And then the lyrics, sung as a passionate teenager’s soulful cry to unmarked heavens: “I was on the outside when you said, you said you needed me / I was looking at myself / I was blind I could not see / A boy tries hard to be a man / His mother takes him by his hand / If he stops to think he starts to cry…If you walk away…I will follow.”Ĭoming straight from the outside of rock convention, the unprecedented Dublin quartet followed nobody in its procession toward locating and satisfying a vast need among the world’s three-chords-and-the-truth-seeking rock audience. As pivotal collaborator Brian Eno might have observed in one of his oblique strategy sessions, the path between where you mean to go and where you ultimately wind up is rarely a straight line.Īll the ironic prophecy anyone need hear regarding U2 is right there in “I Will Follow,” the sweeping declaration that opens Boy: a tiny tape error and a nearly inaudible count-off signifying both the cavalier ignorance of buffed niceties and the commitment to live all-together-now music-making, the distant herald of the Edge’s distinctive two-note riff drama, Larry Mullen Jr.’s firing drum reports, the weird-but-right glockenspiel tinkles, Bono’s titular invocation and finally Adam Clayton’s surprising bass propulsion. If the career of U2 is seen as some sort of cosmic sociology project, the results are more confusing than illuminating, and the damage to the subjects is unmistakable. In the discipline of rock, the great what-if questions - like what happens to a fiery, idealistic young band that becomes unthinkably popular and still wants to respect itself in the morning - can only be answered by living through the experience and extracting whatever data and conclusions might emerge. In human terms, this can be characterized as the how-will-you-know-if-you-don’t-try-it quandary. It’s the other investigative process that causes irreparable changes to the object being examined. Empirical science recognizes two forms of testing, only one of which - weighing a pebble, say, or candling an egg - is considered non-destructive.