U2 Finds its Mojo In Houston

Houston:  Awake to the reviews of the show last night and the best quote of the evening may have just come from Craig Hlavaty reporting for Houston Chronicle.  The band seems to have found a new fire inside them performing the cuts that redefined them as arena rock's reigning intellectuals at the end of the '80s. Now three decades later they seem to be rediscovering the mojo that made them international heroes. All it took was a trip back to the desert for some reflection.

Could it have been the plan all along for U2 to return to the past for some reflection towards the future? The Songs of Experience has been a challenge for the band to find its way thru this political chaos, fears of terror attacks.

All indications point towards this band not giving to terrorist attacks. While security was as tight as a Super Bowl game with delays entering the venue.  Fans poured in ready to be taken back 30 years with a backdrop of images including the works of Anton Corbijn; which seemed to place fans in the driver's seat for an experience of a lifetime.

The tour moves on to Dallas and off to Chicago for a few nights. The band has pretty much settled into their setlist and the show is a visual experience that is not to be missed.

The full setlist was:

1. Sunday Bloody Sunday
2. New Year's Day
3. Pride (In The Name Of Love)
4. Where The Streets Have No Name / California (There Is No End To Love) (snippet)
5. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
6. With Or Without You
7. Bullet The Blue Sky
8. Running To Stand Still
9. Red Hill Mining Town
10. In God's Country
11. Trip Through Your Wires
12. One Tree Hill
13. Exit / Wise Blood (snippet) / Eeny Meeny Miny Moe (snippet)
14. Mothers Of The Disappeared

Encore(s):

1. Miss Sarajevo / The New Colossus (snippet)
2. Bad / America (snippet)
3. Beautiful Day
4. Elevation
5. Ultra Violet (Light My Way)
6. One
7. The Little Things That Give You Away

* Snippets provided by U2gigs.com

Too Big For Texas: U2's 'Claw' Vs. Cowboy Stadium

By John McAlley

What happens when the biggest stage show in rock and roll history — U2’s 360-Degree Tour — sets up in the biggest domed stadium in the world — the new $1.2 billion Cowboy Stadium?

The answer is obvious: big problems.

Although they’ve scorched crowds with some of the most incendiary concerts of the past decade, the Irish rock band has not attempted a run of stadium shows since 1997’s much lambasted and remote-feeling PopMart tour. The 360-Degree outing, with its massive in-the-round stage set known affectionately as “The Claw,” is intended to solve the intimacy problems of playing to crowds upwards of 80,000. The thinking: if the stage is almost as big as the stadium itself, no fan will be left behind.

Did it work in Dallas? Find out after the jump.

First, the numbers: with an operating budget of $750,000 a day, U2’s tour employs nearly 400 people and 200 trucks to move three separate versions of the same 170-ton set from venue to venue. While U2 performs on one set at, say, Cowboy Stadium, another is being assembled at the next tour stop in Houston while a third is being transported for an upcoming gig in Oklahoma. The $40 million tangle of steel requires as much as 8 days of set-up and breakdown — for a two-hour show.

Cowboy Stadium accommodates over 100,000 fans. Its high-definition video screen — again, the biggest in the world — weighs the same as a 747, runs 60-yards in length and is suspended so ostentatiously at midfield that the showplace venue suffered a national embarrassment before it formally opened. In a preseason game against the Dallas Cowboys, Tennessee Titans punter A.J. Trapasso sent a kick right into the low-hanging guts of the thing.

The Claw — slightly off center — illuminates Cowboy Stadium. The 170-ton stage set requires as much as 8 days to set up and break down. (John McAlley for NPR)

Whether the Claw helps U2 hit its fans in the gut is something we’ll never know in Texas. Taken separately, the Claw and Cowboy Stadium are epic feats of engineering, but throwing them together was like trying to wedge the Guggenheim Museum into the foyer of the Met. As soaring as Cowboy Stadium is, it couldn’t accommodate the Claw. The structure, which is designed to play at dead center of the field, had to be shunted into an end zone because of the looming GinormoTron, leaving tens of thousands of fans, well, a football field away from their favorite rock and roll band.

It caused the whole show to feel a little off, too — almost as if Bono and his mates sensed the loss of the centripetal, focusing force of their spectacular set.

But as anyone who has tracked his numerous global initiatives knows, Bono loves a challenge. And despite the need to enthrall the masses — over 70,000 attended the Dallas show and larger crowds have made dates in New York and Los Angeles sell-outs — the U2 song list doesn’t pander. The band fearlessly pushed forward material from its new No Line On The Horizon album and paraded — through the use of video images and Bono’s impassioned preachifying — noble causes ranging from the staunching of AIDS in Africa to the pursuit of justice for the persecuted Burmese-goverment opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

“Just sing!” protested some of the Big D crowd. That is, until Bono thanked local icon George W. Bush for his contribution to the fight against AIDS. The mention was met with an ear-shattering roar, proof that even in an age of garishly outsized sports palaces and over-the-top entertainments, the oldest trick in the book — name-checking a good ol’ cowboy — can bring down the house.

Everything is bigger in Texas 360 Arrives

By any measure, U2 is one of the world’s biggest rock bands.

It stands to reason then, that for their latest jaunt around America, the rockers are delivering a truly outsized spectacle.

Dave Long/U2TOURFANS Staff 209 The U2 360º Tour boasts an immense, stadium-shrinking stage design that has wowed fans from Barcelona to Boston. Designed by production designer Willie Williams and architect Mark Fisher, longtime U2 collaborators, the circular, immersive stage has been on the band’s mind since at least 2006. According to notes furnished by U2’s record label, the four-legged model was initially developed over dinner with a few forks during the Vertigo Tour.

The Irish quartet hasn’t been to North Texas since around that same time — 2005 — while touring in support of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It has been more than a decade since U2 has played stadiums in North America; it last did so in 1997, during the infamous PopMart Tour.

With buzzy opening act Muse in tow, U2 plays Cowboys Stadium on Monday to promote its latest album, No Line on the Horizon. Tickets, as of this writing, are still available (Ticketmaster’s Web site showed seats at all price points), as are $30 “party passes” similar to the type sold for Dallas Cowboys games.

Here’s a closer look at U2’s gargantuan stage, designed, the band says, in an effort to “establish a physical proximity” to the audience. It will be situated near Cowboys Stadium’s eastern end zone.

The highest point

Much has been made about the fact that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is willing to move the gigantic HDTVs for a rock concert but not

for a pro football game. That’s

probably because few punters could manage the considerable height of U2’s elaborate 360-degree stage. The overall steel structure is 90 feet tall, while the center pylon reaches a height of 150 feet.

Ready for a close-up

AMG/U2TOURFANS 2009While the whole audience can’t be on the field for an up-close look at Bono and his stylish shades, the band has made it easier to watch the action. Wrapped around the 360-degree stage is a cylindrical video screen, described by the band as “groundbreaking.” The screen weighs a whopping 54 tons — the overall design is built to withstand a weight of up to 180 tons — and covers 4,300 square feet.

Plenty of pixels

The cylindrical video screen is made up of 1 million individual elements: 500,000 pixels; 320,000 fasteners; 30,000 cables; and 150,000 machined pieces. It can be broken into segments on what’s called a “multiple pantograph system.” This allows the screen to open and/or spread apart vertically as an effect. The screen can open to 14,000 square feet, roughly the size of two doubles tennis courts.

Building it up, tearing it down

A stage this dramatic doesn’t go up quickly: The steel structure alone takes four days to build (the stages were originally constructed by the Belgian company Stageco). The construction of each stage requires the use of innovative, high-pressure hydraulic systems. It takes an additional 12 hours to load in the screen, stage and other production equipment. Once the crowds have dispersed, it takes the crew six hours to dismantle the production aspect. Forty-eight hours pass before the steel structure is taken down and removed from the stadium.