Baggot Street, the J Geils Band, and the artist that made Bono love the blues
Bono and the blues are two things that have always come hand in hand, almost like his charity efforts, or his ability to piss people off at the same time.
But all joking aside, the U2 frontman shares the mark of many a classic rock star, being influenced by the sultry, often subtle sound of the blues. Just look at The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or indeed any band from the 1960s – what they all possess at their heart is a reverential love of the genre, spurring rock and roll on to its seismic new heights.
Although he arrived on the scene a little later on, Bono was no different in this regard. His Irish upbringing and musical inclinations had intrinsically pulled him towards Baggot Street as a young man, the Dublin artistic hotbed where the blues pulsed from every pub and corner. From there, his sights were only going to get more prolific.
Yet despite his formative years, it was only when Bono went up in the world that he realised what the true heart of the music really meant. Under the educational wing of Peter Wolf of the J Geils Band, he realised how the grass was truly greener with the blues, when being played by one specific band.
Of course, it had to be The Stones. “I’d heard the blues played badly. Every bar band on Baggot Street in Dublin played the blues, but this time I was hearing the real thing, and it got through to me in a way it had never got through to me before,” Bono admitted. This was a band who, naturally, had been influenced by the blues in bucketloads. Turning that sense of inspiration on its head was a whole different matter.
“They were playing this stuff and some ‘50s stuff. Keith can play the piano well, and I really love the sound of his voice,” Bono added, creating a new sense of spectacle around The Stones as not just rock and roll masters, but real blues gods. After that realisation, he was able to look beyond his rudimentary offerings on Baggot Street and even The Stones themselves, to worship the genre’s founding fathers.
One of those was John Lee Hooker, the Delta blues pioneer who was instrumental to the development of the Detroit scene. Flashing forward decades to the late 1980s, however, in Bono’s own little corner of the world, his sound had an unexpectedly profound impact with juggernaut repercussions.
“The words got through to me, and I thought I could write these words,” he recalled, “So I wrote ‘Silver and Gold’ in an hour.” By that logic, he makes it all sound supremely easy, which, as any failed musician or songwriter will know, is far from the case. But regardless, it was clear that from the moment Bono’s blues education really got rolling, there was no looking back.
Calling U2 the next coming of a blues band would be making quite an inaccurate statement, but just like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, as well as all those alongside them, they would be nothing without those swinging beats and inimitable sounds. Just get Bono on the piano, and he can show you what he can do.
