defend the indefensible: RATTLE AND HUM by U2

How does the dialog go pre-rehersal?

BB KING
This are very heavy lyrics for such a young man.

BONO
Thank you, Mr. King.

a. i shall then post a very POSITIVE review
b. i shall then abuse my residual site-admin powers to DELETE the post
c. then i shall LEAVE ilm in a blaze of calculated publicity!! hurrah!!

*dies laughing* OTM!

1) I, like Markus, was turned on to a bunch of other music via R&H. Good music...music even ILM likes!
2) The gospel version of "Still Haven't Found" is actually two parts...if you remember, the a capella intro is much longer on the film, and is edited for the soundtrack. The a capella parts are pretty nice. The choir can sing. But then you realize that Bono is trying to make himself sound as if his every word is backed by a choir of angels...crap.
3) The Edge's refusal to play a "blues" lead on a song with BB King. At the time, I thought he was a punk ass who just couldn't play guitar...since then, I have realized that his solo, as un-"blues" as it is, is quite blues...drone, tone, and moan!
4) The homeless man's blues (Freedom for My People, right?) was the inspiration for one of my finest drunken open mic moments ever.
5) Desire, All I Want is You, Van Diemen's Land

I've done what I can. I suspect my efforts will be dunked like a cookie.

Also, "Silver and Gold" not so bad, if memory serves, but that I haven't heard in years.

I thought it was a great, warts and all doc at the time that left me with mixed feelings. Some beautiful footage of great live performers. Adam Clayton certainly looked cool by this point. Musically, "Heartland" and "Silver and Gold" were closer to what I loved about U2 than anything on The Joshua Tree (that was the album that pushed me away from die-hard fandom, though I love "With or Without You"). But the lyrics, and the stage banter accompanyiny "S & G," were unbearable. "Edge play the blues"? "Am I buggin' ya"? They had to know. They just had to.

The cover choices--not even knowing the lyrics to "Helter Skelter"--were stupid. And somehow also pompous and ridiculous. This was them letting it all hang out in great cinematography. I didn't get into "All I Want Is You" until years later. Same with "One," actually, which is their real roots fusion song, on the next album. Their best music makes it look easy. "Surrender" and "Two Hearts Beat as One" were the template. U2 dismissers can go ahead and miss out on a unique, and pretty great, R&B-punk fusion that's still commands my attention all these years later...

I dunno -- this is the line of argument that I always saw cropping up in grad school talk about various pieces of literature always being designed to undercut itself. "Don't you see? It was all ironic!"

I, like Markus, was turned on to a bunch of other music via R&H. Good music...music even ILM likes!

Now I feel mean, but I shouldn't. My beef was more with the STATEMENT made by all those references, which I took then and take now to be "This is the company we are now keeping. These are standards by which we wish to be judged. History, open another chapter. There is a new band in town."

I mean, chutzpah, and it works, but what's it not an ounce of? Fun.

These two were back-to-back prom themes for my high school class and the year before me, so OTM.

Nice to see Acme back around here, I'd kinda wondered what happened to ya!

Eno is doing keyboards on Heartland -- a song you forget while you're listening to it

lolz

"am i buggin' ya?" provided some MST3K chuckles, at least.
Oh please please please tell me that Joel/Crow/Tom ripped the "Rattle & Hum" movie a new asteroidhole...that movie was bad enough to be the subject of an episode of MST2K.

-- Lord Custos Omicron (Lord Custos Omicron), Saturday, July 2, 2005 4:55 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link
Great Concept! Somebody do it!

hmmm you know I may be able to grant this wish - my in-laws run Rifftraxx with Mike Nelson

"Desire" was that one bit I did like from it then, and do still. As for the rest... um no, way too much cold vomit and lukewarm crap on two vinyls.

hmmm you know I may be able to grant this wish - my in-laws run Rifftraxx with Mike Nelson

!!!

i played this album for my gf on the way to work yesterday b/c she hadn't heard it beyond a couple singles. there was lots of cringing from the passenger side.

the live tracks on this kind of wreck the flow of the much better studio tracks, it would have been a really good 9-song album imo.

^^^^^^^^^ so very, very true

I love it.

Back when this came out, we used to file into school assemblies to classical music picked out by the fearsome by-the-rule-book Head of Upper School. One week he got the boys who switched on/off the records to pick something out. They played "Angel of Harlem".

did he call those rascals into his office and put them on double secret academic probation?

If by that you mean "did they get a bollocking?" then yes.

"Angel Of Harlem" is of course one of only three UK Top 20 hit singles to namecheck John Coltrane.
Your question for ten: what were the other two?

Ian Dury - Reasons to be cheerful, part 3.

"Don't Believe the Hype"? Did that go top 20?

What about Sheryl Crow?

1996 "If It Makes You Happy" UK Singles Chart 9

"Listen to Coltrane/derail your own train . . ."

Wow, this looks tremendous!

"put El Salvador through the amp"

lmao

XXP - it's very good indeed, but there should be a longer cut of it floating about somewhere, 31' seems way too short.

Can't think of another track they've done as loose as 'Desire'.

Desire was the song that brought me into the U2 fold as a kid though i don't rate it as highly now. the two songs i mentioned above i think achieve everything they set out to do. Hawkmoon just sounds massive and Heartland is a great haunted epic, i especially like both the delivery *and* the lyrics here especially:

See the sunrise over her skin
She feels like water in my hand
Freeway, like a river
Cuts through this land
Into the side of love
Like a burning spear
And the poison rain
Like dirty tears
Through the ghostranch hills
Death Valley waters
In the towers of steel
Belief goes on and on

In fact, let's grit our teeth, and go through all the Hat Tips on Rattle & Hum:
stealing Helter Skelter "back" on behalf of the Beatles
dedicating The Edge's effort to poet John Boyle O'Reilly, and dissing him in the sleevenotes
sticking Dylan on inaudible Hammond on Hawkmoon 269 (and Honey Cone on backing vocals)
Dylan again / Hendrix on All Along The Watchtower, because there's no chance of bathos there
yuk, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For goes gospel with the New Voices Of Freedom
Hey, Sterling Magee, Bobby Robinson & Macie Mabins, would you like 0:38 on our bloated album?
the brass nerve of "for Billie Holiday" on Angel Of Harlem: how wonderful it would be to hear which curse words she would use if she heard it
Bono and Bob set the Bible to music and Bob does backing vox on Love Rescue Me
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mister BB King
of *course
Eno is doing keyboards on Heartland -- a song you forget while you're listening to it
"for John Lennon", because God needed a sanctimonious updating
hey, dead Jimi Hendirx, would you like 0:43 on our bloated record, on which the guitars are also quite good?
"put El Salvador through the amp"
and after the rattle, the hum: Van Dyke Parks on All I Want Is You
"thanks to Tim Buckley"?!
the Spinal Tap Gracelands moments

immortal post

I see Bateau got to that two days back my bad

My old friend Matt used to refer to it as Prattle and Yawn. One of his wittier remarks. He also kept a Best of Eric Clapton 8-track, pierced by a heated screwdriver, as a mantle piece. I miss that guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-XDgiTX204

The snare is way out of tune on Desire and apparently everyone is too caught up in emotion and feeling to notice

this really has to be one of the most confused follow-ups to a gigantic success ever. this was my introduction to u2, being the only album of theirs owned by my parents & the reason my dad always expressed a dislike for them and it was so confusing as this incoherent grab bag of new material & live tracks, and it still doesn't really make any more sense to me now. it's not quite a proper follow-up to the joshua tree but it still ended up having to be one. it's not a live album either and it's not even really that coherent as a soundtrack to the film, especially with the additional new tracks. i really don't understand how they decided on this being the album they put out at all.

it also just sounds really muddy and bland as an album, without eno & lanois around everything interesting about their sound is gone. the covers are mediocre and a little embarrassing. there are plenty of u2 live recordings that are more definitive versions of their 80s material than the studio versions, but none of them are found here - the only live track that's really worth anything at all is "i still haven't found what i'm looking for" with the gospel choir which is pretty great actually but the rest is totally pointless. the new tracks are mostly pretty bad too. "van diemen's land" is just an edge solo demo that it's a wonder they thought it was worth putting on the album. "desire" and "angel of harlem" are fine and while they're nothing special at all, they at least feel fully formed and justify their own existence. "hawkmoon 269", "love rescue me" and "when love comes to town" are all slogs that demonstrate how ill-conceived the whole project was. "heartland" is ok but clearly the joshua tree outtake it is, and "god part ii" is such an embarrassing concept with music to match. it's genuinely baffling that they thought most of this was worth releasing. at least "all i want is you" is genuinely very good. i guess if you stripped it down to just "desire", "angel of harlem", "heartland" and "all i want is you" then you have an ok EP, which it clearly never should have been more than.

Neil Tennant's tetchy, impromptu review still the best:

Rock critics liked RAH because they want a return to the traditional rock values. What they basically want is for it to be like 1969 again. It's this thing where British -- or in U2's case Irish -- groups discover the roots of American music. U2 have discovered this and they're just doing pastiches (his voice rises) and it's reviewed as a serious thing because `Dylan plays organ' on some song and B.B. King plays on some throwaway pop song `When Love Comes To Town' that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It could be in `Starlight Express' if you ask me.

The fact is that the PSB stand against all of this, so it's quite right that people like that should slag us off. Because we hate everything that they are and stand for. We hate it because it's stultifying, it says nothing, it is big and pompous and ugly. We hate it for exactly the same reasons Johnny Rotten said he hated dinosaur groups in 1976.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, September 26, 2008

The interesting paradox about this record is that the least-successful, most egregious mistake of a song ("God Part II") is actually the one that points most directly to where they were going in the next 10 years.
The only song I kept from this is "Freedom for My People".

"put El Salvador through the amp"

(his voice rises)

i guess if you stripped it down to just "desire", "angel of harlem", "heartland" and "all i want is you" then you have an ok EP

I'd drop "Heartland" but yeah pretty much - it would've been a pretty nice EP in a lot of ways. I like B.B. King on "Love Comes to Town," it's a nice guest shot, but you're better off hearing his own records.

FWIW, I revisited Robbie Robertson recently, which was fucking awful - I take back every defense I had for it. A lot of it was overwrought, but then you had two tracks (with Peter Gabriel's involvement) that felt like Roberston wanted to make So and two more (with U2) that sound like the blueprint for Rattle & Hum. I'm all for artists trying something different, but just as U2's Americana was mostly dubious, so was Robertson doing the reverse, and hearing the two ambitions intersect was wretched.

Rick Danko does backing vocals on one song on that record that couldn't sound more pasted in. I have loved "Showdown at Big Sky" since the first time I heard it though.

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" is one of the most vacuously expensive indulgences recorded by a great songwriter.

i was feeling like a stranger in a strange land
you know, where people play games with the night

Hearing anything with Sammy BoDean at this point is pretty much a cringe.

That said, I think "Broken Arrow" is a heck of a song. I'd like to hear it more stripped down like with a Chris Whitley like feel with the tune played on a dobro. (HEY BILLY STRINGS - COVER THIS ONE...)

I kinda think the old hipster spoken stuff works better on 'Underworld of Redboy'. I really like that one.

I went into see this movie and it was like an 11pm showing packed to the gills and came out kinda thinking U2 was definitely not as cool anymore. WTF...

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" is one of the most vacuously expensive indulgences recorded by a great songwriter.

There's a quote about it by Robertson or Lanois about it that's been published ad nauseam, describing how Robertson has all these great stories and they thought, why not just record one of them and put some music to it? I was almost expecting something like Loretta Lynn's recitation on "Little Red Shoes" and how Jack White built a track around it, but instead we get this shitty fake story-song that's self-consciously delivered by Robertson - it's not telling a story but blatantly acting like a narrator written into an unconvincing script. You'd think it was ad copy made up for a shitty liquor commercial.

That said, I think "Broken Arrow" is a heck of a song. I'd like to hear it more stripped down like with a Chris Whitley like feel with the tune played on a dobro. (HEY BILLY STRINGS - COVER THIS ONE...)

With Gabriel programming the keyboards and drum patterns to what's already a spacious, stripped down production, it should've been a Gabriel track - sort of like "In Your Eyes" if it was done more like "Don't Give Up." It's very easy to picture Gabriel singing it than Robertson and doing a much better job of it.

Also re: "Love Comes to Town," it would've been much better if they got someone like Bettye LaVette to sing it with King than Bono.

* There's a quote about it by Robertson or Lanois that's been published ad nauseam

This album would have been fine if it was released as a sort of odds-n-sodds stopgap, minus all the hoopla. That said, iirc I bought a poster in the theatre lobby after I saw the movie.

BTW, yesterday I came across this Chilean U2 tribute band that absolutely kills it. Their Bono es muy bueno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemonU2trib

Weird, that was just a link to their youtube home page. Anyway, here's a song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4KKCx3CAC0

never not funny to me that neil tennant's off-the-cuff review manages to be absolutely wrong in almost every detail -- in what conceivable way is R&H "like 1969 again"? -- but overall absolutely correct (rattle and hum is bad not good and PSB were right to be against it)

I think the context's important, namely the Wilburyizing of the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic, though you people had acid house on the chart.

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" provided grist for Robertson impersonations between me and my friends for years, though... "Man, this is sure stirring up some ghosts for me".
I think the song was a dry run for the semi-autobiographical screenplay that a Rolling Stone article said he had written at this time.

"You know, I'm going to go down to Burger King to get a Whopper and see if the cashier can read my mind... She said your coupon is not valid anymore."