Interview with the Las Vegas Review Journal
Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 04, 2005 - By Mike Kalil
"The reason I'm attracted to the light of Scriptures is because there's another side of me that is dark." -- Bono, 1988
Faith and religion have often been seen as anathema to the rebel spirit of rock 'n' roll.
Of the giant bands that have dominated the past 25 years of rock music, perhaps none has so publicly embraced faith as a driving force in its art as U2.
Since their mid-1970s beginnings in Dublin's Shalom Christian Fellowship, Bono and company have constantly referenced religion in lyrics, interviews and social activism, such as Bono's successful campaign for African debt relief.
As U2 ignored the Review-Journal's repeated requests for interviews made via phone, fax and e-mail during the past three months, the newspaper recently spoke with the Rev. Steve Stockman, a Presbyterian minister, U2 expert and author of the recent book Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2.
Stockman, 44, first heard U2 around the time of the band's first singles.
"I had come to university to study theology," he says. "I got a couple of record tokens for my birthday. Somebody said U2 were Christian, and I thought I'd try that."
The purchase of a U2 album launched the fierce fandom that would sow the seeds for the book Stockman would pen two decades later.
In "Walk On," Stockman traces the constant theme of Christian spirituality streaming through U2's albums and acts. (Bassist Adam Clayton is the only non-Christian member of the group.)
He concludes that U2, unlike other veteran rock bands like the Rolling Stones, hasn't flailed artistically through 11 albums because the band is still chasing its original ambitions.
"The Stones got what they were looking for when they went into it, which is fame and fortune and good-looking women," Stockman says.
"U2 didn't go into music for those reasons. They've never met the reason they got into it for. They're still journeying toward it, and I think that's why they're still making great albums. They're still on a spiritual and artistic journey."
At the invitation of the newspaper, Stockman catalogued and commented on some of the most overt Christian imagery in U2's lyrics, framing it in the context of what the band was experiencing at the time.
Stockman counts the band's third album, 1983's War, as the point when U2 began blending the religious with the political, especially on the fiery protest track "Sunday Bloody Sunday," where the group compares and contrasts the significance of Ireland's Bloody Sunday massacre with Easter Sunday.
"They were bringing Jesus into the realm of Irish troubles," Stockman says. "The religious imagery is big there where (Bono) sings 'Sunday, bloody Sunday/To claim the victory Jesus won/Sunday, bloody Sunday.'
"And then '40,' the song they've been ending concerts with recently, the lyrics are 'I waited patiently for the Lord/He inclined and heard my cry/He brought me out of the pit/Out of the miry clay.' It's powerful stuff."
Irish journalist Bill Graham called U2's fourth album "the Holy Spirit album" for its heavy religious imagery.
U2 took the name for 1984's The Unforgettable Fire from a Chicago museum exhibition on the horrors from the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the band's museum visit, Bono and company saw another exhibit documenting the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
It was the first time band members reared in solemn religious settings had been exposed to King's evangelism and deeds.
"That (exhibit) changed everything," Stockman says. "Martin Luther King took religion outside the church and into the real world for them. If you look at (songs on) The Unforgettable Fire -- 'MLK,' 'Pride (In the Name of Love)' -- you start to see a wee bit of substance to some of the politics that they were a bit flaky on on War."
Noticing the religious references throughout the band's rock songs, producer Daniel Lanois encouraged Bono to go a step further and write a song in the vein of a traditional gospel for their 1987 effort, The Joshua Tree.
The result was "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," the iconic video for which was shot on Fremont Street.
"Certainly, they knew this was the big one, yet it confused a lot of Christians," Stockman says, noting that the song briefly stoked controversy.
"The narrower end of evangelical Christianity was reacting to this as something to prove that U2 were not real Christians, saying 'We have found what we're looking for. We've found Jesus.' "
Bono disagreed, saying he had penned it "as a gospel song for a restless spirit."
Stockman calls the song "a concise creed of redemption," with numerous allusions to Christ. "Jesus breaks bonds, looses chains, carries the cross and all of our shame. After the confession there is the clear and confident assent of 'I believe it.' "
Stockman says the band's 1990s albums -- Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop -- have spiritual depth, but not the same kind of overt religious references of their 1980s work. "Bono says, 'We sang about what we believed in in the '80s. We sang about what we didn't believe in in the '90s,' " Stockman says.
"These albums are about the ridiculousness of the media, TV, telephones, the absurdity of who we make into stars and heroes."
Yet the band returned to overt spirituality in the two albums they've released in the 21st century.
"When you come to All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, they're suddenly back to what they believe in," Stockman says. "They went back to their primary colors and stopped trying to be too clever."
Stockman cites many songs from the two albums as Christian-themed, from the survival plea "Walk On" to the prayer-like "Yahweh."
The reverend admits that he occasionally uses a line from the most recent album's "Crumbs From Your Table" in sermons.
"Bono is very quotable. The line is 'Would you deny for others what you demand for yourself?' And that's just a depth charge. You can use that in every sermon you ever preach on justice issues," Stockman says.
Careful of his reputation, the chaplain doesn't always reveal to congregants the source.
"I don't always attribute it to Bono, because they'll say, 'Oh, he's going on about U2 again.'"
© Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2005.
Back
