(2 of 2)
Rattle and Hum sounds big without being pretentious, an extraordinary accomplishment considering that the band has chosen to chronicle its own musical wanderings, then set them -- and this is the big step -- parallel to a deeper, even more personal striving. The album's first cut, an atomic remake of the Beatles' Helter Skelter, sets the trajectory as if it were a tour itinerary, an emotional playground journey from the bottom to the top of a slide "Where I stop and I turn/ And I go for a ride/ Till I get to the bottom/ And I see you again." Many of the album's 17 songs deal with images of exile and uneasy spiritual responsibility, most strikingly in the Dylan collaboration: "Many strangers have I met/ On the road to my regret/ Many lost who seek to find themselves in me/ They ask me to reveal/ The very thoughts they would conceal/ Love rescue me."
It is this pervasive, alternating mood of renewal and uncertainty that gives Rattle and Hum its size and its impact. The record is timely enough to get in a neat lyrical crack about the new John Lennon biography ("I don't believe in Goldman his type like a curse/ Instant karma's gonna get him if I don't get him first"), but sufficiently tough-minded to resist looking to music for salvation. Like the Lennon song from which it draws its title, God Part II suggests only that if there is any anodyne at all for spiritual pain, it lies inward, on the far side of a troubled heart.
The last tune on Rattle and Hum, All I Want Is You, is a love song full of gentle pleading, hopeful but not necessarily optimistic, which suggests that in their 264 days of touring, some personal relationships were sacrificed, others scarred or put at serious risk. Two hundred sixty-four days is a long time away to be looking for home, and the song, fragile and heartrending, ends the record with unexpected quiet, and intimacy. It is a characteristically bold, even reckless move. Whatever was given up in 1987 remains a mystery, but it is clear, now, what U2 came away with -- the best live rock album ever made. The record, in every sense, of their lives.