U2 in East Lansing — 7/26/2011

“Wow.”  Bono could be seen saying it while looking out at the crowd toward the end of U2’s performance at Spartan Stadium on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, on June 26, 2011.  Having been in attendance, I can’t think of a better word to sum up the event.

After having never seen U2 in concert, despite being a fan of the band since the late 1980s, I’ve now seen U2 twice in a little less than two years during their 360° Tour—first at Soldier Field in Chicago in September 2009 and now in East Lansing this past weekend.  I highly enjoyed the concert in 2009, but this one felt even better (and, for more on ways in which the East Lansing concert was “even better,” check out my other review of the event).  I’m not entirely sure why.  It could have been my seats (to the side of the stage rather than behind).  It could have been the feel of a college football stadium over an NFL stadium.  It could have been that U2 has found some nuanced and specific ways to improve the show since its opening legs.  It could have been that the set played in East Lansing works better than the set played in Chicago.  Likely, it involved some combination of those factors and others.  Whatever the case, the East Lansing show reinforced to a greater degree what I thought after the Chicago show:  U2 knows how to rock and how to entertain. 

From beginning to end, the show contained no down moments.  U2 appear to have mastered the ability to use their video screen, which circles the band, providing its imagery for, as the tour name indicates, 360 degrees.  At various points the screen featured, among other things, a taped recitation of some “Beautiful Day” lyrics by astronaut Mark Kelly leading into performance of the song; a message by Desmond Tutu leading into “One”; and images of Aung San Suu Kyi during “Walk On,” which U2 dedicated to her during her house arrest of almost 20 years in Burma.  Even before U2 began, after Florence and the Machine provided a nice warm-up for the main act, the video screen offered the audience an array of facts, such as the highest point in Michigan, the amount of money spent on video games that day, the world’s population, and much more, interspersed with the current time from destinations around the world.  All of these elements, as the tour name of “360” itself also suggests, were framed, as they have been throughout the tour, within that “around the world” theme—the idea of people recognizing the global interrelationships of our world and our world’s status within the universe.  The stage is meant to resemble a spaceship on which all of us around the world are passengers, and the playing of the original recordings David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” at the beginning of the show and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” at the end as concertgoers leave connect to that theme.

In between, U2 played a total of 23 of their own songs, as well as a brief chorus of the classic Shirelles’ song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” performed by Bono toward the end of the show, sandwiched between “One” and “Where the Streets Have No Name.”  The show featured three songs from U2’s latest studio album, No Line on the Horizon:  “Get on Your Boots,” “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” and the final song of the show—“Moment of Surrender,” which was dedicated, with a touching call for audience members to hold up their cell phones in the dark, to E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who passed away on June 18.  The band also played a half dozen songs from the 1980s, including their first hit, “I Will Follow”; “Sunday Bloody Sunday”; “Pride (In the Name of Love)”; and their three big hits from The Joshua Tree (“With or Without You,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “Where the Streets Have No Name”).  Much of the set came from the 1991-2000 period, though, including the first four songs of the show, which all hail from Achtung Baby—the band’s highly influential album that this coming November will mark 20 years since its release.  After “Until the End of the World” made four straight songs from Achtung Baby to start the show, I turned to my dad, with whom I attended the concert, and joked that I didn’t realize it was suddenly 1991 again.

Not that I’m complaining, though.  I think the reliance on more older material for this concert contributed to me feeling more connected to it than to the Chicago concert.  The same, I’m sure, goes for my dad, who said afterward that he recognized a lot of the songs.  He also said that the concert was “spectacular” and echoed my sentiment that it didn’t have a dull moment.  He had never been to a rock concert at a stadium before, so we joked on the way out that the first one he ever attended had been so good that it had ruined all others, since none would be able to live up to the experience of this show.

I’d say that counts as another “Wow.”  It’s no wonder the 360 Tour has become the highest grossing concert tour ever.  Count me in that statistic twice, and I’m thoroughly thrilled to be there both times.