U2 360 Tour, A Split Review.

I guess I’ll start off by walking into the brick wall of popular opinion…

For me, what was memorable about this concert wasn’t the music, it was more about that magnificent stage (no pun intended). Being a long-time fan of such engineering marvels as the Gateway Arch and the Hoover Dam, this U2 stage was really something to contemplate… I know I’m going against the tide here… other than Jim DeRogatis at the Chicago Sun-Times who disliked the proceedings for different reasons… the Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone and most everyone I know are tripping over themselves to emanate the U2 love (brought to you by Blackberry and Live Nation no less). But I’m not hopping on that bandwagon… to me it was a crappy, uninspired set list… it didn’t come close to the proper ebb and flow, soft valleys to soaring crescendos worthy of a stage like that… worthy of a band that has meant as much as U2 has over their lifespan.

So here’s an idea… for all the energy expended in setting up this stage and then taking it back down, that coupled with the majority in attendance having spent $250 for a ticket (a truly obscene number)… Why not play 3+ hours? Buck the trendy 2 hour 15 minute show and blow the crowd away. Many sporting events last 3 hours, good long-form movies do as well, is it too much to ask that a $250 stadium rock show might?

Not to say that “No Line on the Horizon” isn’t made up of decent songs, but they’re brand new… how many have listened to them more than 9 or 10 times? If your going to play 7 of the 11 songs on your 6-month old new album… at least expand your set list so the new songs aren’t played at the expense of the songs that you made your mark with… the songs that could have been used to bring the high parts of the show that much higher… again, worthy of that stage, worthy of the band… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about what Pink Floyd might have done with that stage, but I digress…

There’s a reason that “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “New Years Day” have been U2 live staples since they were released. It’s because they’re from that period of the U2 canon when they were still struggling and hungry… which backs up what I’ve always thought… rich guys don’t write great songs… serviceable songs maybe, but great songs no… back in the day they were naming their songs things like “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Drowning Man” and “Surrender”. What we’ve gotten in the last decade have been sappy, micro-titled, radio-ready songs like “Beautiful Day”, “Elevation” and now most recently, “Magnificent”.

The boys of U2 are forever fat and happy… The life experiences that made them the band they were are but a mere speck in their rearview mirrors. From here it’s all luxury, limos and leer jets… there will be no more hardship and struggle, everything from here on out will be staged (again, no pun intended). So if that’s the case, open up your discography when you’re deciding on the sequencing of your set list. Don’t put live bullets back in the box just because they’re not on your latest album… I believe that U2 fears becoming the Rolling Stones, a touring greatest hits jukebox… but U2’s catalog is not mostly blues-derivative songs about shagging… rather, they wrote many of the anthems that defined their generation. These are songs that should be front and center, for as long as this band plays live… and if the resulting set list exceeds 3 hours… don’t worry about it Dublin, we’ll stay and listen.

Now on to the stage… on this front the band and their production team have succeeded in every way. Designed by Willie Williams working on his 10th U2 production along with Architect Mark Fisher working on his 6th… their creation, dubbed “the spaceship”, was built by Belgian company Stageco using high-pressure hydraulic systems. The steel structure is 90 feet tall and was designed to support 180 tons. The center pylon, which was my favorite part, reaches 150 feet into the air and is topped with a massive disco ball, a popular U2 motif. The super-structure takes 4 days to build with an additional 12 hours required to set up the main stage and lift the video screen into place.

The cylindrical 360 degree video screen weighs 54 tons and opens up in a scissor-like fashion to resemble an enormous gyro. Fully extended, it covers an area of 14,000 square feet which is as big as 2 doubles tennis courts. The video screen is made up of over 1 million pieces… 500,000 pixels, 320,000 fasteners, 30,000 cables and 150,000 machined pieces. Once the show is over, it takes 6 hours for the production team to dismantle the stage and another 48 hours for the road crew to take down the super-structure and get it loaded onto the trucks. The stage cost $40 million to design and build and that was just for the first one. The band is currently traveling around North America with 3 complete stages tended to by 500 crew members who are using 189 Semi-trucks for its transport.

(Editor’s Note; For the purposes of this review I’m overlooking the obvious conflict of interest here as the band that claims to want to save the world is doing its damnedest here to hasten the end-of-days. Buying carbon-offsets and mandating the crew use canteens over plastic water bottles is not gonna get you off the hook for this one Bono.)

From an engineering standpoint there’s nothing that spectacular going on, the design is perfectly symmetrical. Where it succeeds is in compressing the vastness of the stadium music experience. The scale of the stage is so immense, it stands on an equal footing with the stadium containing it… it has towers and bridges, ramps and runways… all perfectly suited for allowing the band members 360 degrees of mobility… not to mention the truly state of the art sound system, sending out sound in 360 degrees, lending itself to the open-air stadium that will never bounce that sound back where it came from… the songs they did play were crystal clear… on this front, U2 really delivered the goods, it was like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard in a stadium show before…
So a mixed review… it was certainly worth the dollars and a great experience… but I just can’t help but think of what it could have been if the tempo of the show had been better thought out, better suited to engage the technical capability of their stage… I’ll be the first to admit though, you’d be hard pressed to find other fans in attendance that would share my opinion most likely. For most, U2 could have done two hours of Monty Python’s “The Knights Who Say Ni”  and gone over just as well.

We should all aspire to be a little harder to please…

(Editor’s Note posting 10/22/09; As the 360 tour is pulling in to Pasadena, CA on October 25th… The LA Times has published this awesome interactive of the design process behind the development of “The Claw”, the current U2 stage. Thanks to Phil B. for the link!)

The pictures used in this post come from a set of 74 pictures that I’ve posted on Facebook… They were taken at the Sunday night show from Section 138 (Soldier Field, September 13, 2009). You can check those out by clicking here.