“Shouldn’t be set in stone”: The one U2 song Bono never played the same again
All great rock and roll songs are meant to be somewhat elastic in form. Although most artists will try to nail down the perfect arrangements of a tune to the point where nothing can go wrong, there are many times when a song will be kept open enough for them to take a few liberties whenever performing them live or working off the rest of the group. Despite U2 making glorified classics whenever they walked into the studio, Bono admitted that his performance of this tune would never sound the same.
Considering their reputation for being fairly rigid in song structures, though, it’s hard to imagine any U2 concert having too many improvisational sections. That kind of thing is reserved for jazz players, and when there are a million moving parts to a show like theirs, there’s a good chance that their road crew would want to slug one of them if they ever took a chance and tried something a little bit weird.
Then again, this is a band that was born and raised listening to punk rock, which meant that nothing had to sound the same. Compared to the danceable grooves of their later albums, tunes like ‘I Will Follow’ sound like they were built to be made out of a basement, which is probably the reason why they’ve been able to undergo a lot of different changes whenever they perform the tune live.
When they started to break ground on The Unforgettable Fire, though, their songs went from being naive little exercises to some of the greatest anthems of their generation. No matter how much they tried to put into a tune like ‘Stories For Boys’ back in the day, hearing Bono cry out in pain when singing ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ was half the reason why they rose above the punk underground and into stadiums.
At the same time, that kind of experimentation did rear its head on ‘Bad’. Compared to the rest of the tunes on the record, Bono said that he never had a sketched-out outline for what the tune would become, and since everything is open-ended, he figured that he’d wait to do the dirty work whenever he came out onstage.
Since it’s a bit more abstract, Bono thought the next best thing would be to make something up that would serve the moment whenever he sang, saying, “That is potentially truly a great song… if I had finished it. And in a way I do finish it every night, live. I change the lyrics. Poets have no problem with revising their work. Songs shouldn’t be set in stone. If they are any good, they are living, breathing organisms.”
And if we’re talking about those spur-of-the-moment occasions, nothing compares to the version they played at Live Aid. Though there may have been some dubious choices with Bono’s hairstyle, hearing him sing with so much passion and bring out someone from the audience made them feel like the Everyman for probably the last time before they became one of the biggest punching bags of their generation.
As conflicted as fans continue to be on how U2 is viewed in the public eye, every performance of ‘Bad’ is a good reason why they should never be discounted for their musicianship. Because as much as Bono can get up on his high horse occasionally, he is equally as willing to fly blind when he’s singing and see what comes out of it.
