Achtung Baby

Achtung Baby: U2
Release Date: November 19, 1991
Universal-Island Records, Ltd. (but was it still just Island back then?)

Where shall I start? U2 is one of my all time favorite bands, EVER. Has been. Is now. Will be. I am ashamed to say that I'd kind of forgotten about this album. WHAT WAS I THINKING?!!!! I started the first play through at 5pm, today, and have been listening to it non stop since then, except for the time I spent in yoga this evening. The first of the 90's U2 and it's this wonderful, driven, sexy, painful, pleading, damaged, seductive, grinding journey. I love that it begins with "Zoo Station", which has a bright, heady anticipation to it. He's "ready". Ready for this. Ready for that. "Ready for the laughing gas/Ready for what's next." And throughout the rest of the album, it's like this character is going on these different adventures and finding lots and lots of pretty and not so pretty people; but there is still love, even when it hurts. Hell, love in its pretty and not so pretty state. By the end, "Love is Blindness" is just exhaustion. Beautiful exhaustion. Even at the end of the song, he kind of rallies, only you can tell he's still really, really tired.

"love is clockworks and cold steel/ fingers too numb to feel it/ squeeze the handle blow out the candle/love is blindness"

The single was "Mysterious Ways", and when I was listening to that song, I thought of Phoenix and sun and driving with the windows down--and that crappy "alternative" radio station that was by my account only an alternative to the other crappy stations on the dial--At first I assumed it must be because there was no air conditioning in whatever car I was riding in. Now I realize that it was because it was "winter" and, well, you could drive with the windows down. Was John Moreau still my boyfriend? He was a HUGE U2 fan. He ditched 1/2 a day at school so he could buy Rattle and Hum when it was released (so cool in my 14 year old book); and, unless I've got my memories mixed up, I think he picked me up from school to give me a ride home anyway. What a guy... but, we may not have been together by the time this one was released. It went back and forth there for a little while. If I could write out the sound of a chuckle I would, because I just got a vision of John M., Thom...what was his last name?..., Brent someoneorother, Ben Brittain, and other folks that I can't recall, going to see the movie version of Rattle and Hum in the theatre and dancing in the aisles, we were all so excited by it! And, naturally, because it opened with the Sun Devil Stadium shows we felt a special thrill. Was it the night that I was there? Or was it the second night? No. I'm sure it was the first night...