How Long, To Write This Blog

The advantage of sitting in the cheap seats is you can take in the whole scene.

In June of 2001, I took a day off to go see U2 play a concert in Albany. I had been a professional journalist making $10 an hour at a newspaper in New Hampshire that didn't have an active website until about 2009.

The little town I lived in was surrounded by rolling mountains. A stream cut through town. It was beautiful. I also had no friends and no family. I had every channel on Dish Network. It is not an era I look back on particularly fondly.

But there was that concert. In the line to sit in the GA section, I met a couple of girls from a Christian college in Arkansas and we waited together for six hours before they let us into the arena.

Bono was sick that night. He lost his voice and, basically, could not sing. He asked the crowd to lift him up and carry the show. About 18,000 of us belted songs out for him at the top of our lungs. He prayed. He sang Bible verses. The show ended with Bono mustering enough voice to sing, "Walk On."

The girls asked what I thought of the show as we walked out. "That's what church should be like," I told them. We went our separate ways.

Somewhere in my mid-20s, I figured some things out. I lost a bunch of weight and got active. I dated some girls. My career took off. I found a church in Salt Lake that I liked.

Then, as some of you might remember, I got married. We wanted to find a church that worked for both of us in Salt Lake. It was an adventure. I'd never walked out of a church service before marrying The Wife, but when they start blasting a church organ and playing, "Go Tell It On The Mountain," you start looking for the exit. Some churches we left in the middle of service. We left one in the first 15 minutes. I am positive some people had their feelings hurt.

Photo Credit: TW.
Then we went to Capitol Church. They had a coffee bar in the back. The people were nice. And the worship band played a perfect version of U2's 40. ("He set my feet upon a rock, And made my footsteps firm, Many will see, Many will see and hear.")

Suffice it to say, I liked that church a lot.

But things change. We left that church and helped start a new one in our neighborhood. Then we left the state entirely. My career came to a dead end. I stopped caring quite so much about how much I weigh.

I even stopped listening to music. That used to be my nightly routine. Some nights it was Zeppelin II, others it was CCR's Greatest Hits or anything by Pink Floyd. And sometimes it was Achtung Baby. Now I sleep next to my beautiful wife and I don't want to wake her up with my singing. And I just don't care about hearing the albums any more.

We had always meant to go to a U2 show, TW and I, but the timing was invariably terrible. During the 2005 tour, we were freshly married and she didn't have a job. In 2010, we were both out of a job as she started graduate school. I watched clips from shows on YouTube.

So when we realized U2 was playing a show in Boston on a night I have off from work, there wasn't a whole lot of debate. We were going.

I spent the majority of the concert with my jaw on the ground. Anything you say about this kind of show makes you sound like a lunatic. "THEY HAD A TV THEY WALKED THROUGH." They did. They really did. There were also dorky music notes (They played both "Gloria" and "I Will Follow" in the first four songs!). Bono sang "Massachusetts" instead of "With or Without You" at the end of the song. Adam Clayton fed some ducks on the Common. They clearly love Boston.

But it was how the show wrapped up that got my wheels turning. "He set my feet upon a rock, and made my footsteps firm," Bono sang.

I'd always wanted to hear them finish a show with 40. The crowd finishes the show by belting out, "How long, to sing this song" while the band walks off stage.

You can't make something a pivotal moment. You couldn't have planned on Bono getting sick for that 2001 show. But maybe I can take some of the excitement I feel from seeing a concert and turn it into something. I don't know what. I'm not going back to college. I'm not going to drive service trucks for AAA. I don't want to move again (we finally bought drapes for the guest bedroom!). But I think I'll start with something simple. I work for the next five hours and a friend of mine keeps a pair of headphones in her desk. I'm going to borrow those headphones and listen to the "Pop" album. And we'll see what happens next.

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