Bad

Hey Zoo Freaks, crank it up because the Zoo Crew is spinning "Bad" by U2 right now, that live cut from the Wide Awake in America EP that still hits like a freight train every time we drop the needle. This one came out of those Unforgettable Fire sessions up at Slane Castle where the Edge started jamming on this hypnotic, almost ambient guitar figure and the rest of the band just fell in. Bono has talked about how it felt like an impossible collision of styles, Philip Glass meeting Van Morrison's Astral Weeks with a shot of German electronica running through it. The sequences stay rigid and metronomic while Adam's bass wanders free and the voice rides right along with it. He has said more than once that he never really finished the lyrics, that it stayed unfinished on purpose so he could keep rewriting it every night on stage, turning it into a living, breathing thing instead of something carved in stone.

The song is about heroin, plain and simple, even if the words never spell it out. Bono watched the epidemic tear through Dublin in the late seventies and early eighties, kids giving up everything they held sacred for that rush and then sliding into the nod. In the band's own book he described trying to capture that elation and then the awful sleep that follows, screaming "I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, I'm not sleeping" as a way to fight back against it. He wrote it for a friend named Andy Rowen, known in the old Lypton Village crowd as Guck Pants Delaney, the brother of Guggi. On Andy's twenty-first birthday the story goes that he and his friends decided to shoot enough heroin to kill him. Bono has told versions of that tale from stages in Chicago, in Gothenburg, and again years later in Pittsburgh, always circling back to the same kid from Cedarwood Road and the conditions that keep stories like that repeating. At one point on a UK stage he talked about people lying in the gutters with needles hanging out of their arms while the rich live indifferent to the whole mess.

That live version you are hearing, the one that opens Wide Awake in America, was captured during a soundcheck at Birmingham's NEC Arena on November 12, 1984. The Edge botched the final note and they fixed it in the mix, splicing in a clean one from another show. Radio programmers latched onto this take over the studio original because it stretches out and breathes. The EP itself takes its title straight from the chorus, and it helped crack the American market for the band in a big way. Then came Live Aid in July of 1985 at Wembley. They stretched "Bad" out to about twelve minutes. Bono climbed down into the crowd and danced with a girl while the rest of the band kept going, half-panicked that he had vanished. Paul McGuinness was watching from the wings thinking the whole set had gone off the rails. The band was furious afterward; some of them talked about firing him. Instead that performance became the one Rolling Stone readers voted the best of the whole concert, and it turned U2 into a global stadium act almost overnight. Bono has looked back and said the sound was crap, the haircuts were crap, they never even got to "Pride," and yet it turned out to be one of the best days of their lives.

U2 started in the most ordinary Dublin way possible. In September of 1976 a fourteen-year-old Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a handwritten note on the bulletin board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School that simply read "Drummer seeks musicians to form band." A handful of kids showed up at his family's kitchen in Artane for the first rehearsal. Paul Hewson, who would become Bono, walked in and took over. David Evans and his brother Dik brought guitars, Adam Clayton brought a bass, and a couple of others drifted through. They called themselves Feedback at first because it was one of the few technical terms they knew, then The Hype. Dik eventually stepped aside, and the remaining four settled on U2 after Steve Averill of the Radiators from Space suggested it from a list of options. They were a band before they could really play, as Bono has put it, rehearsing after school and building a reputation on pure passion more than technical polish. They won a talent contest sponsored by Harp Lager, got a manager in Paul McGuinness, and eventually signed to Island. None of them started as virtuosos. The Edge's chiming, delay-heavy style grew out of not being able to play complicated leads, and the whole thing snowballed from those kitchen jams into the sound that still fills arenas.

You can dig deeper into all of it at the U2 official website, where they have kept the history and the stories alive for decades. Follow along with the band themselves on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the hardcore Zoo Freaks who want every pressing detail and every live variation, the long-running fan site U2Songs.com has been cataloging the discography and the deep cuts since the mid-nineties, including multiple entries on this very EP and the different takes of "Bad." And of course you are always welcome back here at THE ZOO where the Zoo Crew keeps the freeform rock spinning without the commercial interruptions. Stay wide awake out there, Zoo Freaks. This one still has miles left in it.