![]() The snippets of Sterling Magree and Hendrix are completely unnecessary, and certainly come off as pretentious.īut ignoring all that, what about the studio tracks themselves? Bono's stage-speeches (in this earlier era, mind) can work in context if you're at a live show, but speeches about Desmond Tutu ("Am I bugging you?") don't deserve being laid down for posterity on a catalog, mainstream release. All the other live tracks feel redundant or simply unnecessary ("Pride" in particular sounds thin and reedy, with wimpy guitar and strained vocals). Of the six live tracks on the album, only "Helter Skelter" works for me personally - it's a bit manic and out-of-left-field (they only played it live a few times in November '87) and sets up the record well, off the top, for an "anything goes" kind of feeling. The gratuitous use of either 'classic-rock' catalog songs or classic-rock/blues artists being guest-stars on the record, giving the impression that U2 was anointing itself alongside the greatsĪnyway, it occurs to me that most of the fault found with Rattle & Hum lies in the live tracks, which tie the record in with the poorly-received film and the previous year's tour. ![]() Unnecessary inclusion of live tracks previously issued on recent U2 studio albums ('Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', 'Pride', and "Bullet the Blue Sky') Unnecessary inclusion of two snippets of other (black) musicians playing live Bono's vocal oil & water mix with Dylan on "Love Rescue Me", albeit the bard is heard only in the background This live romp was also called amateur-ish sounding (which it is), as it was one of the first times the band had played the song. Bono's screwing up the final verse of "All Along The Watchtower" and inserting his own lines. Bono's "okay, Edge, play the blues!" line in "Silver & Gold", followed by a nice solo by The Edge that is not anywhere near the blues. Bono's "we're stealing it back" line off the top of "Helter Skelter" In addition to the usual U2 issues (bombast, pretense, and stage-speeches), the album was in time criticized for the following: After the film opened and died quickly at the box-office, however, a mini U2-backlash began to set in and it was easy to find fault with Rattle & Hum. The record was another enormous commercial success when issued, and mostly received strong reviews. Most of the studio tracks were recorded in Los Angeles with Jimmy Iovine in the producer's chair. (Jimi Hendrix - "The Star Spangled Banner") (Sterling Magee - "Freedom For My People") ![]() I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (live, with the New Voices of Freedom choir) The tracklisting, on four sides of vinyl, ran like this: The album was a very odd mishmash of new studio tracks (9 of them), live recordings from the final leg of the 1987 tour (6 of them), one 35-second recording of then 51-year-old Sterling Magee in Harlem, and 40-odd seconds of Jimi Hendrix doing 'The Star Spangled Banner'. It took only 1.5 years for its follow up record, which came with record-breaking advance orders, etc. er, Joshua Tree album and tour had elevated the quartet from "really big cult band" to one of the contenders for "biggest band in the world". The group couldn't have been any bigger at this moment. ![]() The album was of course a sort of soundtrack to their contemporaneous documentary film (a theatrically-released film, at that). This was a double-album on vinyl, one 'long'-ish cassette tape, or one CD. Back in October 1988, U2 issued Rattle & Hum. ![]()
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