The 1988 song Bono and The Edge could never agree on: “We didn’t want to tamper”
By the late 1980s, it wasn’t just one much-loved song that saw U2 bite more than they could chew.
Across the decade, the former post-punk outfit muscled their way from the Dublin clubs to the fore of the new wave, winning fans with their distinctly optimistic energy and frontman Bono’s passionate onstage command.
Along the way, an embrace of the studio for added sonic expanse and a fascination with the Americana music traditions would reach a rootsy confluence on 1987’s The Joshua Tree, scoring a number one on both sides of the Atlantic and catapulting U2 to the biggest band on the planet.
Lost in their bluesy, desert wanderings, U2 sought to drop a companion album of sorts the following year, mashing studio cuts, live recordings, and an accompanying film documenting The Joshua Tree Tour’s mammoth US leg. While boasting canonical hits like ‘Desire’, Rattle and Hum’s lapses into pompous Beatles covers and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in the vein of Jimi Hendrix smacked of a band shoehorning themselves into the classic rock pantheon to the band’s detractors.
The naysayers weren’t going to be any less unimpressed by ‘Love Rescue Me’. One of two numbers featuring Bob Dylan’s presence, along with the rendition of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, the songsmith himself joined U2 in Memphis’ famed Sun studio to lend backing vocals and even co-write the lyrical exploration of a saviour’s need for salvation. Hobnobbing with Dylan and queasy subject matter fuelling accusations of Bono’s ballooning ego would help paint Rattle and Hum’s bloated reputation, but also trigger creative differences between Bono and guitarist The Edge.
“I really like the song, but I regret that we didn’t make it more our own sonically,” The Edge confessed to the Los Angeles Times in 1993, during the height of their Zoo TV heyday, “At the time, we were exploring folk and blues and these different musical traditions, and we didn’t want to tamper with them.”
Sun’s storied heritage pours out of ‘Love Rescue Me’. Having hosted the likes of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison for hallowed recording sessions, U2’s bluesy nod indeed leans into a purer gospel balladry lifted straight from the US South the band were so obsessed with. While a lack of contemporary flair or Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ studio polish may have given The Edge doubts, Bono felt ‘Love Rescue Me’s’ elemental make-up stood their spiritual summoning stronger.
“I think the fact that the track is so musically spare suits it,” Bono countered, “I was in Los Angeles, and I woke up with a very bad hangover, and the words and the melody were just going around in my head. I asked Edge later if he had ever heard it, if it was some old song. In fact, I thought it might be a Bob Dylan song.”
‘Love Rescue Me’ would prove a live mainstay across the Lovetown Tour, before near enough vanishing from setlists for decades after the blitz of U2’s Achtung Baby reinvention. The Dylan gospel collaboration obviously still packed an emotional punch for the Irish stadium behemoth, dusting off the rare number here and there in the 2010s, but forming a routine segment of their Las Vegas residency in 2024.
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