Where the seats have no name

I was in preschool when U2 released the Joshua Tree, so I don’t remember all the accolades and awards that followed in its wake. I do, however, remember “borrowing” the CD from my parents’ collection and listening to it on repeat as a teenager. The moody intro and anguished vocals of “With or Without You” earned the track top airplay on my boom box, while my sister and I developed a ritual of cranking up the volume to howl along with Bono whenever the song aired on the radio.

During "With or Without You"

But I was always puzzled by the indecisive musings of the protagonist. How could he be so crazy about someone who obviously made him crazy, relinquishing him to a bed of nails no less?

“I think I understand now that I’m married,” I told my husband Wednesday en route to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara for the Joshua Tree Tour 2017, commemorating the album's 30th anniversary. Matt was busy battling Lawrence Expressway traffic to merge onto Tasman Drive, but I think he caught the teasing glint in my eyes.

Among Wednesday’s 22-song set, U2’s “With or Without You” performance, however, left the audience waiting and wanting a little more; the intro started and ended, but Bono didn’t begin singing until after an awkward delay caused by a technical or mental lapse indiscernible from our nosebleed-inducing seats.

There were a few additional missteps, including delaying the start of the show until 9 p.m., a full hour after opening act Mumford and Sons vacated the stage, but Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. have earned a few allowances in a career spanning four decades. They still know how to rock, and they still have something to say.

During "Where the Streets Have No Name"

The band sandwiched the entire Joshua Tree (Grammy Album of the Year, 1988), between tracks from earlier albums War and The Unforgettable Fire and a six-song encore with later material from Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” opened the set. The song, about the 1972 deadly shooting of protestors by the British Army in Northern Ireland, led off two hours of hits interlaced with celebrations of Americana (whispered strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” black and white footage of sweeping American West landscapes and the native people who inhabit them) and politics (blatant digs at President Trump and references to the Syrian refugee crisis, including the drowning of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi). During “Miss Sarajevo,” lower deck audience members passed a sheet-like square large enough to cover entire seating section around the stadium. It featured the passport photo of a 15-year-old Syrian girl featured in an interview broadcast on an LED screen behind the band during the song. The girl, living in a dismal Jordanian refugee camp, said she dreams of immigrating to the United States one day.

“We will find higher ground when we find common ground,” Bono said during “Pride,” as words like “dream” and “truth” broke away from the text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and floated across the video screen.

That screen

Ah, that screen. Until it lit up with film footage of an endless desert highway during “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the unfortunate brown-colored panels and Joshua tree awkwardly emerging from it resembled a drive-in movie screen fashioned from cardboard. The album’s first track also marked the beginning of the live video feed broadcast. Up until that point, the band’s performance at the end of a tree-shaped catwalk resembled ants gyrating on a head of cauliflower – at least to us “cheap seat” occupants.

Bono dedicated “Ultra Violet” to the women in the band members’ lives and to women who “insisted and persisted” throughout history – or “Herstory.” The faces of these “Little Miss Icons” –from abolitionist Sojourner Truth and anarchist activist Emma Goldman to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comedian Ellen Degeneres and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai – cycled across the screen.

The band closed with “The Little Things That Give You Away,” a new song scheduled for official release later this year as part of “Songs of Experience,” a follow-up album to the band’s 2014 “Songs of Innocence.” The band revealed a square-shaped black and white image of a barefoot man and woman holding hands, presumably the album cover shot, during the performance. The woman appeared to wear an army helmet and the man resembled a teenage Bono, but it was difficult to identify him from a distance.

Bono, is that you?

“We have a new album,” Bono said. “This is a song on it. And we’re just warming up.”

High in the stands, where temperatures dipped into the high 40s and the wind whipped about, Matt and I were shivering, and I twisted my shoulder into his side for warmth. By then I wore the commemorative concert T-shirt I had bought him over my own clothes for added warmth. But he didn’t seem to mind.

Set list:
-Sunday Bloody Sunday (War, 1983)
-New Year’s Day (War, 1983)
-A Sort of Homecoming (The Unforgettable Fire, 1984)
-Bad (The Unforgettable Fire, 1984)
-Pride (In the Name of Love) (The Unforgettable Fire, 1984)
-Where the Streets Have No Name (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-With or Without You (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Bullet the Blue Sky (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Running to Stand Still (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Red Hill Mining Town (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-In God’s Country (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Trip Through Your Wires (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-One Tree Hill (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Exit (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
-Mothers of the Disappeared (The Joshua Tree, 1987)

Encore:
-Beautiful Day (All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000)
-Elevation (All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000)
-Ultra Violet (Light My Way) (Achtung Baby, 1991)
-One (Achtung Baby, 1991)
-Miss Sarajevo (Original Soundtracks 1, 1995)
-The Little Things That Give You Away (Songs of Experience, 2017)