U2's Joshua Tree Is 20 Years Old

I was living in Huntington Beach, CA (Orange County) at the time that U2's Joshua Tree was released. I, too, was newly enamored with the desert southwest having moved there in the summer of 1985. An awesome part of the country...geographically, historically, culturally, and societally.

My biggest memory of Joshua Tree involved the video shoot for Where The Streets Have No Name. I was on my way to work and listening to KROQ 106.7 on the car radio. KROQ was promoting alternative rock bands left and right. Without them, you probably wouldn't have heard of The Cure, The Smiths, Oingo Boingo, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc. They broke the bands in Los Angeles and then they migrated out across the country. Check out KROQ Classics if you like "The Roq of the 80s" and stream it free through iTunes.

Okay, so I'm sitting in my car, crawling past John Wayne Airport on the 405 Freeway South, and the music news of the morning was about U2 filming a video in L.A. It was a "secret" and folks should head downtown to check it out. Of course, the secret was a leak that was called in to every major radio station in the L.A. basin to get a huge, free, live crowd. I wanted to go but L.A. was an hour drive in good traffic, probably 30 minutes or more on top of that accounting for morning rush hour. I just wasn't up for the slog on the 5 Freeway. A highway that was only 3 lanes in each direction at the time that has been widened to at least 6 lanes each way since then through Orange County up to the Los Angeles County line.

I'm glad I didn't go. People swarmed downtown. Gridlock. No parking. A mess so complete that the police started shutting down the entire area. In the video, you see the end of the filming where the cop tells them they are shutting them down. Listen and you can here him telling the band that they are "pulling people from Orange County" to the location. With nearly 20 million people in a 50 mile radius (and spanning 8 phone area codes) you can imagine what a disaster it turned out to be. I even think there was a police investigation since no permits were issued and they wanted to recoup the cost of law enforcement.

But it sure looks great on film!
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