transcript help!

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

womanfish

Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
Joined
Aug 3, 2000
Messages
7,915
Location
moons of Zooropa
I have a friend who I need to "convert" i guess you could say. LOL. Anyway, I am looking for the piece Bono wrote in Rolling Stone about Elvis, Also that Edge wrote about The Clash. Also the Propaganda text that Bono wrote about Bob Dylan, and if Bono has ever written about The Ramones or Joey Ramone, and also if he's ever written about Bob Marley. I would be MOST indebted to anyone who could lead me to these, or if they could email me. Let me know and I will give my email address. Thanks guys.
 
3) Elvis Presley

By Bono

Out of Tupelo, Mississippi, out of Memphis, Tennessee, came this green, sharkskin-suited girl chaser, wearing eye shadow -- a trucker-dandy white boy who must have risked his hide to act so black and dress so gay. This wasn't New York or even New Orleans; this was Memphis in the Fifties. This was punk rock. This was revolt. Elvis changed everything -- musically, sexually, politically. In Elvis, you had the whole lot; it's all there in that elastic voice and body. As he changed shape, so did the world: He was a Fifties-style icon who was what the Sixties were capable of, and then suddenly not. In the Seventies, he turned celebrity into a blood sport, but interestingly, the more he fell to Earth, the more godlike he became to his fans. His last performances showcase a voice even bigger than his gut, where you cry real tears as the music messiah sings his tired heart out, turning casino into temple.
In Elvis, you have the blueprint for rock & roll: The highness -- the gospel highs. The mud -- the Delta mud, the blues. Sexual liberation. Controversy. Changing the way people feel about the world. It's all there with Elvis.

I was barely conscious when I saw the '68 comeback special, at eight years old -- which was probably an advantage. I hadn't the critical faculties to divide the different Elvises into different categories or sort through the contradictions. Pretty much everything I want from guitar, bass and drums was present: a performer annoyed by the distance from his audience; a persona that made a prism of fame's wide-angle lens; a sexuality matched only by a thirst for God's instruction.

But it's that elastic spastic dance that is the most difficult to explain -- hips that swivel from Europe to Africa, which is the whole point of America, I guess. For an Irish boy, the voice might have explained the sexiness of the U.S.A., but the dance explained the energy of this new world about to boil over and scald the rest of us with new ideas on race, religion, fashion, love and peace. These were ideas bigger than the man who would break the ice for them, ideas that would later confound the man who took the Anglo-Saxon stiff upper lip and curled it forever. He was "Elvis the Pelvis," with one hand on the blues terminal and the other on the gospel, which is the essence of rock & roll, a lightning flash running along his spine, electroshock therapy for a generation about to refuse numbness, both male and female, black and white.

I recently met with Coretta Scott King, John Lewis and some of the other leaders of the American civil-rights movement, and they reminded me of the cultural apartheid rock & roll was up against. I think the hill they climbed would have been much steeper were it not for the racial inroads black music was making on white pop culture. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival were all introduced to the blues through Elvis. He was already doing what the civil-rights movement was demanding: breaking down barriers. You don't think of Elvis as political, but that is politics: changing the way people see the world.

In the Eighties, U2 went to Memphis, to Sun Studio -- the scene of rock & roll's big bang. We were working with Elvis' engineer and music diviner, Cowboy Jack Clement. He reopened the studio so we could cut some tracks within the same four walls where Elvis recorded "Mystery Train." He found the old valve microphone the King had howled through; the reverb was the same reverb: "Train I ride, sixteen coaches long." It was a small tunnel of a place, but there was a certain clarity to the sound. You can hear it in those Sun records, and they are the ones for me -- leanness but not meanness. The King didn't know he was the King yet. It's haunted, hunted, spooky music. Elvis doesn't know where the train will take him, and that's why we want to be passengers.

Jerry Schilling, the only one of the Memphis Mafia not to sell him out, told me a story about when he used to live at Graceland, down by the squash courts. He had a little room there, and he said that when Elvis was upset and feeling out of kilter, he would leave the big house and go down to his little gym, where there was a piano. With no one else around, his choice would always be gospel, losing and finding himself in the old spirituals. He was happiest when he was singing his way back to spiritual safety. But he didn't stay long enough. Self-loathing was waiting back up at the house, where Elvis was seen shooting at his TV screens, the Bible open beside him at St. Paul's great ode to love, Corinthians 13. Elvis clearly didn't believe God's grace was amazing enough.

Some commentators say it was the Army, others say it was Hollywood or Las Vegas that broke his spirit. The rock & roll world certainly didn't like to see their King doing what he was told. I think it was probably much more likely his marriage or his mother -- or a finer fracture from earlier on, like losing his twin brother, Jesse, at birth. Maybe it was just the big arse of fame sitting on him.

I think the Vegas period is underrated. I find it the most emotional. By that point Elvis was clearly not in control of his own life, and there is this incredible pathos. The big opera voice of the later years -- that's the one that really hurts me.

Why is it that we want our idols to die on a cross of their own making, and if they don't, we want our money back? But you know, Elvis ate America before America ate him.

(From RS 946, April 15, 2004)


30) The Clash

By The Edge

The Clash, more than any other group, kick-started a thousand garage bands across Ireland and the U.K. For U2 and other people of our generation, seeing them perform was a life-changing experience. There's really no other way to describe it.
I can vividly remember when I first saw the Clash. It was in Dublin in October 1977. They were touring behind their first album, and they played a 1,200-capacity venue at Trinity College. Dublin had never seen anything like it. It really had a massive impact around here, and I still meet people who are in the music business today -- maybe they are DJs, maybe they are in bands -- because they saw that show.

U2 were a young band at the time, and it was a complete throw-down to us. It was like: Why are you in music? What the hell is music all about, anyway? The members of the Clash were not world-class musicians by any means, but the racket they made was undeniable -- the pure, visceral energy and the anger and the commitment. They were raw in every sense, and they were not ashamed that they were about much more than playing with precision and making sure the guitars were in tune. This wasn't just entertainment. It was a life-and-death thing. They made it possible for us to take our band seriously. I don't think that we would have gone on to become the band we are if it wasn't for that concert and that band. There it was. They showed us what you needed. And it was all about heart.

The social and political content of the songs was a huge inspiration, certainly for U2. It was the call to wake up, get wise, get angry, get political and get noisy about it. It's interesting that the members were quite different characters. Paul Simonon had an art-school background, and Joe Strummer was the son of a diplomat. But you really sensed they were comrades in arms. They were completely in accord, railing against injustice, railing against a system they were just sick of. And they thought it had to go.

I saw them a couple of times after the Dublin show, and they always had something fresh going on. It's a shame that they weren't around longer. The music they made is timeless. It's got so much fighting spirit, so much heart, that it just doesn't age. You can still hear it in Green Day and No Doubt, Nirvana and the Pixies, certainly U2 and Audioslave. There wasn't a minute when you sensed that they were coasting. They meant it, and you can hear it in their work.

(From RS 946, April 15, 2004)


Hope that helps.

Tchau
MT
 
Found another one:

Bono Inducts Bob Marley

Transcript, January 19, 1994



(Here's the poem/speech Bono wrote and read when he was asked to induct the late Bob Marley into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 19, 1994.)


I know claiming Bob Marley is Irish might be a little difficult here tonight, but bear with me. Jamaica and Ireland have a lot in common: Naomi Campbell, Chris Blackwell, Guinness, a fondness for little green leaves -- the weed. Religion. The philosophy of procrastination -- don't put off 'til tomorrow what you can put off til the day after. Unless, of course, it's freedom. We are both islands; we were both colonies. We share a common yoke: the struggle for identity, the struggle for independence, the vulnerable and uncertain future that's left behind when the jackboot of empire is finally retreated.

The roots, the getting up, the standing up, and the hard bit: the staying up. In such a struggle, the voice of Bob Marley was the voice of reason. These were love songs that you could admit listening to; songs of hurt, hard but healing, tough going; songs of Freedom, where that word meant something again; Redemption songs. A sexy revolution where Jah is Jehovah on street level. Not over his people but with his people. Not just stylin', jammin'. Down the line of Judah, from Ethiopia, where it all began for the Rastaman.

I spent some time in Ethiopia with my wife, Ali, and everywhere we went we saw Bob Marley's face. There he was, dressed to hustle God. Let my people go. An ancient plea. Prayers catching fire in Mozambique, Nigeria, the Lebanon, Alabama, Detroit, New York, Notting Hill, Belfast. Dr. King in dreads. A Third and a First World superstar. Mental slavery ends where imagination begins. Here was this new music, rocking out of the shantytowns, lolling, loping rhythms, telling it like it was, like it is, like it ever shall be. Skanking. Ska. Blue Beat. Rock Steady. Reggae. Dub. And now ragga. And all of this from a man who drove three BMWs. BMW -- Bob Marley and the Wailers, that was his excuse!

Rock and roll loves its juvenilia, its caricatures, its cartoons. The protest singer, the pop star, the sex god, your mature messiah types [laughs]. We love the extremes, and we're expected to choose: the mud of the blues or the oxygen of gospel, the hellhounds on our trail or the band of angels.

Well, Bob Marley didn't choose or walk down the middle. He raced to the edges, embracing all extremes, creating a oneness. His oneness. One love. He wanted everything at the same time. Prophet. Soul rebel. Rastaman. Herbsman. Wildman. A natural, mystic man. Lady's man. Island man. Family man. Rita's man. Soccer man. Showman. Shaman. Human. Jamaican!

So the spirit of Bob and the spirit of Jah lives on, in his son Ziggy and his lover Rita Marley. I'm proud to welcome Bob Marley into the Hall of Fame. Amen!


Tchau
MT
 
And another:

Eulogy: Bono Remembers Joey Ramone

U2's main man pays tribute to one of his seminal influences

Time magazine, April 11, 2001

By Bono



When we first formed the band, Adam and I were 16, Edge was 15, and Larry was 14, and we were fans of the Ramones. They kind of stopped the world long enough for bands like U2 and others to get on. It was suddenly the end of Progressive Rock and virtuosity over melody and the end of interminable guitar solos and the rock-band-as-music-school. These were all the things that prevented you from getting on the train when you were a kid if you hadn't been to music college.

At one of our rehearsals, we were visited by a big-shot TV director who was going to give us a break on the national airwaves. We'd been fighting in our garage about how our own songs should end, or start or even what middles they should have when this TV director was coming to see us, so we played him two Ramones songs when he arrived and told him they were ours, and he thought this was amazing. And then when we went on the TV show, we played them two of our own songs, and they didn't notice. So that's our first debt.

This was the best Punk Rock band ever, because they actually invented something. There were great bands like the Stooges and the MC5, but I think that they were still blues bands. The Ramones were actually the beginning of something new. They stood for the idea of making your limitations work for you. In film jargon, they would be "a pure situation." They talked like they walked like they sounded onstage. Everything added up. That takes an extraordinary intelligence to figure out.

When I was standing in the State Cinema in Dublin in 1977 listening to Joey sing and realizing that there was nothing else [that] mattered to him, pretty soon nothing else mattered to me. If they remind me of anything now, it's that singular idea. It travels further and deeper than the baggage of possibilities you pick up along the way.

This was a really important moment in the last 25 years, because suddenly imagination was the only obstacle to overcome. Anyone could play those four chords. That's why hip-hop has taken off, because you don't have to be a virtuoso, you just have to have great taste. You have to be able to hear it more than you have to be able to play it. Suddenly, the grasp becomes more important than the reach. Suddenly, a bunch of kids from the north side of Dublin who would never have had a chance to get on the musical merry-go-round watched it stop for just long enough to jump on. We were a band before we could play. We formed our band around an idea of friendship and shared spirit. That was a preposterous notion before the Ramones.

I spoke to Joey a couple of days before he died. He wasn't able to say much, but I just told him that we were thinking about him. He was indomitable to the last minute. A doctor wanted to put a tube down his throat to help with his breathing, and Joey wasn't having any of it because he didn't want his voice affected, because he had some solo gigs coming up. He was fighting it off and fearless. A great spirit.


? Time magazine, 2001. All rights reserved.


:)
MT
 
De nada...you?re welcome. Couldn?t find the piece about Bob Dylan though. Isn?t it an intereview for Hotpress, Bono being the interviewer?

MT
 
Back
Top Bottom