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The Joshua Tree Tour Dec 5, 1987 (37 years ago) Tampa Stadium Tampa, Florida, United States
Buckwheat Zydeco Los Lobos
Revisiting U2's original 'Joshua Tree' tour stop at Tampa Stadium, 30 years later By Jay Cridlin Tampa Bay Times Published June 12 2017
Three weeks before Christmas 1987, Tampa Bay hosted a wild weekend of live music.
Whitney Houston played the USF Sun Dome. The Red Hot Chili Peppers took the stage at Jannus Landing. At Ruth Eckerd Hall, Andy Williams was preparing four Christmas shows over two days.
But for more than 50,000 fans, there was only one show that weekend that mattered: U2 at Tampa Stadium on Saturday, Dec. 5, 1987.
"We’re here to warm up your winter night!" Bono, then 27, shouted to the crowd. "There’s only one kind of audience that you can take into a winter night. And they’ll sing louder than any singer in any rock and roll band, and that’s the U2 audience. So you wanna sing with me?"
Did they ever. This was the original Joshua Tree tour, the one that catapulted U2 from big theaters and arenas to stadiums across America. Thirty years later, U2 is bringing The Joshua Tree back to Tampa on Wednesday with a 30th anniversary performance at Raymond James Stadium.
Looking back at that 1987, show, it’s interesting to see just how the world saw U2 at the time, and how U2 saw themselves.
U2 had played Tampa several times before the Joshua Tree tour, including gigs at the USF Sun Dome in 1985, Curtis Hixon Hall twice in 1983 and even an old club called the End Zone in 1981. But by the time they came back in 1997, they were, in the words of a Tampa Tribune headline, "the band that matters" in rock music. They had a reputation for being "heavy-handed and pretentious," wrote the St. Petersburg Times, but that only seemed to endear them more to certain fans.
In a preview of the concert, the Tribune polled several University of Tampa students about why U2’s music mattered so much.
"They represent a whole different attitude for the way music is going these days," said Richard McBrine, 21. "It’s not just sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. ... Bono’s lyrics are about human experience. When music gets to that level ... it’s worth 50 bucks to go see it."
Tickets weren’t quite that much, but they did sell out quickly — in about a day and a half, according to the St. Petersburg Times. With Los Lobos and Buckwheat Zydeco tapped as openers, the concert — one of the last on U2’s original Joshua Tree tour — was set to be a full-on love letter to America, just like the album that preceded it.
"We’re a long way from Ireland, but I know we got some Irish people here," Bono said. "Those of you who are not Irish, of course, we make you honorary Irishmen and -women for the night."
U2 at this time was very much concerned with global issues; Bono spoke about politics in Ireland and America, and gave a shout-out to Amnesty International. But they were not yet quite the worldwide citizens and emissaries they would become. This much was evident when the ever-loquacious frontman engaged in a bit of observational comedy emphasizing his Emerald Isle ties.
"Some people have been talking to me about, they say, ‘Bono, your accent has changed, and you’re starting to sound like an American.’ I said, what do you mean? They say to me, ‘Well, you keep saying words you’ve never said before, like "party" or something like that. What is this "party" thing, anyway? What does it mean?’ And other things — people come up and say, ‘Bono, you’re really intense.’ What does that mean? In Dublin City, if somebody came up and said you were really intense, you’d smack ’em in the gob. But I take it over here it’s a compliment, is that right?"
Musically, the band delivered a range of hits to that point, including I Will Follow, Gloria, Sunday Bloody Sunday, New Year’s Day and Pride (In the Name of Love). From The Joshua Tree, they played all the big hits, including opener Where the Streets Have No Name, With or Without You and I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For; the only Joshua Tree songs that didn’t get a spin were Red Hill Mining Town and Mothers of the Disappeared.
They played snippets of the Doors’ Riders on the Storm and the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday and Sympathy For the Devil, and at the end, during 40, a little holiday bonus: A snippet of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? (but not, unfortunately, Bono’s legendary line "Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you!"). And Bono pulled a fan named Chris Lee up on stage to play guitar on a cover of People Get Ready.
"Bono’s reckless, jaunty stage style included long skipping jigs across the full breadth of the wide stage; he strutted and flailed and flung his head back," wrote St. Petersburg Times reviewer Eric Snider. "Although he’s been criticized for being heavy-handed and pretentious, appeared sincerely committed to combining exhilarating sounds with food for thought. He succeeded."
In stark contrast to eye-popping U2 tours to come, the stage was "consciously devoid of effects, props and gimmicks," wrote the Times. "The large stacks of amplifiers on either side of the stage were covered with a canvas on which an abstract ‘Joshua Tree’ was painted. The words ‘Stop the madness’ were splashed — graffiti-style — on the right side."
The Tampa Tribune’s Janet Wilkof praised the minimalist setup, favorably comparing U2’s approach to those of legendary acts the band would eventually emulate. She called it "remarkable ... that a concert could be so stirring in a stadium setting with the bare minimum of special effects and fancy tricks. ...
"In the fall, David Bowie and Pink Floyd delivered visually stunning shows with stage sets and effects that met the grand scale of the stadium. The mesmerizing visuals made the shows passive experiences. And although Pink Floyd’s terrific playing matched the impressiveness of the effects — probably every ticket holder felt a chill during Comfortably Numb — U2 achieved the same emotional highs with the sheer power and passion of its songs."
It was, on this chilly December night, such a warm welcome that U2 would keep returning to Tampa time and time again — in 1992, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009 and now 2017.
"And I used to think that it was the sun that kept Florida warm," Bono said that night in 1987.
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