And the live version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is ham-fisted, and haven’t we heard the song seven million times too often already? As for the thirty-eight second snippet from “Freedom for My People” by Harlem street duo Sterling Magee and Adam Gussow, I guess you had to be there. To begin with the absolute low points, the only thing to be said for the forty-three second snippet of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner” is U2 had the common decency not to play the whole thing. Unfortunately they all happen to be the LP’s studio cuts, rather than the ones recorded during U2’s The Joshua Tree tour of the US. But I simply can’t bring myself to hate it-it includes some of my favorite U2 songs. Rattle and Hum’s chief problem is it’s a dog’s breakfast, and lacks even the cheap glue to keep a model airplane in one piece. To cite just two of the album’s critics, The Village Voice’s Tom Carson called Rattle and Hum an “awful record” by “almost any rock-and-roll fan’s standard.” He went on to add that the LP’s sound wasn’t “attributable to pretensions so much as to monumental know-nothingism.” Meanwhile, David Browne of the New York Daily News said Rattle and Hum “just prattles and numbs.” The phrases “sincere egomania” and “the worst album by a major band in years” were also bandied about. But there were plenty of haters to take my place, and they emerged from the dank caves we music critics inhabit to litter guano all over the band’s 1988 studio/live LP Rattle and Hum, the soundtrack of a rockumentary released the same year. But as the years passed they loosened up, Bono became less of a tight-ass, and I discovered I enjoyed some of their songs, a lot. For the longest time I had no use for U2-they were too sanctimonious and self-righteous was my opinion, and Bono stuck me as a frustrated Sunday school teacher.
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