The 1977 song that gave U2 a career: “The song we should play”
Every single member of U2 knew that they needed the songs before they ever tried to go up onstage.
Being one of the greatest live bands of all time is all well and good, but if you’re not singing the kinds of songs that people want to hear, all you’re left with is doing borderline karaoke to tunes that might as well be used as commercial jingles. But when the Irish legends started putting themselves together at the very beginning of their career, it turned out they only needed to look into their record collections to see what they needed.
After all, it’s not like their heroes were known to be the greatest musicians in the world by any stretch. Half of the best bands in rock and roll only worked with the fundamentals that they started out with, and when the punk regime came in, there were no rules anymore. You didn’t need to learn massive solos to be the best guitarist in the world, but whereas The Clash made the biggest splash in the UK, Ramones really got the ball rolling a few months earlier on their debut.
There was nothing like these four gangly guys from Queens, but when everyone took a look at them in their leathers on their debut record, they stood out more than anyone else. Joey Ramone was singing the kinds of rock and roll tunes that could have made for brilliant pop tracks had they been played a little bit slower, but the energy behind a song like ‘Glad To See You Go’ was what Bono and The Edge needed to hear.
They weren’t going to get anywhere by following the guitarist’s lead of listening to bands like Yes, and since the Ramones track was bright and poppy enough, it did a decent job at filling the clubs during their first handful of gigs. But when they got their first stint on national television, Bono decided to be a little bit cheeky and tried to pass the song off as one of their own when the cameras were turned on.
All of them were still snot-nosed kids at that point, but since everything was fairly underground, The Edge remembered thinking that they could have actually got away with it had they kept their poker faces, saying, “Bono just says, ‘The song of ours we should play is Glad To See You Go and he’s looking at Larry, me and Adam and we all go, ‘OK’. The Ramones song? Cool. So we just played a Ramones song and the guy said, ‘So that’s one of your tunes?’ Yep!”
Then again, it’s not like U2 were the only ones trying to pass off their heroes songs as their own, either. When Metallica were hashing out their first tunes half a world away in San Francisco, they would usually just introduce the song ‘Am I Evil’ without mentioning that it was a Diamond Head tune. But it’s not like Bono wasn’t going to try and pay Ramones back every single time he sang in a massive stadium.
The punk stalwarts never did get the kind of stadium-level attention that they really deserved, but even when U2 left punk rock behind, Bono did make sure to heap praise on the band’s name. Aside from the glowing love letters to the band that he wrote decades after the fact, ‘The Miracle Of Joey Ramone’ is one of the most energetic songs that the band wrote in the 2010s, so much so that it almost excuses the fact that the band try to force it down everyone’s throats when it was released.
But if Ramones taught the band anything, it was about moving away from the typical style of rock and roll. All they could do was be themselves, and if that meant wearing their influences on their sleeve openly, that was what they were going to do to become one of the biggest rock and roll bands they could be.
