Dolberry watched the U2 documentary
"From the Sky Down" about the making of Achtung Baby last Friday. I think I've recounted this before on the DCV, but the first time I listened to that album was
literally one of the most disappointing experiences of my life. Dolberry remembers it like it was yesterday. TbKMD, Lynne our Billiken Friend, and Dolberry were headed from Chicago to St. Louis for the weekend.
It strikes me that this particular drive is sort of a metaphor for life ... getting out of downtown Chicago on a Friday night is a task at least as hard as escaping the birth canal. That traumatic experience is followed by a prolonged period of alternating bursts between going 70 mph and being stone-dead-stopped through the suburbs
(ages 1 day to 21 years). Then you get a mind-numbingly long stretch of dull routine where your best hope is to steal small moments of joy at
ridiculous Illinois town names before you recidivate into barest minimal consciousness
(ages 21 years until retirement). Then there's the really scary part where you go thru East St. Louis and hope you don't get killed
(death). Then, finally after all that you get to St. Louis
(heaven ... well ... heaven if heaven smells like mashed grain and the sky's kinda slate gray).
Anyway, Dolberry had armed himself for that particular drive by going to a record store
(look it up) and buying the latest cassette
(look it up) from Bono, Edge, Adam, and Larry. As soon as we hit that part of the drive where you could put it in cruise control ... I took the tape out of its pristine and as-yet-unbroken case
(generally cassette tape cases were meticulously designed to break after approximately 2.8 uses on average ... their structural integrity depended upon the sparsest prong of plastic that the record companies could engineer w/ late '80s technology) and loaded in Achtung Baby with an anticipation that rivaled my wedding day ... which technically hadn't happened yet ... and never would've had ... had I acknowledged the above sentiment at any point prior to the aforementioned wedding day.
In the documentary, Bono notes that the band went into the studio smarting from the reaction engendered by their previous album ... "Rattle and Hum" ... which was generally viewed as uncool Americana, pretentious, and "overly earnest". Musically, their strategy was to sample more of the industrial German rock that was prevalent in Europe at the time. Stylistically, they decided that if they were going to be branded as pretentious anyway ... they'd play it to the hilt and thus Bono went ubiquitous w/ the sunglasses, dropped the mullet for sideburns (sniff), and added a few tablespoons of swagger to his already large personality. The theme of the movie is built on one of Bono's quotes about the making of the album ...
"You have to reject one expression of the band, first, before you get to
the next expression, and in between you have nothing, you
have to risk it all."
So, as the Achtung Baby tape whirrs its first sounds ... an instantly disconcerting discord of noise that sounds like the 2nd shift at an assembly line leading into "Zoo Station".
Bono: "I'm ready. I'm ready for the laughing gas."
Dolberry: What the WHAT?!?
Driving on the flat expanse of I-55, the rest of my Achtung Baby experience went downhill faster than the steepest slopes coming out of Joshua Tree National Park. With the exception of "The Fly", which sounded passably enough like actual rock and roll to warrant another play, the rest of the experience was a
Volquezian disaster.
Watching the movie and dodging Bono's fusillade of f-bombs, it dawned that the character sometimes known as Dolberry has become overly earnest ... dull ... and maybe even a little pretentious. More responsibilities at work and church, while welcomed, have shaved a little off the bounce in the step. It took 10 minutes of purposely frivolous thinking to even summon Dolberry to the blogwriting table tonight. How does one balance the need for seriousness ... and wanting to accomplish things of meaning ... with the need to remain joyful in the present or near-present? Is there a secret to enjoying the rural-Illinois stretch of mid-life
(short of pharmaceutical cheating)?
In retrospect ... Dolberry superappreciates what a kicktuckus album that Achtung Baby is. Two of the songs would probably find their way into Dolberry's Top 10 of all time
("Until the End of the World", "The Fly"); one of the songs is really good if you're in a sap-tacular mood
("One"); and at least two of them rock out solidly live
("Ultraviolet" and "Even Better than the Real Thing"). Maybe there's a life lesson here. Maybe it's ok to be overly earnest at times while being overtly non-earnest elsewhile? Maybe it's ok if people think you're full of crap at times. Maybe if you embrace it. Maybe if you have the greatest alter-ego in the world, it's ok to let me loose at times.
