U2 - New Year's Day (12" single)

My journey with U2 started with the band's second album October, and soon after I picked up a copy of Boy. I put both of those albums on a single cassette. My first car, purchased from my parents, was a giant green 1973 Mercury Marquis Brougham that only had an 8-track player, so I bought an adapter from Radio Shack. The cassette lived there for a long time.

When the 12" single dropped early in 1983 I eagerly snagged a copy, and then waited for the album. The title track was definitely U2, but it was different too. It was more like what we'd later know as U2, though it was hard to put your finger on exactly what at the time. Whatever it was, it was awesome. Then there was the very rough "Treasure (Whatever Happened to Pete the Chop)," which remains to this day a lost track for the band. I suppose this was a rough mix, and it was more reminiscent of their first two albums. Stylistically it would have been an odd duck going forward.

The second side contains live tracks taken from a Belgian television special from July 1982, and includes "Fire" and "I Threw a Brick Through a Window / A Day Without Me." These are wicked recordings and a snapshot of a band that was growing by leaps and bounds.

I was always sort of curious about the difference between the single version that was supposedly a "long version," coming in at 5:40, and the album version that was maybe a couple of seconds shorter. I do remember doing a rough A/B comparison back in the day, but as I had to change the speed for the 12" and then back for the album, by the time I'd played both they just sounded the same to me.

Regardless, this was a heady time to be a U2 fan. You could literally feel that something big was going to happen with their forthcoming album. If "New Year's Day" was any indication of what else was in store, it was going to be a hell of a ride.

As to my long-suffering vinyl copy, it's been through the wringer, so to speak. It survived the great '90s crawl space flood, and although there is some damage to the jacket, it's pretty intact, and the vinyl itself is still pristine.

I still find it strange that the performances here have never been preserved and made available again.

Truly a shame. The 12" single captures a band right on the verge (almost said edge, har de har har) of making it big.

Comments

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog