Part 2
Yumiko and I walked through the glass doorway, underneath the solemn fluorescent lighting and quickly made our way towards the rows and rows of multi-colored mega-product. The second search for “The Tree” began in earnest on this day, November 20th, 2007, but we could not have been further from the quiet solitude of the desert. To the contrary, we were somewhere within the sprawling suburban metropolis known as the greater Los Angeles area, walking amongst the din of fifty plasma TVs, an arsenal of home stereo equipment and various other home appliances. In a sacrilegious move, I had, at least for today, abandoned the independent local “record” store in favor of the convenience and exclusivity that only a behemoth corporate mega-monster store could offer. Curiously, I found myself searching for The Joshua Tree within the bowels of Best Buy.
Of course, what I was looking for on this particular day was not THE actual Joshua tree, but rather the 20th Anniversary deluxe box set re-issue of The Joshua Tree album. In five days, I was heading back up north into the Mojave Desert to finally track down The Tree and I was going to do it right this year. By a grand stroke of luck and synchronicity, the U2 camp decided to re-issue a carefully re-mastered version of their seminal masterwork a mere few days before our trip through the Mojave and Death Valley - a trip which I had carefully planned one year prior and swore to carry out on Thanksgiving weekend, 2007. Road trip music mixes were being compiled and this celebratory offering was an absolute must. Not only would we be getting a pristine transfer of the original album, there were all the B-sides and previously unreleased work-in-progress studio experiments that would undoubtedly provide a panoptic chronicle of how The Joshua Tree came in to focus. After a quick perusal of the music section, I spotted a table displaying various box sets and recent releases. I walked forward and there it was, as promised: a beautiful deluxe box-set commemorating U2’s first masterpiece, The Joshua Tree.
The acquisition of this finely re-packaged gem was simply icing on the cake, as it came at a time when I had just spent months re-tracing the conceptual approach and creative process that U2 went through in the mid-80s to get from point A (The Unforgettable Fire) to point B (The Joshua Tree). The idea was to go back out into the Mojave this year with a more complete understanding of The Joshua Tree’s enigmatic imagery, desert metaphors and passionate yearning to get at the heart of America through it’s rich tradition of Gospel, Country & Western, Soul, R&B, Rockabilly and Blues. What I ultimately discovered through reading, listening to live bootlegs, viewing documentaries and watching rare European live television appearances was a relatively young band with an incredibly fierce devotion to their art.
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The early beginnings of what would give birth to The Joshua Tree were not very impressive. In fact, some of the early attempts by the band to forge a new “Roots Rock” direction after The Unforgettable Fire were, on the surface, painfully bad, especially when cover songs were involved. But the one thing that they did have was a passion about what they were doing and a vision about where they wanted to take it, and that was glaringly apparent from the first down beat. As an artist, it is a very courageous move to step out of one’s comfort zone and immerse oneself in a relatively unfamiliar form or style. It is admirable that U2 persevered. And it is nothing short of miraculous that out of a not-so-promising beginning arose such incredible songs and recorded performances, presented in a cinematic grandeur that still, twenty years later, retains every bit of its majesty.
It all began in 1985 with Bono’s participation in the Sun City album project - spearheaded by Steven Van Zandt’s Artists United Against Apartheid - where Bono became committed to immersing himself in the musical traditions of 20th century America as well as discovering his own Irish musical roots. The Delta Blues-inspired “Silver and Gold,” written by Bono in a one-night frenzy and recorded with Keith Richards and Ron Wood for the Sun City album, was the dividing line between The Unforgettable Fire and the future. Even though it is possible to argue that, thematically, The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree are like two different volumes of a single meditation on America’s paradoxical and enigmatic character, the musical grit and lyrical realism that the band sought towards the end of 1985 is in sharp contrast to the impressionistic, abstract experimentalism of 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire.
In early 1986, U2 had very little in terms of developed ideas to bank a masterpiece album on. Their infamous appearance on Ireland’s TV Ga Ga in January of that year proved to be a premature showcase of the band’s new direction. In fact, U2 felt so embarrassed by the gig that they asked TV Ga Ga not to air the performance on television. The show’s producers, reportedly sharing the same sentiment, happily obliged the band. This performance, however, revealed one important thing: Even though U2 had not quite found their new direction yet, they had a fierce determination and a reserve of unbound energy that, above all, lead one to believe that if they tweaked this and got it right, they were going to be a major force to be reckoned with. As has always been the case with U2, their power lay within the spirit, heart and conviction of their ideas, even if they appear much rougher around the edges than their over-groomed peers.
Something
truly magical happened throughout 1986 as U2 put their head down and proceeded
to draw blood from a stone. At the time of the TV Ga
Ga
performance,
the band had a painfully weird song called “Woman Fish” and a rough
version of “Trip Through Your Wires,” both of which had really
no meaningful or discernable lyrics to speak of at the time. In addition to
that, there was a rough demo of “Red Hill Mining Town,” a simple
chord progression idea that would one day become “With or Without You” and
a bass/drums/guitar jam that would become the foundation for “Bullet
The Blue Sky.” Another public appearance at Ireland’s “Self
Aid” benefit concert in May, 1986, revealed that U2 were unrelenting
in their pursuit of the American Rock ‘n’ Roll tradition, opening
with a stiff-but-spirited cover of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon
Everybody.” Also within that set was a raw, searing cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s
Farm.” When U2 hit the stage for their final appearance at the aforementioned
(in Part 1) Amnesty International Conspiracy
of Hope Tour in New Jersey on June 15th, 1986, they were beginning to find
the spirit and momentum that would
allow them to fully realize the material for The Joshua Tree. The
way in which things coalesced into what we know as The Joshua Tree album today
is truly
an amazing occurrence and, fan or not of U2, they should be commended for taking
such a huge artistic leap into the unknown.
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I had waited nearly an entire year to continue my quest for The Tree since abandoning my search last year just as the sun began to set over the Mojave Desert on December 3rd, 2006. Since that time, I was able to confirm that The Tree’s remains did, in fact, still lie on the desert floor. This year, our trip had been carefully planned: Yumiko, Tara and I were going to find The Tree and then proceed on to Death Valley where we would stay over for just one night. Part two of the “mission” this year was to also visit the spot where Anton Corbijn had shot U2 amidst those beautiful desert badlands on the front cover of The Joshua Tree: Zabriskie Point. Sunday, November 25th was going to be the day.
Early morning came quickly as Yumiko and I stumbled out of bed in the darkness. After a quick gathering of last minute items, we pulled the car around to load up. Tara, our two-year-ten-month old daughter, awoke amongst all the commotion and once everything was loaded, we snatched her up, made a dash for the car and strapped her in. When I fired our car to life – and I really am not kidding about this for added drama – the very first line of the first verse of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” rang out from the car speakers. I asked my wife if she had put a CD in at some point earlier and she shook her head no. “It’s the radio,” she replied. Unbelievable. THAT particular song just happened to be ramping up on the radio as we began our journey. Even my daughter took notice as she started shouting, “moon!” “moon!” Tara knows “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” as “The Moon Song” because my wife edited some video footage from last year’s trip - which included a few prominent shots of a rising full moon - to the music of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” So we pulled out on to the highway singing “The Moon Song” and raced eastward into the early morning sun.
Climbing out of the Los Angeles basin and ascending towards the barren high desert near Hesperia and Victorville is one of several “escape routes” commonly used by masses of weary Angelenos as they take flight from the city on desperate weekend get-aways. But our journey really started when we veered north on to highway 395 and began to leave greater Los Angeles and its adjacent desert communities in the dust. There is often an unspoken ritual involved with traveling in the desert as the vast landscape slowly churns away, mile after mile. Conversation gives way to quiet reflection and quiet reflection gives way to a carefully selected road trip soundtrack. Our traveling music was, of course, comprised of virtually everything from The Joshua Tree / Rattle and Hum era, with a few complimentary artists added in: Roy Orbison, Merle Haggard, Leadbelly, The Everly Brothers, Elvis, Robbie Robertson, The Band and Bob Dylan. But most of the time we were listening to U2. And the rule was that there was to be no other U2 except for stuff that was recorded between late-1985 and late-1989. As one would imagine, the U2 catalog from this era sounds absolutely fantastic amid the sand and sagebrush. “Trip Through Your Wires” – often cited as the awkward “throw-away” song on The Joshua Tree – becomes much more prominent on a desert highway. And other less traveled gems from the Rattle and Hum era, like “Hawkmoon 269,” “A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel,” the Woody Guthrie cover of “Jesus Christ,” “Love Rescue Me” and “Hallelujah Here She Comes” truly reveal themselves in the desert as spirited cries of wanderlust, communion and regret on the high frontier of life.
The true prize as we continued north towards Death Valley was to listen to the newly re-mastered re-issue of The Joshua Tree in its entirety. In this day and age, it is easy to overlook and underestimate the art of the “album” – an art which is now as antiquated as a double feature at a drive-in theatre, family-owned hardware stores and full-serve gas stations. Gone now are the illustrated themes, heart-felt narratives and abstract vignettes that used to characterize a collection of songs grouped together as one work. The album. It was once the norm. Now it is a lost and forgotten form, squelched by the insatiable corporate machine that drives the music business under a short-term, no-time-for-losers profit manifesto. But there with us on that lonely highway was what I consider, still, twenty years later, to be a wonderful and beautiful album. An album that draws the listener in with unabashed cinematic beauty and unfolds like a story, rising and falling, then finally resolves as the last notes disappear into the silence. As “Mothers of the Disappeared” ended, I threw the car in neutral, pulled the parking brake and turned off the engine. Although not at all timed to coincide, we had just come to the final leg of our journey to find The Tree: a remote gas station near the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
While searching for clues and directions to The Tree prior to our trip in December, 2006, I got the impression that there was an unspoken code amongst those on the internet who had already visited The Tree not to publicly divulge too much information about its location. There is sufficient information out there in cyberspace to locate The Tree if one is really serious about it, but as I discovered through first-hand experience, not all the information floating around is accurate. In keeping with this code of semi-secrecy, I do not think it appropriate to literally reveal our actual route, however, any astute reader should be able to piece together my given clues with whatever else is available in order to confirm a location. One belief that I can dispel is that The Tree is in Joshua Tree National Park – a common myth fueled by speculation that U2 chose the album name The Joshua Tree as a tribute to country rock pioneer Gram Parsons, which is not at all true.
Leaving the gas station in our rear-view mirror, we headed east along the edge of a spectacular salt flat. The sky had been a little murky since leaving LA and as the morning hours waned, the sun occasionally bled through the clouds. We had not been blessed with the immaculate weather that we were so lucky to receive last year, but the desert remained beautiful nonetheless. As we made our final approach dropping into the valley where The Tree lay, that familiar mountain range appeared on the horizon, looming larger and more magnificent than anything that could be captured through the lens of a camera. Once again, it was like stepping into a painting or a photograph. I had spent more than a few hours throughout the last year studying the mountain profile of this area, in hopes that, when I returned, I wouldn’t have to embark on an enormous scouting mission like I did last December. The plan was to pick up right where I left off – parking the car at the last spot we stopped at on our 2006 trip, where the mountain profile seemed to look exactly like the Corbijn photos. All my subsequent “research” after throwing in the towel last year indicated that that was exactly where I needed to be. The moment was at hand.
U2 Photography by Anton Corbijn
Stills from Outside It's America
Live band shots by unknown/uncredited photographers