lazarus said:
If they disliked the song so much, why put it on the album? Perhaps they didn't like the way it originally sounded, and had Lillywhite mess with it until it worked for them.
Here are some quotes over the years on that song. It indeed appears they never thought it lived up to its potential.
Into The Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song (1996)
'"Steve mixed it and he went for the sonic blast of it," Bono says. "It started out as one of those Scott Walker things but we felt it was too rich. Daniel probably felt that the way we went in the end was too FM. It's a song I feel we didn't quite nail on the record because there was another whole set of lyrics that were dumped and I wrote those quickly and off we went. But we did another version which was released as a single which was better."'
U2: A Decade Of Turmoil (Q magazine article November 2002)
'[...] although perversely, it was the most typically U2-ish tracks that were proving the most difficult. Producer Steve Lillywhite remembers the mixing of Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (notably absent from the forthcoming Best Of [1990-2000 - MJ]) as being especially testing.
"They hated that song," he says. "I spent a month on it and I still don't think it was as realised as it could've been. The Americans had heard it and said, That's your radio song there, because they were having trouble with some of the more industrial elements. It's almost like a covers band doing a U2 moment. Maybe we tried too hard."'
U2 By U2 (2006)
Adam: 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' was a very rough demo that we could never really improve on, so we kept going back to the original demo. There's something magical about it. It's a great torch song, with melody and emotion, but I don't think we ever captured it again and we have never really been able to play the song live. Sometimes you get songs like that. They have so much promise but it's as if you can't open the tin, you can't get in at them.
Edge: It is not that we
can't play the song live, it's more that it doesn't come alive. I remember Bono playing the original STS demo to Jimmy Iovine. Bono was explaining to Jimmy about House music, this new dance movement that was taking off at that time. Jimmy heard the demo of 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and said, "You're banging on about House music? That's house music! You write a song like that, you get to live in a house like this!"