By Ryan Carter, Staff Writer
Posted: 10/24/2009 07:11:12 AM PDT
PASADENA - It was March 1981 - the Country Club in Reseda. U2 opened and closed their gig that night with a song called "I Will Follow."
Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn left the show that night knowing he'd seen something special.
Technically, Bono, a guy called The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton weren't stellar musicians. They didn't even have enough songs to close with something different.
And yet Hilburn could see that these guys - then in their early 20s - were on to something.
"This was a band that could matter," he said.
Six years later they would hit mega-stardom with the album "Joshua Tree." A stream of hits would follow.
And nearly 30 years after Hilburn saw them, they still matter.
If you're anywhere near the Rose Bowl on Sunday, you'll see why. Nearly 100,000 people will fill the stadium for the band's penultimate show on a North American stadium tour that is breaking house records across the country.
Among the masses there will be Ramon Arellano, of San Gabriel, a manager at El Portal Restaurant in Pasadena. When he heard the band was playing the Rose Bowl, he went on-line and paid more than $500 for tickets for him and his wife.
For Arellano, even though he couldn't really understand Bono's talking when he first heard a live version in his native Mexico of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" - "something about people dying because of bombs" - he knew he was a fan.
"For me, the music was more than about the lyrics," he said.
Speaking of lyrics, also there on Sunday will be Joe Hier - otherwise known as Hollywood Bono, the frontman for tribute band Hollywood U2.
He couldn't believe it when, he said, he got a call from Bono's cousin, Simon Hewson, asking his band to play an afternoon benefit for the St. Baldrick's Foundation - a cancer research foundation - at The Vault Bar & Grill in Pasadena.
"This is going to be the biggest show I ever play in my life," Hier said, adding that afterward, he's going to the show.
He and a lot of others.
Fans are coming from everywhere from San Diego to Jamaica to see this show, one local hotel manager said.
Why all the fuss over four guys from Ireland?
It goes back to what Hilburn saw back in 1981.
It didn't matter that they weren't great technically.
"It was the songs, the attitude, the message," Hilburn said. "I saw something in Bono and the band that night that was so promising. They stood for something, and seemed to have purpose, passion and promise."
It was the kind of something, Hilburn said, that few bands have been able to hold on to.
They channeled that energy, Hilburn said, into great music and an integrity rooted in staying together as a band long after their peers broke up or sold out.
Only the Beatles surpass U2 in terms of bands with such mass appeal, said Hilburn, who's memoir, "Corn Flakes with John Lennon (And Other Tales from a Rock `n' Roll Life)," chronicles his experiences with U2 and other performers. (In fact, Bono wrote its introduction).
That appeal is strong in Southern California, which - along with the fact that the Rose Bowl is their only California show - helps explain why the show sparked a record sell-out in a matter of hours.
Hilburn suggested the Southern California appeal goes back to the mid-1980s, when "Joshua Tree" hit and the song "Where the Street Have No Name."
"Joshua Tree" had a California symbolism in it, Hilburn said, and ultimately that would endear fans to the band.
Hier - Hollywood Bono - has tapped into that endearing spirit when covering U2 tunes.
"I never get tired of it," Hier said of playing U2's songs live. "People just go crazy over it. They really give a crap about what they are doing."
ryan.carter@sgvn.com
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