Trip Through Your Wires
Bono plays the harmonica on this one.
He plays it the way people actually learn harmonica — imperfectly, hungrily, without formal instruction. It bends where it should bend and it’s slightly wrong in places. This is 1987, The Joshua Tree, one of the biggest records ever made — the Edge’s delay pedal building cathedrals out of quarter notes, Anton Corbijn photographs of four serious men in the American desert — and in the middle of side two there is a ragged, blowsy blues thing that sounds like it wandered in from a Sonny Terry record. They kept it. I’m glad they kept it.
The songs around it took the attention, and they earned it. “Bullet the Blue Sky” came out of a trip Bono took to El Salvador with Amnesty International, and the Edge turned the experience into something that sounds like a military helicopter descending on you. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Where the Streets Have No Name” belong to everybody now. “Trip Through Your Wires” sits in among them, three minutes and thirty-one seconds long, asking for nothing.
The record was made at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin and at Danesmoate House in the Dublin mountains. Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno produced it together, with Flood engineering. Lanois had just come off Graceland with Paul Simon, and he understood how to make a record feel like a place. The Joshua Tree feels like the American southwest the way a Cormac McCarthy novel does — not because anyone recorded it there, but because the people making it had driven the roads and let the landscape get into them.
Listen to what the band does here. Larry Mullen Jr.’s drum pattern is close to a shuffle but not quite there. The rhythm guitar is loose in a way U2 rhythm guitar almost never is. The Edge plays with no delay, or close to none — and the delay pedal is his signature, the thing that turns one note into a whole environment. Without it you hear how good a straight guitar player he is. He leans on the strings. He responds. He stays out of the way of the feeling.
“In the cold and silent night, the rain came heavy and the wind got wild.”
And over it all, that harmonica. It is not Sonny Boy Williamson. It is not Little Walter. The blues Bono loved was never a museum piece to him, not a genre to be respectfully quoted — it was a way of holding a lyric in your mouth, a way of letting the need in a song be uglier and more physical than a polished record wants to admit. The whole song is slightly wrong in exactly the right places. A band that kept everything under tight control let this one breathe.
The Joshua Tree came out in March of 1987, and U2 spent the rest of that year becoming the biggest band in the world in real time — stadiums, television, newspapers. They had worked toward it for a decade: Boy, October, War, The Unforgettable Fire. And then they arrived, and arriving meant that everything they did from that point on was read by an enormous audience. They stopped being musicians making records and started being symbols carrying weight.
This song carries no weight. That is the gift of it. It is four men from Dublin who fell in love with American music, sitting in a room in the Dublin mountains, chasing a feeling. No politics. No stadium. Rain and want, and a borrowed tradition played with enough impurity to feel true.
The album is about faith and doubt and the impossible American dream. It is mostly concerned with enormity. But on side two the stakes shrink down to one man watching someone fade away in the dark, and there is nothing he can do about it — nothing to build, nothing to fix, nothing to say that would help.
So he picks up the harmonica and plays it wrong in the right places. It’s the truest sound on the record.
