July 17, 2011 - Busch Stadium - St. Louis, MO

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Here's my pics from RZ2.

U2 Busch Stadium pictures by cash30 - Photobucket

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He should have, it might have cooled him off!!
At least the heat got Bono out of his jacket for most of the show.
 
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Don't think I have ever seen Bono perform in a short-sleeve shirt like that. It must have been crazzzyyyyyyy humid last night for you guys! :sick:
 
Don't think I have ever seen Bono perform in a short-sleeve shirt like that. It must have been crazzzyyyyyyy humid last night for you guys! :sick:


They had firetrucks outside the stadium with sprayers up and one had this giant fan probably 4 feet tall that blew out misted air. That was kinda cool. I would not have been able to survive doing GA, Red Zone was bad enough. I think the heat index at 5 o'clock was around 105. I think Bono changed shirts at least 5 or 6 times, including having Edge do the intro to Stay so he could go change again. Adam was shirtless under his jacket during Zooropa and Crazy.
 
a few post concert thoughts here, not really a review as much as a reflection on the most recent experience. We just got back from STL today, had a really good time, and oh boy was it really hot and humid!

We decided not to que in line all day because we were okay with just standing in the back somewhere and taking in the show from a different perspective than that of way up close. We really wanted to see the light show and i want to thank those of you who advised me to do so, because there really is a whole other dimension to this show that you don't get to see if you are up close.

We ended up staying out way too late saturday night so getting up early sunday was out of the question anyway. More on that later....we happened over to the stadium around 6:45 and walked right in, no waiting at all. I'm not sure how long the GA line was because as i looked out the hotel window during the day it appeared as if the GA line was smaller than usual, though that might have been because they were obscured by tents and such.

The crowd around us was pretty good, other than a couple of drunken & high morons whom im surprised weren't carried out on a stretcher. Also im amazed at how nobody seems to cheer at all for Zooropa, probably the best moment of the night, wtf people? My only guess is maybe they didn't realize the band was actually playing the song because they were hidden behind the screen...who knows.

Some really funny Bono moments when he talked about the setlist from back in 1981. Also he kept shouting out to the people in the Hilton Hotels a block away and telling the people up there to "turn on their lights". And he made a comment towards the hotel, not sure who specifically he was directing it to, "go to bed young man". Maybe someone knows?

Now for some gripes....not related to the concert in any way at all.

We stayed at the Millennium Hotel, which was a complete cluster-fuck. The hotel had some type of Miss America pageant for 10year old girls going on, and they were everywhere with their tiaras and their banners and their queen sized attitudes. Quite the contrast from Miss Sarajevo where the women were making a statement in a time of war, risking their lives, to these miniature drama queens whose families loaded up the SUV and drove them all over the country so they could compete in beauty pageants and get an early start on their quest to be gossip girl. I love kids, but this was ridiculous.

The hotel was either understaffed or unprepared to handle the guests. I suspect both. The elevators took forever to operate, and i find it odd that a hotel with 27 floors has only 1 level for parking in a 9 story garage. Getting out of the garage this morning was a mess because the mechanical arm didn't work so we were stuck trying to get out for a while....at least we didn't have to pay the $36 when all was said and done everyone just drove off!

Apparently there was a fire saturday evening on one of the floors, im thinking the 9th floor. We were in the hotel bar when some of the guests came down and were pissed because the room next door had caught on fire and nobody had bothered to evacuate them. The manager came by and offered to comp their drinks, of course all of us sitting at the bar expressed our anguish at the situation and we got some free drinks too!

After the bar closed, we went out on the patio and out of the blue there was a family from Georgia who decided to hop the fence to the pool area and go for a swim. The pool was closed at 10 but this wasn't stopping anyone, so of course we joined them for about an hour. I'm really surprised that nobody called security on us because im sure we were noisy. I guess they had better things to do, like checking on the fires and such.

All in all it was a great time, despite the absurd hotel accommodations (we met people who had booked their room back in January and didn't even get to check in until hours after the show because the hotel just didn't have anywhere to put them) and the oppressive daytime heat.

The show was great, not Nashville great but close enough, the people were great. We met a lot of nice folks from Joplin, Kansas City, Oklahoma, St Louis, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even some fellow interferencers early in the morning before the show (apologize for my drunkenness :hug: ). Kinda sad that this has all come to an end for us being our last show and all. Very thankful for the 4 great shows that we got to see with some varying degrees of setlists.

Despite the relief of being back home, where there's no place like home, im sad that this chapter is now officially over for me. Part of me wishes it would just go on and on and on....maybe in my dreams...i sure wouldn't do all of this for any other band.

:heart:

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Glad you enjoyed the view from the back!

.... and why the hell is my 'double post' edit quoted in your sig? :lol:
 
The show was great, not Nashville great but close enough, the people were great. We met a lot of nice folks from Joplin, Kansas City, Oklahoma, St Louis, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even some fellow interferencers early in the morning before the show (apologize for my drunkenness :hug: ). Kinda sad that this has all come to an end for us being our last show and all. Very thankful for the 4 great shows that we got to see with some varying degrees of setlists.

Despite the relief of being back home, where there's no place like home, im sad that this chapter is now officially over for me. Part of me wishes it would just go on and on and on....maybe in my dreams...i sure wouldn't do all of this for any other band.

I can totally relate the huge....almost depression-like when everything is over and walking out of the stadium. Almost brought tears to my eyes
:sad:
 
Travelling through America requires a mild form of bilingualism. There are fascinating and occasionally entertaining, risqué language differences in spelling, pronunciation and vocabulary. (For example, compare and contrast the responses to saying “Your pants have slipped and are showing your fanny” to an American and then to a British woman.)

There are also differences in measurements: drinks are measured in fluid ounces, weights are in pounds, and temperatures are in Fahrenheit. I’m still not fully familiar with these scales. However using either temperature scale, Sunday in St Louis was fuckin hot, almost unbearably hot when out in the sun. (The local fire department had set up two showers next to the GA line during the day, but they were little used because the flow of water was too powerful.)

The concert was intensely scalding too, remarkably so for fifty-somethings playing the 106th show of their tour. It seemed like U2, and Bono especially, were conducting their own quantum research whilst in Teflon-melting heat. The Busch Stadium became a Large musical Hadron Collider: sizzling band crashing into scorching fans creating a concentrated radioactive explosion in the overheating core. The elemental setlist causes were frustratingly predictable, but the particle results were gloriously unpredictable. I’m sure even the elusive Higgs Boson was momentarily forged during Pride.

The principal spark, as ever, was the Higgs Bono. I would have been very content to doze lazily in the heat. Where I was full of lethargy, Bono was full of energy, fizzing around the stage like a leather electron. Actually his wardrobe also received a good workout. He began the show in his usual T-shirt and jacket. The jacket came off after Mysterious Ways. After Still Haven’t Found, he asked Edge to talk to the people as he nipped downstairs to change into a shirt. He was back in a T-shirt a few songs later. (Edge, unexpectedly dumped on the spot, slightly awkwardly repeated the introduction to Stay that Bono has been using lately, which unintentionally provided a reminder of just how smooth and natural Bono’s interactions usually are.)

It was a day for sitting in the shade, not standing in the sun. I had been very glad to sit outside the stadium all day in some blessed shade, only going into the venue before Interpol started. I was in the seats close to, but behind the stage on Edge’s side. I was also very glad that my seat was in the shade, and more so that the girl beside me had brought in a surprisingly effective battery-powered fan, which provided a lovely secondary breeze. It was hot in the shade in the seats. It’s difficult to imagine how sticky and sweaty the fans on the field must have been before the sun sank below the stands. Fans doing GA were allowed onto the field just after 5:00 pm, when I’m sure the sun would have been blazing down on them.

There was one wonderfully considerate concession to fans because of the heat: cool-bags (coolers) were permitted into the stadium. My spoiling hosts, Steve and Lisa, had provided me with a nifty little cool-bag containing a bag of ice and some cold drinks. The cool-bag proved its golden value as the day worn on, when the drinks were still gorgeously chilled and revitalizing. Between arriving at the stadium just after 1:00 pm, and leaving just before midnight, I drunk four litres of water and Gatorade (blue sugar!).

I’ve seen Interpol several times now, in Europe last year and America this year. They’re a challenging band to enjoy (one guy behind me in St Louis was obnoxiously screaming for them to get off the stage). However I suspect I’m starting to get there. On Sunday, after repeated live exposure building familiarity, I began to feel the first stirrings of appreciation. Like an American cross between Joy Division, Mogwai and Radiohead, with more occasional snaps of melody, they’re difficult, introspective and utterly unsuitable as a stadium support act, but there’s a dark, unhinged and intriguing depth which means I’ll be checking out their latest album when I get a chance. They’re a hard working band too. I checked their latest U2 warm-up setlists on Setlist.fm and was surprised they’ve been playing their own gigs in between their U2 dates.

There was over an hour wait between the end of Interpol’s set and the start of U2’s. I learned from the onscreen rainbow stats that governments spend ten times as much per day on defence than on health. Then a roadie carried a huge electric fan into the underworld just before U2 hit the stage, clearly to fan the flames in the boiler room.

The best moment of the show was when Bono brought five young chaps onstage during Elevation. (I’d met them briefly near the front of the GA line before the show.) Each bloke had one letter or number painted on his chest. These characters spelt “U2 360°” when they stood in the correct sequence. Bono spotted them on the outer rail during Elevation and brought them all up onstage to jump around, sing along and cryptically spell “0° 2 6 U 3” or something. The other standout highlight was the mass choir singalong to Hallelujah as the evocative, fragile, low-fi hymn before Streets.

St Louis was quite possibly the least travelled to concert in the States so far. Very few of the usual GA gypsies made the trip to Missouri in the Midwest for a Sunday night show. I didn’t know anything about the city before I arrived. I foolishly didn’t even know where it was within the USA. I learned a bit more about the city when I went to St Louis’s most famous landmark on Monday: the cloud-tickling Gateway Arch. I learned that St Louis is known as the ‘Gateway to the West’. There is a museum underneath the arch about the western expansion of America after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Lewis and Clark started their little hike in the woods from St Louis in 1804 at the request of President Thomas Jefferson. U2’s tour scheduler in Live Nation clearly isn’t following the Lewis and Clark approach to trip planning, instead bouncing everyone back east to New York again after dragging us here from Philadelphia. Then west again. Then east again. Then Moncton. Quite illogical logistics.

Random observations:

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I think there were new video images during Mysterious Ways.

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Bono engaged in a one-way dialogue with the guests staying in the Hilton hotel which overlooked the stage. I couldn’t see from my seat whether they responded to his calls to turn their lights off though.

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Bizarrely, considering the heat, the LED jackets were brought out for Zooropa. Adam left his hanging open for a song or two afterwards showing off his buff midriff to the ladies in the pit.

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Bono made a very funny speech about the setlist from U2’s gig in St Louis in 1981, when the first three songs and the last three songs were The Ocean, 11 O’Clock Tick Tock and I Will Follow. Oh to change I Will Follow out for any of the other songs he listed.

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The latest indication I’ve seen too many shows. I noticed Aung San Suu Kyi’s barely perceptible glances down at her autocue during her encore video speech.

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I was trying to think of devilishly witty, sarcastic responses to Bono’s rhetorical questioning about “What message would a man 200 miles above Earth have for us?” It’d make for a fun thread on Interference and @U2.

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Just how staggeringly good was that performance of Stuck In A Moment on Letterman last night?
 
Each bloke had one letter or number painted on his chest. These characters spelt “U2 360°” when they stood in the correct sequence. Bono spotted them on the outer rail during Elevation and brought them all up onstage to jump around, sing along and cryptically spell “0° 2 6 U 3” or something.

I had forgot about that!

you would think these guys would have been arranged to stand in order, but then again at this point in the show im guessing it was more fun just to have them up there and not give a shit.

Good review as always :up:
 
I have a sound question for anyone that has gone to more than one date on the tour. I was at the first North American show in Chicago 2 years ago, and the bass didn't sound like it was overwhelming at all.

Then I was at the St. Louis show last weekend and in seats for the first time since the Elevation tour. I was in the 200 level and the bass was pounding.

I was wondering if they have changed the sound since the tour has started, and now there is more bass in the mix, or if it was just where I was sitting.

It was still a great show, but I thought the bass muddied the mix a little bit.

Thanks for any input. I'm kind of a sound geek so I like hearing if the sound was different on the floor.
 
This was my 2nd show of the tour, first being Miami. We flew in on Sunday morning, and as soon as we got off the plane, your clothes stuck to you.
We also stayed at the Millineum Hotel, it was all we could get. The great thing about it was, it was one block from the stadium. The not so good thing was, Toddlers and Tieras was going on in there. 3 year olds that were dressed as, well, you get the hint.

We had GA for this one, and decided to walk over, to take a look at the stage, before going back, to try and get a nap. I thought it was huge in Miami, but it seemed twice the size in St Louis, probably due to it being a baseball stadium. You really didn't need a ticket, because center field was wide open. They had their own wall of sound, the same as everyone else.

We walked over about 8, and caught a few minutes of Interpol. I had 2 people with us, that had never seen U2 before, and to watch them soak it all in, was a fun time. Overwhelmed is not the word when you have GA!!!
We were about 30 people back, right in the middle of the stage, and soundboard.
When space oddity cranked up, it was once again a full moment of joy, every hair on your body raised, and pure exhilaration. The sound was dead perfect, it just will never get better for me. Thank God they let us take a small cooler in, but, they also had coolers all around us, to fill your own water bottle.
It seems that everyone we talked to in St Louis, were extremely supportive that a band like U2 was playing there. We talked to many security people, inside and out, and they knew their night would be easy, except for the heat. It was on every news channel, and it was all positive press.
From where we were, the crowd was definitely alot less quiet, than Miami. In Miami, that was the loudest and most fun having crowd I've been around. And being HUGE Achtung baby fans, that couldn't make that tour,(basic training) it made up for it with the cuts they played.

All in all, I don't know what could top seeing U2. Which honestly saddens me a little bit, but I feel extremely privileged to see not one, but 2 U2 shows. I will definitely plan in advance for the next tour, whenever it may be, to do more shows.
 
I'm feeling nostalgic about the concert now. It was really good and I had a great time despite one lady trying to be a complete buzzkill during Interpool. Met some really nice people around me and from now on I'm only seeing U2 on their second leg. Oh and Adam was as beautiful as ever. Wish I'd brought my camera.
 
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