The Annotated Mixtape

Finding out, I’m finding out the things that I’ve been talking about,

Finding out the things that I’ve been missing out,

Finding out the things that are on my mind

—“Boy/Girl”

I once dated U2. We went steady throughout my junior high school years. Ours was a serious, committed, exclusive, long-term relationship. I felt smitten, heartstruck, crushed, lovesick, moony. Sure, I looked at other bands—who doesn’t?—but those other bands only confirmed for me how special U2 was. If I flirted, I never strayed. Not at first.

What exactly did I see in these four young men with artfully scruffy haircuts, flannel shirts and peacoats, the grit and roughness of Dublin nearly visible on their smooth faces? In those days their own peculiar take on anthemic stadium rock had only begun to fill stadiums; they’d yet to revise themselves into a slick, MTV-ready package, as heavily processed as one of the Edge’s guitar riffs. I may have been attracted to their sensitive posture coupled with their propensity to rock: unlike much of the post-punk and new wave of their era, they had no aversion to the sort of guitar heroics most thirteen-year-old boys, myself included, require in their music. Or it may have been the fact that while many of my contemporaries mauled air guitars to Van Halen’s Diver Down, Led Zeppelin’s II, or AC/DC’s Back in Black, and watched idealized versions of themselves on screen in such movies as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, I—who never owned those records, who never saw those films until my late twenties, and then mostly to participate in Sarah’s semi-ironic nostalgia—looked across the Atlantic for my role models. Because I played soccer—in 1983 and 1984, a profoundly unpopular sport in my hometown—the Scottish film Gregory’s Girl (about an awkward, soccer-playing teenage boy confused about girls) was my John Hughes movie; the Irish band U2 was my Van Halen. Even at twelve and thirteen, I imagined I possessed a discriminating sensibility, one that spurned mass-market pop culture in favor of something that I naïvely believed was more genuine, less commodified—if only because it was foreign, unknown amongst my peers.

Afternoons, I’d sequester myself in my bedroom, where I’d switch on my silver Sony receiver and cue U2’s Boy LP on the old Harman-Kardon turntable I’d inherited from my parents. I played that LP so often, light would have shone through its grooves if I’d held it up to the window. I studied the album cover—the four deliberately distorted portraits of the US pressing—for so long I might have been looking into a mirror. I read the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve, sang along when I knew no one was listening, fumbled out Adam Clayton’s bass lines on my cheap birthday-present bass guitar.

The songs on Boy—which, in such titles as “Twilight,” “Stories for Boys,” and “Out of Control,” or such lyrics as “A boy tries hard to be a man / His mother takes him by the hand” and “In the shadow, boy meets man” delineated the confusing, liminal state in which I found myself—seemed to explain something essential to me during those repeated listens, or perhaps served as an affirmation that my feelings were not as unique as, at my most self-pitying moments, I sometimes believed. When Bono sang, “Look from the outside to the world I left behind,” I could sigh with some combination of recognition and gratitude. The pulsing bass, the galloping drums, the reverberant guitar arpeggios—all these instruments played with a kind of nervous turbulence—the very sound of this album suggested my own restlessness, my own inability to inhabit myself.

If not Boy, I listened to War. Or October. I believed that these one-word titles evoked the same sort of complex, inchoate feelings blitzing my hormone-sullied self. Like Boy, these other two LPs offered their own metaphors, ones I could conveniently personalize: the lyrics on October repeated images of burning and falling that indicated less the autumn leaves than my own adolescent fluster; War depicted conflicts political and personal, so I could reckon the troubled state of the world—which I barely understood any-way—a mere outgrowth of my own inner cosmos. These three documents seemed profound—nothing about my love could be anything less—and I became their scholar, their apologist. But among them I returned most often to Boy—slurred and reckless, raw, recorded seemingly in a single take, its initial mistakes preserved out of a youthful indifference. Forget Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson’s multi-tracked “teenage symphonies to God”: Boy was for me the genuine article.

I preferred side two to side one, which opened with “I Will Follow,” U2’s earliest hit, a song whose seductive qualities always seemed too simple to me; I felt most captivated by Boy’s subtler depths, and, on side two, U2’s songs seemed more nuanced if no less bombastic. “Stories for Boys” announced itself with a reverbed guitar riff and a thunderous drum roll; “The Ocean”—with its tape-effect water gurgles and rope creaks, bass chords, and near-whispered vocals—struck me as profound; “A Day Without Me” offered the album’s poppiest moment—though this was lurching and off-kilter pop, driven by rattling drum fills, piercing guitar riffs, buoyant chords, and the Edge’s tape-sped, chipmunked vocals in its long fadeout. “Another Time, Another Place” seemed, despite a simple bass pulse and crisp rhythm, the most musically ambitious song on the album, with the Edge’s melancholy harmonics, a key change midway through, an extended guitar solo, and Bono’s throatiest vocal lines, including one verse declaimed in—Gaelic? Latin?—certainly not English. “Electric Co.” sounded as furious as the shock treatment it portrayed, and from its closing rumble rose the indeterminate acoustic narrative of “Shadows and Tall Trees.” Those many hours in my bedroom wedged these six songs into my memory so incontrovertibly that twenty years later I can still hear them there, note for note.

To get to know my better half better, I sought everything I could: import singles with rare B-sides or remixes; the hagiographies already appearing in the record stores; oversized, tape-cornered posters that slowly sagged under their own weight. In my bedroom I assembled, except for two or three impossible-to-find items, U2’s complete discography, as if doing so were proof of both my feelings and the depth of my commitment, as if love were a case of consuming one’s partner.

A local radio station would, every afternoon at five o’clock, play the “Top Five at Five.” During the weeks when U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” was a staple of this countdown, I would tune in daily—perhaps believing that such sanction vouched for my own brilliance and good taste, perhaps checking that my band’s reputation had not slipped in the estimation of others.

Another radio station would, from time to time, late at night, play a band’s entire oeuvre in alphabetical order—“U2, A to Z,” for example. Even though such an undertaking would require hours—how quaint it seems even mentioning this now, after the Clear Channel era, after radio in general—I would ready a blank tape and sit, one finger hovering above my tapedeck’s record button, through the whole program for those few super-rare songs or alternate takes I might not have owned.

Our first meeting is somewhat hazy to me now—there was no momentous, across-the-room meeting of our eyes, no introduction through a mutual friend; I was too young to have picked U2 up in a bar. Instead, we became aware of each other over time. I watched the videos for “Gloria” and “A Celebration” on the USA network’s Night Flight as Friday night became Saturday morning; I’d twist the tuning knob on my receiver to the left end of the dial and grip my antenna for better reception to listen to a static-stuttered “New Year’s Day” on the college stations from Boston and Providence, before that song was broadcast on my hometown’s airwaves; finally, at my seventh-grade birthday party, a friend handed me a flat package wrapped in the Sunday comics page—my first U2 LP.

U2 and I saw each other, as often as possible, at the Centrum, a venue they sold out a surprising number of times in those years—once, I believe, three nights in one week. Why did they come so often to a city to which the Boston and New York newspapers referred, if they referred to it at all, as a “fading milltown”? Simply to see me, I was convinced: the center of my own tiny world, I believed it only natural that U2 would entertain me there. I sat by the rotary telephone those mornings the tickets went on sale, breathlessly dialing and redialing the box office until I broke through the busy signal and secured myself a seat, borrowing my father’s credit card instead of my father’s car to arrange my date. A $16.50 ticket was a small price to pay to celebrate our relationship by wearing a crisp, yet-unwashed U2 concert T-shirt to homeroom the next morning.

Through the smoke of smuggled-in pot, I gazed at the faraway object of my affection, on a stage surrounded by thousands of other people who didn’t understand U2—people who stuck fingers into their mouths to whistle, who lifted the meager flames of Bic lighters as if they were at a Rolling Stones show. Perhaps I should have known—by the way Bono pranced and strutted and waved flags, by the hysterical shrieking of the girls who imagined that Larry Mullen, Jr., had winked at them as he pounded the beat to “40,” by the sheer number of people who had shown up to watch four Irish guys with bad hair belt out their dramatic take on rock music—that things between us couldn’t last, that what now seemed so endearing, cool, and endlessly fascinating would so quickly come to disgust me.

It is a curious thing, dating a band. I had no interest in U2 sexually, but my interest transcended the platonic. I wanted to be them, to have them explain myself to me, or at the very least have my affiliation with them somehow verify my own worth to others. They might elevate me. I admired their moody rock star poses in fields and snowscapes, and practiced their pouty-yet-piercing gazes.

When you date a band, you want everyone else to know how special your relationship is, so you ink the band’s name across your arm, your hand, your jeans, your notebook. If there is a mention of your band appearing on the radio, or on TV—even a song you have heard several hundred times, perhaps even several times that same day—you hush everyone around, in order to better hear the song, and to draw attention to it. Dating a band means laying claim, marking an off-limits sort of ownership: when I wrote “U2” on my notebook, I may as well have written “JH + U2 TLF.” Although your relationship with your band begins under the most private of circumstances—you, a stereo, a closed bedroom door, perhaps even a set of headphones—it becomes a declaration to anyone who’ll listen, especially in seventh grade when your allegiances in everything from sneakers to polo shirts to sports teams to hairstyles define your very soul; it is as clear a system of signs and signals as public handholding or a wedding ring. You must somehow perform the equivalent of kissing your band at your locker between classes. My best friend at this time dated ZZ Top—too young to grow a beard, he etched the word “Texas” into the finish of his guitar, and, during games of twenty-one at my driveway basketball hoop, explained to me the mythology of that red car and its mysterious keys on the double-Z keychain.

Of course, dating a band also involves a certain level of paradox; often—at least in the case of bands such as U2—the entire point of being in a band is to become popular and sell millions of records, and yet someone dating a band both desires and fears this outcome. Once the band attains that popularity, you’ll spend a lot of nights waiting up with the lights on, but they won’t come home.

One of my fiercest rivals during eighth grade was a girl in my class who also dated U2. Because she transferred to our junior high from out of state that year, her claim surprised me: it might have been valid at whatever school she’d attended before mine, but, caught unawares, I saw it as a threat. She made her relationship with U2 an even greater and more obvious part of her life than I did. In January 1985, on our first day back at school after the winter holidays, she bragged to me, “I played ‘New Year’s Day’ eighty-five times in a row the other day.” Conversations with her quickly turned into U2 trivia contests—could I, she wanted to know, name the Edge’s wife (Aisling), the school at which Larry posted a flyer seeking classmates to form a band (Mount Temple), the band’s first incarnation (the Hype)? I sulked and raged inside whenever it seemed that someone viewed her as a bigger fan than I: for her, dating U2 seemed to be more about Bono’s blue-eyed gaze and the Edge’s high cheekbones than the music. Worse, in my opinion, she expressed a desire to date me. Her friend told me that she liked me—liked me liked me—and for a few months I received prank phone calls every night—I’d answer to hear a moment of silence, the muffled sounds of two girls giggling, and then the line going dead. Perhaps she saw our shared appreciation for U2 as a potential bond. I preferred to view it as a barrier as firm and impenetrable as the Berlin Wall seemed in those years.

I like to think that some part of me realized that, early in our relationship, U2 served as a surrogate for the girls I was too shy to ask out. But by ninth grade, I had somehow acquired a steady girlfriend, and after school most days would walk two miles to her house, where we sat on her couch kissing through the short autumn afternoons. Half-heard, the local, non-cable video channel V-66 played in the background: teenage mood music. I sometimes felt as awkward with my girlfriend as, a year earlier, I had felt muddling my way through “Sunday Bloody Sunday” on my bass guitar, but was determined to muddle through this new territory as well. It still seemed possible to date both U2 and a girl without either party feeling resentful, and without my loyalties feeling too divided—U2 didn’t make many demands, didn’t expect much, came over whenever I touched needle to vinyl and left whenever I lifted the tonearm. Still, as if secretly jealous, the boys from Dublin would sometimes appear in a video on my girlfriend’s television screen, and, during such potentially awkward moments, I’d pause my explorations to watch, the cathode-ray light flickering over us in her darkened living room.

As in any long-term relationship, my partner occasionally embarrassed me: the chanted beginning to “Red Light” kept me from appreciating that song for years, and Bono’s histrionic grunts throughout U2’s records seemed, in my dispassionate moments, absurd—nearly blushing, I’d turn down the volume so no one else would hear them. In his Journals, John Cheever wrote that his daughter “makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong times and of speaking lines I have not written,” and I came to feel similarly selfish about U2; I could not imagine them existing beyond the fantasy versions I had conjured in the space of my bedroom. No one else could understand them as I did, I thought, until that point in time when I realized I no longer did understand them—and even then I saw that lack of understanding not as a flaw of my own, but rather an error on their part: their once-perfect sense of aesthetics and propriety began to diverge from mine. Bono’s increasingly self-aware antics onstage—wrapping himself in white flags, putting a foot on a monitor to reach an upraised fist over the crowd—made me cringe. Didn’t he see that such theater was unnecessary, that the music had power enough? Soon these quibbles became difficult to ignore, and the music’s power over me faltered within these gestures; the idea of living together began to seem impossible.

We never fought that I can recall: my disappointments went unspoken, as if I thought that keeping them to myself would mean U2 would cease disappointing me. But instead, the disappointments became more apparent. When U2 released The Unforgettable Fire in 1984, I felt conflicted. There had been hints that the album would be something of a departure: Bono noted, in a 1983 interview with the Irish rock magazine Hot Press, that he saw U2’s first “three albums as the end of an era.” For me, this declaration also marked the moment a personal era began to end. Perhaps, for the first time, I saw how much their album titles strained for porten-tousness, this one more so than any other. Perhaps I finally noticed the band’s unabashed fascination with my familiar and mundane America—their songs were now titled “4th of July,” “Elvis Presley and America,” and “MLK”—which to my mind stripped them of their essential Irishness, and much of their appeal. Perhaps The Unforgettable Fire was a more mature and subtle record, less anthem and more texture, for which I was then unready; perhaps, despite my own atheism, I liked Bono much better when he’d sung about the messiah than when he began to believe that he was the second coming. It was a confusing time in our relationship: as U2 finally achieved top forty status in the US, more and more of my friends and classmates asked me about them, and yet I could already feel us drifting apart.

As do most relationships at that age—perhaps through an intermediary, or to a chorus of that crucial question, “Who dumped who?”—ours ended in a drawn-out and messy way. By the summer of 1985, when U2 appeared at the Live Aid concert and released the EP Wide Awake in America, it became pretty clear to me that they’d long been cheating behind my back, seeking out new fans indiscriminately (and hadn’t discrimination, the ability to see in each other what no one else could, been the very foundation of our relationship?). But I’d cheated, too: the vast possibility in the bins at Al Bum’s had entranced me. Things between us turned cool and strained—I’d already rolled up most of my tattered U2 posters, wrapped them in rubber bands, and put them in my closet; for a while there had been other bands’ posters on my walls, and the flat gazes of Bono, the Edge, Larry, and Adam seemed to express a growing unhappiness at their displacement in my bedroom.

In 1987, dismayed at what I saw—ponytails, leather vests, so much dabbling in a cowboy affect—I bought The Joshua Tree mostly to confirm how irreconcilable the differences between us had become: by now, it was an anomaly in my record collection. Within weeks, half my high school attempted to lay claim to my former beloved: kids who a year ago might have worn Mötley Crüe T-shirts now showed up at school with the same U2 T-shirts I once wore, or ventured tiny ponytails in imitation of those worn by Bono and the Edge.

More distressingly, U2 had changed in ways I didn’t understand: videos shot in Las Vegas, or filmed on a Los Angeles rooftop, seemed obviously populist efforts to assimilate themselves into the world of Van Halen. (If I may pursue this comparison further: Bono’s theatrics were mere variation on David Lee Roth’s—and let us note the affinity for tight leather pants that both men shared. Where Roth played to the libido, Bono played to the conscience. Each turned into a narcissistic, caricaturish preacher. the Edge’s guitar heroics, too, came to seem not unlike Eddie Van Halen’s—instead of blazing fretwork and finger-tapped strings, the Edge used banks of delay and reverb and echo, but the effect was nearly as wanky, just in a more nerdy way.)

I could try to pretend that U2’s music still mattered to me, could try to pretend that my heart was still in it, despite the absence of some key ingredient. The one thing I did understand was that—despite what I’d once felt—I needed to cut my ties. I gathered up all of my U2 records—the debut single, all the imports, the albums, everything—and sold them to a girl in school, someone who could appreciate the new version of U2 without seeing it forever overlaid with the old one. Perhaps, in such a betrayal, I hoped to hurt U2 as they had hurt me. I tried not to look over my shoulder as I walked away. I was certain I would never need those records again. Yes, I dumped U2. Only later did I realize that what I had in fact dumped was the soundtrack to my early adolescence.

U2’s popularity grew to the point where they no longer needed fans to date them; they could, and did, date supermodels. For a while, they were the most popular act in rock and roll—“rock’s hottest ticket,” as one of their live bootleg titles had it—something which always surprised me given the way I remembered them: endearingly scruffy, dewy, still in the process of figuring themselves out. If nothing else, they’ve long since figured out what the rock-listening public wanted, and in so doing cemented their place in rock and roll history. Of course, it occurred to me years ago that I was the one who never understood U2; those people whistling and shrieking and lifting lighter flames in their fists had grasped U2 completely.

For a brief while I felt like someone who watches an ex achieve everything that had been impossible during the relationship. I can vaguely recall U2 collaborating with B.B. King and Johnny Cash—forever seeking that elusive, mythic America, it seemed to me—but at that time my ex and I moved in such different circles that this information reached me only indirectly, the sort of thing a friend of a friend might report offhand, having forgotten our earlier connection.

I take some solace in discovering that I am not the only one who feels that U2 squandered something special. In the 1985 second edition of The New Trouser Press Record Guide, editor Ira A. Robbins judges U2 in rhetoric typical of the contemporary critical opinion:

With a unique, passionate sound, individualist lyrical outlook and youthful guilelessness, Ireland’s U2 made a big splash quickly, both in the UK and US… The four Dublin lads have become well-deserved stars, both popularly and critically…. An unquestionable masterpiece, Boy has a strength, beauty and character that is hard to believe on a debut album made by teenagers.

But by the time of the book’s fifth edition, published a decade later as The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, Robbins distanced himself from the band and his earlier acclaim:

The boys tried hard to be men, and within a few years had lost every bit of their childlike grace, with mounting self-obsession and concomitant inability to see themselves develop into world-class prats…. Last laughs can be mighty bitter, and Bono is hardly in a position to be pointing fingers at little rock gods who’ve lost their way.

Or, as Robert Christgau succinctly put it in his Village Voice review (accompanied by a grade of “B-”) of U2’s October: “What a stupid band to expect purity from.”

As I finished high school and for years to come, I had no concern with the goings-on in the world of U2. In the expanding universe of my musical tastes, they had become a dim and distant point in my past. If I thought of them, it was with the understanding that I had been an unformed person then, and that my feelings had been blurred with the hasty and senseless passions of youth. (“Look from the outside to the world I left behind”—or, to paraphrase Hemingway, ours had been only a boy and band affair.) Some part of my consciousness registered that the Edge was balding and goateed, Bono flaunted getups not unlike those worn by Madonna’s concert dancers, Adam was rumored to have a drug problem, and Larry still had not changed his haircut since 1984. I heard, at parties or on the radio, their reinvented sound in the string of hits they had in the early 1990s, and went into another room or changed the station—not out of sorrow, or anger, or bitterness, but simply indifference.

I emerged blinking from the intensity of my relationship with U2, uncertain of how to proceed. All the bands I’d ignored during those years I was dating U2 had gone elsewhere, found other partners, given up on me. I tried to date other bands, but could never fully muster the passion. I’d missed my chance with Joy Division and Wire, Buzzcocks and the Clash, A Certain Ratio, the Slits, and Section 25—they’d all broken up. R.E.M. wore a beret and too many Greenpeace and Amnesty International badges on an army-surplus backpack. The Smiths, whiny and dramatic, spent too much time in front of the mirror, in drama club, and reading arch British poetry looking for quotations to print beneath their yearbook photos. I wasn’t sure I could really be seen in public with the Fall, much genuinely stranger than the greasy-haired, philosopher-quoting kids smoking clove cigarettes on the quad during lunch. Sonic Youth, intelligent as they were, seemed to have dropped out of school and were spending all day getting stoned in someone’s borrowed apartment—would I ever be able to bring them home to meet Mom? Throwing Muses, the Pixies, and My Bloody Valentine each tempted me in the last few years of the 1980s, but by then I’d decided I was too old to date bands. All these relationships were mere dalliances, a string of one-night stands, cheap and empty thrills compared to the onetime depth of my feelings for U2. I sometimes wondered if I’d ever rediscover true love, or if I’d turn into that bore at the party still talking about the person I went out with years ago. My burgeoning LP collection seemed a testament to the hold U2 had once had over me: I could keep hoping to replace them, but would never rekindle a similar spark.

I grew up. Matured. At some point—until I started writing this book, at least—I no longer needed the self-assurance that came from positioning myself in relation to pop music. And there were, after all, girls to date.

But now, after years of running from U2, I have risked a look back. They remain, in the landscape of rock music, inescapable, and, as Bono insisted in “New Year’s Day,”

Though torn in two we can be one.

I will begin again, I will begin again.

Oh and maybe the time is right,

Oh maybe tonight.

I will be with you again.

In the course of my usual visits to used record stores, I’ve tried—discreetly, when clerks who don’t know me are working the till: buying U2 records more than twenty years after the fact is decidedly uncool—to reassemble some of my old collection. I’ve told myself I’m only doing research to write this essay.

The albums were easy to find; any used record store has some of them. The import singles I’d once prized were slightly more difficult, but not dauntingly so, and I now have about ten of U2’s early records. Late at night, after Sarah has gone to bed, I slip them from their sleeves, ease on my headphones, and, in the living room’s darkness, allow myself to get reacquainted. “Two Hearts Beat as One,” indeed: “I try to spit it out / I try to explain / the way I feel.” The last few nights, I’ve stayed up past two o’clock in the morning, then hidden the U2 records in the bins and sneaked into bed beside my sleeping wife.

It feels good, familiar, almost too easy. Still, I swear I’m not committing to anything this time.