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

My journey with U2 started with October, and soon after I picked up a copy of Boy. I put both of those albums on a single cassette and it lived in my car for a long time. My first car, purchased off my parents: a giant green 1973 Mercury Marquis Brougham only had an 8-track player, so I bought a cassette adapter from Radio Shack so I could have tunes in the car.

When the 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, but it was hard to put a finger on, but it was awesome. Then there was the very rough "Treasure (Whatever Happened to Pete the Chop)" that remains to this day a lost track for the band. I suppose this was a rough mix, and was more reminiscent of their first two albums, and stylistically would have been ad odd duck going forward.

The second side contains live tracks taken from a Belgium television special from July of 1982, and contained "Fire," "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 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 not been preserved and made available. Truly a shame, this was a band right on the verge (almost said edge, har de har har) of making it big.

Comments

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and 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 that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album 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. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasurers I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home.Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in the band? Of course I had a radio - it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about $35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. Sunny Days was a great song, I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later when I got my first record player the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited classics, among them Sunny Days and other golden nuggets that...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog