#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD CRACKED#
#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD DRIVER#
#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD PLUS#

With Gram Parsons' unacknowledged ghost looking over their shoulders, and out-there producers Daniel Lanois and Eno working the pots, the lads had gotten things perfectly right-and the album soared like a bottlerocket shot off in the desert, eventually winning two Grammies and selling over 25 million copies, in a world suddenly clamoring for more of U2.Д«ut though their many albums since have been praiseworthy and sometimes edgily experimental, none has equaled that Joshua Tree masterpiece. Certainly the boys had their own rockin'-for-Christ axes to sharpen, but who wouldn't assume some sort of Gram-'tribute' connection, given the specifically American-sounding tracks of country/blues/gospel rock 'n' roll (the U2 version of Cosmic Soul) driven by Bono's stream-of-consciousness meanderings and the steely, surging guitars of The Edge? So when the then little-known Irish band U2 released its great 'American' album in 1987, it was pretty much impossible to believe that The Joshua Tree had nothing to do with Parsons, even though the band never openly acknowledged any relationship.

#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD PLUS#

Kaufman's inflammatory action earned him a ludicrously small fine, but a wild man rep and 'Road Mangler' title (that's how his business card read), employed thus for years after by the young Emmylou Harris, back then just emerging as Gram's sweet-voiced, country-duets discovery.ДЄs the tale of Parson's death and quasi-resurrection entered rock 'n' roll lore, Joshua Tree (the Mojave Desert locale and Inn) became a kind of pilgrims' shrine-most recently complete with an annual Gram festival, plus young alt.country and country-rock fans making the trek repeatedly in the same way that folks still travel to visit Jim Morrison's headstone in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. and then the police came speeding to the scene. The daring duo poured gasoline, struck a match. Driving a beat-up hearse, the two guys hauled the casketed remains back to a favorite huge rock at Joshua Tree monument for a Viking-style funeral pyre. airport, where it was about to be shipped to Louisiana for burial. So far, so bad.Д«ut of course the rest of that tale is the real kicker: his friend and road manager Phil Kaufman and another cohort proceeded to steal Gram's corpse from the L.A.

rockers like to hang out and get high and search the skies for UFOs, and where in 1973 ol' still-not-straight Gram somehow got to partying too hard (alcohol, morphine and more) and wound up dead in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn. Registering all this, it became impossible not to think of that other Joshua tree forest (actually a national park) some ways out of Palm Springs, California. And (per that driver) did we know that the trees grow at only certain altitudes, at the approximate rate of a foot every hundred years? And if one gets uprooted, it has to be replanted exactly as originally oriented otherwise, it dies.

#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD DRIVER#

That naming story was emphasized by the bus driver who hauled us rafters back from Lake Mead, as we rode through a Joshua tree 'forest' lining the two-lane highway heading for Hoover Dam. Seems that the early Mormon pioneers of Utah and the barren strip of Arizona north of the Canyon were the first white people to think much about the tall, multi-branched yucca plant that they soon named after the biblical Joshua, his arms outstretched in prayer. And the rafting trip my wife and I recently took down the Grand Canyon inadvertently resurrected the whole bizarre 'Joshua tree' tale associated with Parsons. A short piece I wrote some years ago about him and Jim Morrison at the Seattle Pop Festival has just been reprinted in Shake, a music magazine out of Nashville. I've been thinking about Gram again for a couple of reasons.

#U2 THE JOSHUA TREE COVER LAKE MEAD CRACKED#

Gram's cracked singing voice and his 'Cosmic American Music' (he disliked the 'country-rock' pigeonhole and wanted soul to be included) are solidly fixed in the firmament.ДЄs someone once said, It's a funny old world. Yet the Parsons hagiographic cult rolls on- tribute festivals in several locales every year, petitions to induct him into the Country Music Hall of Fame, even an effort to get his face put on a stamp, plus more and more books about him, including one co-written by his troubled grown daughter. (Hillman scorches that side of Gram to this day.) He was a nice guy-a Southern boy charmer, really-but a main chancer too. interviewed him and fellow Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman at great length (that five-part interview starts here), had him over to dinner, hung out with him at a couple of major rock festivals, and watched him get druggier as the months passed. I knew country-rock legend Gram Parsons slightly.

U2 the joshua tree cover lake mead