The performance that reduced Bono to tears: “The music messiah”
For Bono, music has always carried a specific spiritual power. Anyone can try their hand at writing a hit, but where everyone sees disposable pop music, Bono sees a means to exorcise his demons, always putting his heart and soul into tracks like ‘New Year’s Day’ and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’. Most artists need the right songs, but it all comes down to how you perform them, and as far as Bono saw it, seeing footage of Elvis Presley live was enough to leave him in shambles.
It’s not like Bono was the only one, either. Throughout Presley’s early career, people weren’t exactly reacting to him like another crooner. Since he shook his hips and got into risque behaviour every time he took the stage, people were having a much more visceral reaction to what they were seeing. This was what rock and roll actually looked like, and it didn’t take long for the rest of the world to take notice.
When you look back on what Presley was actually playing, though, it’s not all that different from what artists before him were doing. People like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis could certainly hold their own as performers, but Presley’s iconic stance made him look like a Shakespearean actor, almost like he lived most of the songs he sang about.
While Presley may have ignited hearts in the 1950s, he was a completely different animal when the 1970s kicked in. After going through the Army and reminding us why he was so good at his 1968 comeback special, the last years of his life were not as kind, turning him into the kind of dancing monkey with little to no control over what he did anymore.
Whereas most people saw Presley becoming a bit of a joke, Bono started to see the real pathos behind him for the first time, telling Rolling Stone, “In the 1970s, he turned celebrity into a blood sport, but interestingly, the more he fell to Earth, the more godlike he became to his fans. His last performances showcase a voice even bigger than his gut, where you cry real tears as the music messiah sings his tired heart out.”
Sure, Presley couldn’t sing the classics like he used to, but that didn’t even seem to matter to the fans. They were just happy to see one of their idols in the flesh for the first time, and the fact that he was willing to show himself as an imperfect person made him all the more endearing to everyone in that casino.
If you look at where Bono went after U2 had their Elvis-level of fame, he seemed to be taking a fair bit from how Presley carried himself. He still knew how to run his mouth and how to be absolutely insufferable, but when you listen to Achtung Baby, you start to hear a man who’s gotten everything he could ask for out of fame and still feeling empty inside because he doesn’t have anyone to share it with.
Bono and Presley always approached the stage with more than a little bit of a messiah complex, but the message behind their performance went a lot deeper than that. Everyone wants to have their name up in the lights, but there’s only a matter of time before fame turns into a cage you can never break out of.
