The 1960s band Bono called everything he needed: “A persona that made a prism”
Bono didn’t normally need a lot of bells and whistles to impress him whenever he heard a new song.
He liked the idea of being surprised every now and again, but when you look at some of the greatest U2 songs ever made, the reason why they work is that they still sound great even if they were limited to just his voice and The Edge on acoustic guitar. The power of the song had to hit you first before anything else, and Bono knew that some of the greatest musicians of all time could leave you stunned with a minimal setup.
But would you expect anything less from the same person who used punk rock as his main influence? Everyone from Ramones to The Clash took up a precious piece of his record collection, and when you listen to the way that they incorporated that mentality into every single move that they make, they clearly liked the idea of keeping people guessing where they were going to go next on every single record.
Not all of those experiments were the best choices, and Bono has even had to apologise for a few of them in the past, but he knew that the way back into people’s hearts was to keep making great songs all over again. He didn’t mind making music that was popular with the kids at the time, but he did have a much broader scope when it came to what sounded great to his ears all the time.
Some of the best songs in his record collection were ones that pushed boundaries for the time, but what makes a song great is being able to distil everything down to a simple melody. Nothing about rock and roll was meant to be about making something complex, and since he already hated prog rock with every fibre of his being, hearing something as simple as Elvis Presley’s early records was a breath of fresh air to him.
Presley wasn’t meant to be one of the most gifted singers in the world, but he could use his voice better than just about anyone in the rock and roll sphere. He didn’t mind sounding a little bit rough on his songs, and when listening to the first tunes that he made for Sun Records, he was clearly after the same kind of energy that he heard out of his favourite blues acts that came out of the American south.
So with the help of a brand new band behind him, Bono couldn’t imagine a better group if he had tried when he heard Presley make his comeback in the late 1960s, saying, “I was eight years old when I saw the ’68 comeback special — which was probably an advantage. I hadn’t the critical faculties to divide the different Elvises into different categories or sort through the contradictions. Pretty much everything I want from guitar, bass and drums was present: a performer annoyed by the distance from his audience; a persona that made a prism of fame’s wide-angle lens.”
That kind of separation can definitely be felt in the way that Presley approached a lot of his material. He was known for sounding larger than life, so having everyone at his feet was what made a lot of the show look that much more intimate, especially when he started to sing with an acoustic guitar and made everything sound like he was strumming away with a couple of his friends.
Everyone would have considered a star of Presley’s calibre to be passe by this time, but he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. He had served his time in the army, and it was time for him to prove to some of the younger crowd what a big deal he used to be and what he could still do whenever he got a guitar in his hand.
