A Sort Of Homecoming: Thoughts And Reflections Upon Seeing U2 Live

Belleville is a small college town of roughly 45,000 people, located almost directly in the center of the major highway bridging Ottawa, where I live, and Toronto, where my father and I are headed. If there is a single word to describe Belleville—where I existed for many years and where my father still does—it is innocuous. This is not an insult; I’ve been divorced of the city for long enough that all clichéd hometown resentment has been thoroughly drained. Now I can’t look on the town except to look back, as on a high school sweetheart, nostalgic for her charms but lacking interest in experiencing them again.

My homecoming is the indirect result of a trip my father and I have had planned for several months and which has sprung up on us now rather unexpectedly. We have two tickets to see U2 perform live at the Rogers Center stadium in Toronto and I’ve found my way to Belleville so that the two of us can drive the rest of the way together.

I’ve written before that being a young U2 fan in 2009 isn’t exactly easy, because the nature of the band’s status as veritably the World’s Biggest casts a vulgarity across the breadth of their popularity. I feel like very much the U2 apologist within my social circle, declarations of my (perhaps slightly wavering) adoration for the group having been met with eye-rolls on a number of occasions, but this seems a little odd, doesn’t it? Granted, the enormity of a band’s fanbase is no real indication of quality, but if so many people like U2 so much—enough to sell out a tour of a scale very few other bands in the history of rock music could undertake—why does identifying yourself as a member of that audience feel so weirdly shameful? We’re not talking about the height of vacuity here, either: this is the reputed and canonical group responsible for The Joshua Tree (1987); this is not Nickelback. And yet the discerning young music fan will dismiss both in one insouciant sweep.

Such are the ruminations of a boy and his father as they drive along the Ontarian highways on Thursday afternoon. The fact is I’m quite pleased to be taking this trip, though my enthusiasm is only in part directed toward the Big Event. Despite only living a few hours’ drive apart, my father and I spend very little time together in the course of our daily lives. I’d endured the past five years working through my undergraduate degree over in Ottawa while my father continued his career in the automotive industry in Belleville; it’s difficult to see one’s family as often as one might like when the rigidity of routine is set so firmly in place. But very recently, everything changed: I finished my degree and have been seeking gainful employment rather fruitlessly, while my father, his vocation of choice being unfortunately afflicted by our current economic climate, transitioned with surprising celerity from the world of unemployment to the more seemingly urbane environment of college. Across the period of a few brief months, the comfortable framework of our lives had been rent asunder; now, yet to outright flounder, we struggle to catch up.

My father and I saw U2 together for the first time in New York City, at Madison Square Garden, in the fall of 2005, when I was just entering my second year and my father was settling in to a more prestigious position at the automotive company. For my family this was a time of relative prosperity, our collective view of the near future unblemished by the shit that lay a few years ahead, and the trip was an accurate reflection of just that. This was one of those deplorably prodigal vacations in which no gesture is too lavish and no expense is too great because the vacationers partaking wish to relish and savor the few snatches of truly regal life they finally have the means to grasp. My father, if I can attempt to cast an analytical eye on his actions and motives for a moment, saw this vacation as an opportunity to not just experience but provide. That is, for me, the key to the whole adventure: my father wanted to show me a weekend of garish expenditure because, like the old parental adage runs, he was never afforded such opportunities himself. Understand that my family really did follow the North American dream, moving from England to Canada in 1990 in pursuit of something bigger and better, and the returns it provided were frankly incredible. Doncaster’s no Tehran, sure, but in his youth my father couldn’t continue his education beyond public school because the Marsh family couldn’t afford the school uniform to the gifted private school which sought to matriculate his gifted little noggin. And there we were, fifteen years later, him with a respectable career at a successful company, his son set to be the first Marsh to earn an undergraduate degree, and, bloody hell, the both of ‘em in New York Fucking City watching the biggest rock and roll band of all time in what turned out to be exactly the big ridiculous Spectacle they so very badly needed. Trust me when I say that this trip, heading to Toronto, transcends its obvious value to become something more personal and much, much more important.

So, by now we’ve hit the outer metropolitan limits where we’re planning on catching a subway train into the heart of the city. Subways tend to make me very uncomfortable—perhaps it’s just the subconscious and surely common anxiety concerning the danger implicit in standing so near to an unguarded gap full of, I don’t know, electric rails or whatever it is. As we board I grow increasingly self-conscious about my disposition, fearing that my father may interpret my anxiety regarding the subway train as some kind of negative emotion regarding the concert itself, or the trip entire, and the thought of projecting such feelings makes me doubly anxious and exacerbates the situation further, and then the sheer stupidity of this double-mind increases my self-consciousness, and it all continues to spiral downward until I notice that the woman sitting across from me is eying me cautiously and I realize that my face must be crumpled and contorted like someone on the verge of a total breakdown. I will myself to settle and think happy thoughts; if my father noticed my expression of reprobation, he hid it well. Currently he’s scanning the U2 section of his iPod, silently hypothesizing potential, possible, and probable setlists (none of which will include tonight’s surprise half-cover of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Two Tribes.”).

We’re playing this very ascetically: the NYC trip saw us dining at a five-star restaurant; this time around we grab Swiss Chalet from a mall food court. Not that I’m complaining—I fucking love Swiss Chalet—it’s just interesting to compare the lavishness of that earlier vacation with the relative simplicity of this one, as though the experiences themselves were little synecdoches for our situations at large.

This is all rushing through my mind as we arrive at the stadium around 4:15, some 45 minutes before admittance. The lineup in front of the Rogers Centre entrance is rather intimidating; my father makes some quick mental calculations to discern what proximity to the stage we’re likely to procure at this point in the line, being careful to factor in both the special VIP “Red Zone” areas flanking the stage and estimated running-from-doors-to-stage-once-admitted time discrepancies. My cool veneer of placidity is being slowly diminished by two very irritating students standing directly behind us, the louder and more boisterous of whom continues to hit me in the back of the head with his right hand as he gesticulates wildly, which he acknowledges and apologizes for but which fails to cease even after repeated stares and “do you mind“s. Added to this is the confusing tendency of the walkway bridging the entrance with the connecting street, on which we stood for the entirety of the 45-minute wait, to undulate subtly from the force of trains passing on the tracks below. These continued but hardly noticeable shakings are bemoaned loudly by every waiting U2 fan in line and the widespread complaining makes the queasiness borderline intolerable. Woe. My father, apparently oblivious to the sensation for the bulk of our wait, turns to me just before doors open and says, “You know, I think the ground might be moving.”

We’re finally inside the stadium, standing among a few thousand earlybird U2 fans in the pit-like General Admission area, waiting patiently for…well, for nothing, because it’s only 5:00 pm and the opening act isn’t supposed to hit the stage until 7. The characters immediately surrounding us are an odd bunch, but despite their singularly defining characteristics—this guy talks loudly, this guy drove here from Northern Quebec, this girl has an inexplicable obsession with bassist Adam Clayton above all other members of the band—my father and I decline any possible invitations to get acquainted. This is truly a Long Wait, nearly an event in and of itself, and it really elucidates some of the major differences between this Big Thing and the meager shit I go to weekly called “concerts”: the shows I attend so frequently are events, but each is not an Event. U2 live is The Event. It is all-encompassing and grossly spectacular, and it is preposterous. Shows just go on; I see bands, bands I certainly like more than U2, and the experience is just that: not an Experience. This is more than a concert because U2 are more than a band; they walk around like giant cartoons, totally unreal except as grand, visceral Things. It’s probably not a stretch to assume many of the people here tonight have been to only a handful of concerts in their life and many more have never been to one at all—before the grandeur of this multimillion dollar stage and multimillion dollar stadium, under the eyes of 54,000 U2 fans, I felt as though the hundreds of shows I’d seen in the past several years had melted away into paltry inexperience. In the most basic and superficial sense, a regular show seems so much smaller, so much less significant, than the event that is U2 live—roughly that of masturbation to actual sex.

I feel catatonic. By 6:30 the crowd has congregated around us so densely that movement of any kind was a physical impossibility. I’m inclined to deride any fellow concert-goers in the vicinity on the grounds that they are simply present, particularly those who pontificate loudly or shuffle and lurch in a haze of $10 cups of Bud Light. But I cannot abide this negativity. It depresses me. A girl beside us comments idly that the crowd seems especially hostile, jostling here and there in cunning attempts to move closer to the stage, but I maintain she’s projecting. I tell her as much; she shakes her head indignantly. But I know that people are, as a general rule, simply minding their business, content with their position, but just plain excited and excitable. For my own part, I’m less concerned with the behavior of others than with my own. Ever the obsequious worrier, I’m not irked so much as disconcerted, anxious not to bother the paying U2 fans around me. I resign myself to perpetual repose. Each time I can’t resist shifting weight from one foot to another or raising my hands to clap, I look around cautiously, careful to note any sidelong glances of irritation at my fidgeting. (One young man to my left, clad in a cream Army cap and intent on filming the concert with his cellphone camera, gives me a particularly chilling look as I attempt to scratch my elbow.)

Snow Patrol burst forth from the hallowed depths of the inner stage with vigor and warmth, but my father and I have little tolerance: we are weary, wary, and need to use the washroom. We will not brook this bullshit. The band’s lead singer, whose name I can’t even be bothered to Google, brims with glee at performing for 50,000—whoops, make that 10,000; the bulk of the crowd’s arriving late, and those already here seem indifferent. These guys were, like, indie at one point, weren’t they? They had a song about Sufjan? (Performed here, that song drops the Illinoise reference, natch). They’ve hit it big in recent years and, boy, do they ever know how to work it, exercising stadium tropes like they’ve had ten diamond records, at one point going so far as to engage the crowd in some silly echolalia game during which they exclaim, without a shred of irony, that they could die right now and be happy. Huh.

In fact, that was a recurring theme of the evening: the Event was what David Foster Wallace would have called an “Irony-Free Zone,” where every rock and roll cliché, no matter how tawdry or vacuous, was accepted and embraced and relished with a cheer. When U2 finally hit the stage the Event had already reached its fever pitch—the excitement was just being there and fulfilling the wants and needs of 54,000 people is simple enough when those wants and needs are limited to simply showing up and playing songs you’ve been playing for 25 years. Nobody was jaded or cynical or hip enough to find Bono’s posturing obnoxious or even goofy, and upon walking out into the night I passed several dozen concert-goers declaring with great fervor that this had been the single greatest live music experience of their lives. I cannot pass judgment; the Event occurred and everybody went home satisfied, satiated, full. My father and I enjoyed ourselves very much, despite how arduous elements of it proved to be, and that was enough. This was never about the music or the setlist, it was about the Event, the Experience; it was about coming together to relive, once again and in a very alien context, the experience we shared once in prosperity. So much has changed for my father and I since 2005; we’ve stomached some serious tumult, shit I won’t relate here except to say that its combined effect on our relationship has been frankly profound. Our lives feel different and so too, appropriately, did our time with U2. But the show still went and still goes on.

A spectacle is escapism, so A Spectacular Event on this scale should efface trauma of any kind. But how can we defer the gravity of our personal problems to the singular force of the world’s biggest rock and roll band? Bono pleads with a crowd of 50,000 that they submit themselves not only to a music but to a message, one both vague and simplistic but unwaveringly Good, and so as a mass our faces and thoughts and feelings are encouraged to blend into one nameless whole, exerting the force of our togetherness outward. 108,000 people across two days saw U2 perform, each of us mawkish, solipsistic, and ultimately alone. We matter only as a whole. What do my father and I have to offer to this crowd beyond our dollar and our presence? U2 is bigger than my relationship with my father; the band means more than us in every quantifiable respect. We submit ourselves to them, to It, because we are nothing before it and without it.

And as we take a densely populated subway back to our parked car, I look at my father, trying to understand his thoughts. We’ve been silent for a long time, letting the Experience settle and work through our tiredness and apathy. As our subway comes to a halt and the doors to our stop open, we stand to leave and I ask my father what he thought of the show. We walk out onto the empty platform, ready to go home, and he says, “I don’t think I’d want to do it again.”