My U2-loving friend said he likes to listen to October at least once a year, preferably during the month of October. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t own that album and never heard it, so I just quietly ordered a copy and put it on the turntable as soon as it arrived. Wow, just wow.
Then I went downstairs to retrieve the only other U2 albums I own, in part to see what I missed when I bought them back in the 1980s.
The first song on The Unforgettable Fire is “A Sort of Homecoming,” and I sat in my office easy chair and put it on. Listening to music first thing in the morning is a sort of homecoming for me. There was a time when music and I were constant companions — I have encountered hundreds of fine artists who preserved their performances in plastic so I could see, or hear, what they have released into the air now.
I find, more often than not, that the musicians come in the name of love, and why not? Love makes a body want to sing and to dance — a decade or so earlier than U2, a band sang, “We’re too busy singing to put anybody down,” and isn’t that so? Music is love, music is harmony, music is finding a rhythm to the universe and expressing it with a kind of joy.
It’s like there’s a wire from the essence of the universe to our hearts, minds and soul that excites our emotions and settles us down so we are aware of the connections between us, and we dance and we sing and we feel the unforgettable fire that burns within us — the fire of life, the fire of love.
We walk past the promenade of fools and foolishness and sing, “Take me away from this,” and as the sun rises and sheds its light on us all, we forget our differences and our surface disagreements, and we get lost together in the melody that we all share.
Here I am, listening to where U2 was 40 years ago and wondering why I didn’t get immersed in it in 1984. I doubt the stylus has traveled this groove more than four or five times through the years, the album lost in the avalanche of albums that I accumulated on my shelves. I heard the familiar chime of the guitars and the driving drumbeat and the howling voice, but to me it was just another sound in the crowd, until now.
I kept accumulating and listening, and I thought I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, but it seems it was downstairs all along, waiting on the shelf between The Tymes and Vanilla Fudge.
Hello, music, my old friend, it’s good to be swept away by you again.
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