Finally – my first U2 concert. I have always lived too far away to make it to any previous U2 tours. But when they started building Jerry Jones’ Mothership (aka The Dallas Cowboys Stadium) around the corner from where I work – I only had one thought: when U2 tours, they are going to stop there. I just knew it was going to happen, and sure enough, my speculation proved to be true. And thanks to having an uber-U2 fan for a friend and a glitch in the Ticketmaster system, I was able to get floor seats before most fan club members could snatch them all up.
The opening act for the night was Muse. I really like Muse’s albums, but I can’t really say if they are good in concert. The mix for their set wasn’t good, and I couldn’t see thanks to some drunk Muse fans that shoved us out of the way to get a better view. They were fans, they told us. Now, I am not a short person, so if I can’t see the stage because some dipstick in front of me is acting like a fool, then you know they were pretty drunk.
I forgot to mention that we did get a good spot on the floor, about 3 rows back from the outer stage ring. So, once U2 came on – we got some up close views of everyone in the band. The mix got better for U2, but I have heard it was pretty bad in the upper sections. All that money sunk into a state-of-the-art stadium, and they can’t eve get basic acoustics down.
U2 know how to put on a great show. Whoever designed their stage deserves an award – that thing was huge and awesome. It had this ring made of hundreds of widescreen TVs that were strung together to be a 360 degree widescreen. But during some songs, they actually all expanded away from each other in this cone shape that was, well – really cool, but hard to describe… see the pics.
The set lists from this tour are all over the net. I thought it was a good mix of older and newer songs. I was a little disappointed that they left out my favorite U2 song: “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. But they did play “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, so that made up for it. It was almost insane how comfortable u2 is in front of such a large crowd. They loved it as much as we did.
Bono preached less than I expected, but still made several good points about helping the world. The Edge rocked like the guitar god he is. Adam loved to strike some of coolest poses with a bass I have ever seen. Larry even got out from behind the drum kit and walked around with a handheld drum during a remix of “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy tonight.” Yep – it was a remix version. How many bands as big as U2 do you know that will let other people remix their songs and then play one of those remixes in concert? That just shows that U2 aren’t as full of themselves as they pretend to be sometimes.
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