Mysterious Ways to Get to Concerts, Or, A Quarter-Century of Schlepping to U2 Shows

As I unlocked my bike from the Hawthorne bike rack at precisely 6:30 last night, I heard the bells from that lonely 1800s church on the other side of the tracks. The bells were chiming that familiar church-y DUHHH duhhh DIIIHHH duhh/DUHHH duhhh DIIIHHH duhh–better known as the tail end of that delicious guitar solo by The Edge in “11 O’Clock Tick Tock.”

Yes, U2 is on the brain, because U2 is in town, or at least somewhere in the swamps of Jersey just west of town. And the Sisters TJ were good enough to spring for tickets for me and The Missus for my birthday.

How to get to the show? G. Francis mentioned venturing out via rail–that train to the Secaucus station, as Jersey Jim tried for the Dead recently, then light rail (or is it a shuttle bus?) to the Meadowlands. Surely G. Francis wants no part of automobile travel after sitting in Foxboro/Gillette Stadium parking lot standstill morass for two hours after U2′s Boston-area show a few nights ago.

I was tempted to try the same, but it appears I’ll schlep back to Hawthorne, where the Missus will be waiting in our four-wheeled, four-doored, four-cylindered vehicle which, last time I checked, had four U2 CDs in the center console.

This has gotten me thinking about the various ways I got to U2 shows since I first saw them on Long Island 25 24 years ago.

Indeed, it was 1984 [Editor's Note: It was actually 1985. The Missus pulled out her old Unforgettable Fire concert shirt (gray) and found the date: April 3, 1985, Hempstead, NY. I stand corrected.], and I left for the show the moment a pre-season baseball game against St. Anthony’s had ended. It was early spring, way too cold for a baseball game, and Sweet Pete in centerfield took a fateful step forward on a frozen rope off some overfed Catholic boy’s bat that ended up going for a homer.

I did a quick change at home (you couldn’t go to a U2 show in a JV baseball uniform!), then got picked up by my neighbor–an upperclassman with a car and a role as bassist in a local new wave band.

We drove to Nassau Coliseum, found our seats, and I remember smelling pot to a degree I’d never smelled it before. The tour was “Unforgettable Fire” and U2 opened up with, yes, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” and I may never forget it.

I later ended up writing about that hard-to-shake pot smell in our high school literary journal, which resulted in the journal’s editor, an English teacher with a Greek name that sounded like “Lemonade”, having a serious sit-down with me over the dangers of drugs.

Admittedly, my memory is as foggy as the air in the Coliseum that night.  But I believe my next U2 show was September 1987 in Boston. I was with Slick Rick (not to be confused with Sweet Pete) and we had the brilliant idea of hitchhiking from Kingston, RI to Boston, scoring tickets to the old Boston Garden, then sleeping outside somewhere, like Boston Common.

We composed a large sign with an upraised thumb on it, stapled it to a stick, and hit Rte. 138. Moments later, a girl from my hall pulled over and said we could ride in the back of her pickup as she headed home to the Boston suburbs. “Score!” we said, as was the parlance at the time. Or maybe we said “We’re golden!”

Well, the show was great (the tour was Joshua Tree), even if the Boston Garden was too awful to be charming. We sat behind a large post and there were birds flying around in the rafters.  

Boston was in a downpour and we couldn’t sleep outside, so we made our way to Boston College via the T. Upon arriving around midnight or so, we walked around campus and asked dozens of people if they knew our high school friend–a freshman who’d been been at BC for about two weeks, and represented the difference between sleeping on a train station floor or a dorm floor.

Nobody knew our friend, until we desperately threw out his nickname: Fozzie Bear.

“Foz!” said a student in reply. “I’m going to his room now! He’s having a party! You know Foz?”

Ah, the charmed life of youth. Fozzie was spinning drinks from behind his homemade bar. When we walked in, he was so shocked he fell forward and trashed his bar to splinters. We had a place to drink and, more importantly, crash.

Then came the post-college city years, and I don’t remember much of the details. Quick cab or N/R train hops up to the Garden (Achtung Baby? All That You Can’t Leave Behind?), an occasional schlep out to the Meadowlands by car (Zooropa?), and one show that had a number of Mini cars (the European pre-cursor to the Mini-Cooper) affixed to the ceiling.

The best of the city shows was the most impromptu one–a hush-hush U2 press conference/performance at none other than the K-Mart on Astor Place, which I walked to and, if memory serves, was one of a few hundred people to witness. (Look it up, it really happened.) The album was Pop, the tour was PopMart and the year was 1997; cellphones were not that common and a hush-hush event in the middle of New York City could actually stay relatively hush-hush.

A few months later, me, Sweet Pete (recovered from the centerfield incident), G. Francis, Phat Tommy and Joey from 5D drove down to Philly for a show at Franklin Field. U2 was in a weird place then — the album didn’t sell, people didn’t get the ironic concept, and they were playing to a lot of empty seats. When we got to Philly with time to spare, we did what you do in Philly (no, not boo Donovan McNabb and punch the guy on your left). We got cheesesteaks at one of the famous places (Pat’s? A Wiz without? Wiz or Without You?), got a Guinness at a jammed Irish pub in the city center, then walked over to the ancient stadium at UPenn.

There was a giant toothpick and lit up olive onstage. Entire sections were bereft of mankind. The old-style urinal was equipped for about eight men.

Then I believe I got old, got lazy, swore off stadium shows, and stopped seeing U2.

Until tonight.