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Thanks to my favorite boardie, loveallthetime, we have the article gof wrote in Death + Taxes which is in circulation in New York. Check it out:

Death + Taxes

U2’s “BAD”
Live. From Wide Awake in America
By Geoff Rickly

WHEN I WAS A BOY I was always running. Always turning up stereos, sitting too close to television sets–anything to drown out the deafening vacuum of my empty house: its thunderous voids. My family’s distances, all of those half-finished arguments, the unsaid everything, clung to the walls of that house. I was alone there most of the time, an icicle warming blind cathedrals of silence. My father was absent and omniscient, a presence that filled the rooms after we were in bed and before we woke up. My mother, a vision in tears, a ghost at the kitchen table. Her back had been broken in a car wreck and when the anesthesia wore off, she woke up suffocating in an orange pill bottle. It got so bad some nights she would confess, “If anything happens to me, I want you to know, it’s not because I don’t love you.”

Still, I convinced her to take me to see U2. She was a non-believer but she played along. The opening band, a strange choice for an arena, was the Pixies. I was thrilled. They whipped through their songs with enough viciousness to keep me from hearing my own thoughts. My mother’s reaction to the assault wasn’t obvious until the singer screamed, “you are the son of a mother[****]er.” At this point she laughed and checked her watch. U2 took the stage to the loudest applause I’ve ever heard. My mother just rolled her eyes.

But after an hour of spectacle, the band changed gears. A sound came out of the PA like the first sparks of heartbreak: old clocks sending chimes down the turning universe. Drums swelled to a march and a steady clap began on the upper tier. As far as I could tell, the song had no discernable structure. Every second was just an infinitely small increase in energy from the last. A little bit faster. A little bit louder. A little bit closer to the divine electricity of Belief.

Half way through the song I looked over, and my mother was in tears next to me. I didn’t know why. She was present, a part of the crowd, and a part of the world in some way that I had never seen before. As the night ended, it began to snow and we left to wrap ourselves in its deafening whiteness. I could still feel those opening chords: the pulsing drums and the crowd’s unified voices suspended in the air all around us. The pluralism of the snowflakes lost in the singularity of the storm.

When I got home from school the next day, there was a neat stack of nine U2 albums on the table. I opened the cover of the one titled Wide Awake in America and played the first song. Everything hit me at once. I knew why my mother was in tears the previous evening. In the opening chimes of “Bad” I could hear our fragile dreams rain down around me like a thousand broken windows. A guitar line, composed of fragmentary beauty, carved a quarry, a dark artery pushing thick new blood through my veins. Bono, usually majestic and sweeping, was intimately telling the story of my family. The reverb on his voice filled the exact dimensions of our empty house. Despite the sound of a stadium cheering and the fact that the song was written for a friend that died of an overdose, I knew he was speaking for me — and when he opened his lungs, like some terrifying hawk, to scream, “I’m wide awake,” it traveled down my throat and into my lungs. Every time I open my mouth to sing I can still feel his breath inside me.

My mother walked in and stood next to me, listening to the song. When my father came home we booked a trip to ireland. Soon my family would walk through the land of our fathers’ fathers, propelled by the steady drumbeat of that song. We would find our family’s dreams, not some manufactured American fantasy. We would find the music of our home. The music that slept in our chests. In our blood.

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