U2, Bullet the Blue Sky, from the album “Joshua Tree” (live version from more than 20 years later appears above).
This was rather tough for me to figure out for a couple of reasons. The first is that I would have been pretty young when I first started requesting specific stuff, and of course wouldn’t have had the money to “buy myself” in most cases. I know I bugged and bugged my parents at Richman Gordman on numerous occaisons to buy me cassettes (these were safer property for a lil’ un, even though I had a record player) of Lionel Richie and Hall and Oates.
The Richman Gordman playground (not actually pictured, but this is a very similar elephant). Apparently I wasn't the only kid weirded out by all of this
Very similiar to the one I had as a youngster in the early 80s. It could play 45 or 33 and it had a built in adapter for the 45s.
However, I can place a few albums that I definitely forwent my lawn mowing money for ($15, which wasn’t bad in the late 1980s, when albums were around $7). I could just ask my dad to “order” them when he ordered his 45s for his jukeboxes. U2 Joshua Tree and John Mellecamp’s Lonesome Jubilee were two. I think I had Joshua Tree first, and Bullet the Blue Sky sticks out to me. You really can’t ignore that opener. That’s an incredible classic, sort of timeless to me…but Bullet the Blue Sky did something else to me…the same sort of thing that Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones did (which I knew mostly as the theme song to the TV series “Tour of Duty”, which also debuted in 1987). I don’t know exactly what the connection was…some sort of violent oppressive hopelessness maybe…some fantasy of dying a tragic death in battle, not because I wanted to defend America, but more because I didn’t think there was anything really worth living for, and it would be more glorious to go out in a bang. Seemed cool from what I could tell, and it made the other people who knew extra crazy if it was dramatic. Something like that. It was the 1980s, Reagan had been around for 7 years at this point, I’d already been told for years that communists were out to get us at all costs…but now a little bit of something else was creeping into my awareness…something sinister about America. Outisde it’s America. And it was scarier than the Soviet Union to me.
