua Tree.

I remember not liking the singles at first. Damn, this is a long time ago that I am trying to remember. I remember turning off the video for "With or Without You." But I did like "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Bullet the Blue Sky." Eric played that second one constantly. So I bought the tape.

This album has always been with me. I thought (and still think) that every album should have to open with a song like "Where the Streets Have No Name." That long instrumental to lull you in to just sit down and listen, was fantastic. Then the album moves on, but all the songs flow together, purely, into each other. I remember for years not knowing which song that one refrain belonged to: "Oh, great ocean. Oh, great sea. Run to the ocean, run to the sea." This was before CDs where you knew where each track ended and began. Even the perfect cacophony of "Bullet the Blue Sky" fits exactly where it needs to go, then the album moves on. The most powerful area of the album goes to the last two tracks, "Exit" and "Mothers of the Disappeared." They were the first real poetry I heard in music, the first time I heard music move the lyrics of a song. When that gun goes off in "Exit," I swear I jumped every time. And to finish off the album with that perfectly melancholy track called "Mothers of the Disappeared" just somehow made you appreciate life.

This album changed me. I first of all became a huge U2 fan for a while. I even remember buying the 45 record singles of "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" just for the B-sides, two B-sides per 45, what a frickin bargain! (All of these songs were never available again until The Best Of 1980-1990 came out in 1998. Those songs are "The Three Sunrises," "Spanish Eyes," "Luminous Times (Hold On To Love)," and "Walk to the Water." Those four songs will always be a sort of epilogue, an extra chapter if you will, that I cannot completely separate from the album. Those four songs were cut from the final album but they comprise a big feel of it for me. I must have listened to those 45s and that tape a million times.

Mostly, The Joshua Tree caused me to become appreciative of what music could really do. I mean, it was either that or The Beastie Boys, and somehow they don't have quite the poetic impact that this album had. I began to rate albums in comparison to The Joshua Tree, seeing how albums were a perfect little art, not just a random collection of songs. It still beats most as a wholly perfect album. I think that if was going to give my daughters a musical education, I would start with this one. That's how perfect The Joshua Tree is.