U2 Played MetLife Stadium With The Lumineers, 6/28/17

The Joshua Tree 30th Anniversary Tour

By MomVee

I hadn't been to Giants -- sorry, MetLife -- Stadium since Dylan and The Dead in July of 1987.
I had never seen U2 live, and I love them.

If I close my eyes when I hear "Trip Through Your Wires," I see the inside of M.'s Chevette.

So, despite the fact that I'm sort of lazy about seeing live acts in general, and downright skeptical about arena concerts, I knew I had to see U2 at Giants -- sorry, MetLife -- Stadium last night, and see it with M. She has seen U2 more times than she can count (once with CoolDad and others, but that's someone else's story); despite or because of that, she was game. So we packed our sweaters and shawls and reading glasses, bought our novelty frozen margaritas (lime and strawberry swirled!) for the low price of $17 apiece (we had guessed $24 so were pleasantly surprised -- oh, and we got carded, which was nice) and settled into our nosebleed seats.

Why did I become an arena skeptic? Well, I know the best way to get to like an artist better -- to learn, for instance, that Glenn Tilbrook is a guitarist of amazing skill -- is to see him in a small venue. The corollary seems to be that seeing a beloved group in the vastness of a stadium, especially in the seats I'm willing to pay for, might distance or disappoint the viewer. Also, I'm a wimp and a sybarite, and I am, as I have often told people, perfectly happy to listen to The Joshua Tree in the considerable comforts of my own home.

Not long after we arrived, as we surveyed the sad, sad food options, M. and I ran into A., someone we had not seen since high school. We were not really surprised to see her there, and she was not surprised to see us, although it did feel a little like a rip in the space-time continuum. We began trying to catch up on 30 years' worth of life and news. In the course of that conversation, A.'s husband and I bonded over the common experience of treating yourself to a delicious lunch after the heartache of a visit to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. That connection was a clue.

So, as I said, we were in our nosebleed seats. The Lumineers played, and that was pleasant, but M. and I had our own catching up to do, and we talked a lot. It got dark. It got late. It was, frankly, my bedtime.

The lights came up on the stage, the unmistakable opening strains of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" began, and everyone stood up and sang. Almost everyone sang almost every word of every song, all night long. More than once I discovered that my hands were clasped tightly over the center of my chest, as if I were trying to keep my heart from leaving my body. M. and I kept turning to each other with expressions of wonder and glee. No words were necessary. What would we say? "This song!"

During "Bad," they turned off all the lights, and the stars of thousands of cell phones came twinkling out all over the stadium.

During the encore set, they lit the floor and one member of the milling General Admission group caught my eye. It was someone dressed in green -- from my seat I couldn't tell anything else -- spinning, arms outstretched, head tipped back, throwing off rays of pure joy I could feel all the way up in section 316.

I remembered why we do this. All of us stars in the sky, all of us spinning alone (sometimes with joy, sometimes in frustration), unite in love for the music. I'm not the kind of woo-woo person who talks about energies very much, but it's hard to miss the energy created by tens of thousands of people. Some of us were young together 30 years ago, and most of us were young separately, but we all had this soundtrack in 1987. Since then we have had many joys and many sorrows -- some we know that we share, and some that we share without knowing. At the end of the night on Wednesday, we all ran out of the stadium like a river to the sea.