11/14/2022 0 Comments U2 the joshua tree cd coverAfter being at the site for about 15 minutes and taking pictures we walked the 3500 feet back to the car. I decided to try my new 4wd vehicle and we went down some fairly sandy washes, in the end we walked about 3/4 of a mile to find this iconic monument to an Irish rock band in the middle of the Mojave Desert. We found the spot to stop on the road near the infamous tree rather quickly, at about 4700 feet above sea level the site was quite a bit cooler than nearby Death Valley, our temperature was only about 100 degrees. Joshua Trees only grow at higher elevations because they need below freezing winters to reproduce so we knew it would be not quite as hot as the lower reaches of the desert. We assumed that it would be hot and we knew it was about a three hour drive without any big stops. This famous session with the Joshua Tree became the back cover and the inside sleeve of the album which was released on March 9, 1987.Ī friend and myself decided to drive to find this elusive tree that actually fell down from natural causes in the year 2000, we found the fallen tree on July 3rd, 2014. They got out of the coach there and then and shot the inside sleeve photograph, all in all they were there about 20 minutes in the early morning cold weather. After the Bodie shoot they drove toward Joshua Tree National Monument, along the way they stopped at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Monument (also a National Park today) and shot the cover photograph, then on Highway 190 just outside Death Valley they saw a lone Joshua Tree in the distance, it was then that the band began thinking of The Joshua Tree as a possible name for the album. Steve says the end photos for The Joshua Tree were the result of a “happy accident”, we had stopped and shot at a ghost town in Nevada (actually Bodie, California), and their photographer, Anton Corbijn wanted to shoot at Joshua Tree National Monument (now a National Park) next. According to the designer of the album sleeve, Steve Averill, the band rented a coach in Reno, Nevada, at the time the cover was shot, The Joshua Tree album was tentatively titled “The Two Americas” with another alternate name being “The Desert”, the band wanted to capture the part of the United States where “nature and industrialization meet”. The band U2 were aware of the mythology of the Mojave Desert, this is part of the reason they used it as a backdrop to their album. They well knew of the story of Gram Parsons and how he died, his body was stolen and burned, all centered in the Mojave Desert, link. Later they would return to film videos in Los Angeles and Las Vegas after the album was released. Let’s start with what we know for sure, in 1987 U2 released an album called “The Joshua Tree”, before the album was released they traveled from Reno to Joshua Tree with a few stops in between to take pictures. This blog, The Mojo on the Mojave is about things that are located or happening in the Mojave Desert, part of this story lies outside the Mojave’s reaches but we will touch on the entire bus trip that the Irish rock band U2 took before they released the album that was destined to be called “The Joshua Tree”, we will mainly focus on the portions of that trip that lie within the Mojave Desert. I wouldn't be too sad if I never saw it again however.Let’s Trek Across The Mojave And Find Out About Their “Harmony” Nevertheless, the album is an amazing one, and this video does an okay job of keeping my attention for an hour. Actually, I take that back, I learned that the gossip was true, U2 is incredibly vain. This is something that was accomplished in a much greater way with the Rattle and Hum video (which is amazing if you haven't seen it). By the end of the short "hour of bragging", oops, I mean documentary, I felt no closer to really knowing the band. Although that may be a somewhat trivial annoyance, I was also disappointed with the lack of content. Call me crazy, but I'd rather not listen to how great an artist thinks his/her work is during a documentary. However, most of it was from each member of the band and those involved with the making of the album. I wouldn't have minded had this been coming from critics. I was severely disappointed by how much of the discussion was dedicated to how ahead of its time the album was, how timeless it will be, and how other (and others') music doesn't measure up to it. So, maybe I watched "The Joshua Tree" documentary with too many expectations.
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