In the midst of all the '87 madness -- sold-out arena concerts, two No. 1 singles, a No. 1 album, a deluge of magazine covers -- U2 knew they were adrift. It wasn't simply that the velocity of their incredible success had cut them loose from their moorings. Superstardom beamed a sudden, harsh light: the Irish band had no strong musical foundation at all. There was a sudden shared awareness among them that their center could not hold because it had never been firmly fixed.
Bono, the band's vocalist and lyric writer, had been fretting over this problem for some time. "The music of U2 is in space somewhere," he told Bob Dylan. "There is no particular musical roots or heritage for us. In Ireland there is a tradition, but we've never plugged into it." Dylan, who has nurtured and torn up a few roots in his time, knew just what to say: "Well, you have to reach back into music. You have to reach back."
Rattle and Hum, the title of both U2's brand-new album of the 1987 tour and the energetic performance documentary film released last week, is the sound of the band making contact: with music, with tradition, with their audience, with one another. The title comes from Bullet the Blue Sky, their rabble-rousing apocalypse about American muscle flexing in Central America ("In the locust wind comes a rattle and hum . . . Outside is America"), but the substance of these various tour diaries is, in fact, an exploration. U2 did more than reach back. They immersed themselves in American musical culture, splashed and reveled about, and came away baptized.
The musical contents of the album and film vary slightly. The record contains three songs not in the movie, while the movie has eight performances not found on the album. LP and film make a good complement to each other, but it is on the record that the band stakes its strongest claim. In its first week of release, Rattle and Hum shot straight to the top of the album charts, accompanied by some grumpy reviews that fretted about a scope that went way too wide and a cohesion that remained elusive. Indeed, Rattle and Hum is careeningly ambitious, but what fixes its focus is the band's passion to rediscover and remake themselves. With crystalline production supervised by Jimmy Iovine, U2 has never sounded better or bolder. Performances are mixed together with new, studio-recorded material into a record that is part mosaic and part road map of the group's musical unconscious.
They perform with a Harlem gospel choir on a version of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For that becomes a bit of casual exaltation ex rock cathedra. They cook up a new song for the great bluesman B.B. King, When Love Comes to Town, and kick out the jams together. They corral Dylan into playing Hammond organ on an extraordinary new tune, Hawkmoon 269, and press him into harmony-singing and lyric-writing service on Love Rescue Me, a high point not only for the band but also for their informal spiritual adviser. The Edge, the band's wizard guitar player, contributes a lilting, spooky piece of folk inspiration, Van Diemen's Land, and the whole group works out at Sun Studios in Memphis, where Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis cut some of their best sides. It is a deliberate pilgrimage, of course, but Angel of Harlem, one of the tunes recorded there, not only pays homage to the Sun tradition but also cops a good deal of its sweet, rowdy spirit.