If you were standing in the dust of Tempe, Arizona, on April 2, 1987, you weren't just at a concert. You were witnessing the exact moment four guys from Dublin stopped being a "big band" and became an era-defining monolith. The u2 joshua tree tour wasn't just a series of dates on a calendar; it was a spiritual reckoning with America, a high-stakes gamble on a "roots" sound, and eventually, a record-breaking 30th-anniversary lap that proved some songs simply don't age.
Honestly, the sheer scale of it is hard to wrap your head around. We're talking about a tour that grossed roughly $56 million back in the 80s—which sounds like pocket change today but was massive then—and then came back decades later to rake in over $390 million.
The 1987 Mirage: Desert Soul and Death Threats
The original run was gritty. Bono was famously dealing with more than just vocal strain; he was getting actual death threats because of the band’s vocal stance against Arizona Governor Evan Mecham’s decision to cancel Martin Luther King Jr. Day. You can hear that tension in the recordings. It wasn't the polished stadium spectacle we expect from U2 now.
It was raw.
The band was playing to nearly 3.2 million people across 109 shows, but they felt musically "unprepared" for the fame. Larry Mullen Jr. later admitted they were the biggest band in the world, but they weren't necessarily the best yet. They were still figuring out how to fill those massive voids in stadiums with nothing but a delay pedal and a lot of heart.
- The Setlist: They’d open with "Where the Streets Have No Name" and basically blow the roof off the place (if there was one).
- The Injuries: Bono was a wreck. He fell, he got cuts, he got bruises. He literally gave his blood to those stages.
- The Rattle and Hum Factor: This tour was so intense it birthed a whole movie and a follow-up album that almost broke the band's reputation because people thought they were taking themselves too seriously.
What Most People Get Wrong About the 2017 Return
When U2 announced they were doing a 30th-anniversary u2 joshua tree tour in 2017, the skeptics came out in droves. People called it a "nostalgia cash grab."
They were wrong.
It wasn't just about playing the old hits. The 2017 tour was a technological marvel that utilized a 200-foot-wide 8K resolution LED screen—the largest ever used at the time. Anton Corbijn, the man who basically gave the original album its visual identity with those moody desert shots, came back to film new backgrounds.
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Watching a 45-foot-high silhouette of a Joshua tree while the band played "With or Without You" wasn't just a concert; it was like being inside a piece of high-end cinema.
The Numbers That Actually Matter
If you look at the 2017 and 2019 legs combined, the impact is staggering.
The band played to over 3.2 million people—almost exactly the same number of tickets they sold back in 1987, which is a wild coincidence. But the revenue? That shot up to $390.8 million. They visited places they’d never been before, like Seoul, Singapore, and Mumbai.
In Dublin alone, 80,901 people crammed into Croke Park. That’s not a "nostalgia" crowd; that’s a cultural event.
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Why Does the Joshua Tree Still Matter?
Basically, it’s because the "Two Americas" theme Bono was obsessed with in 1987 felt weirdly relevant again in the late 2010s. The Edge mentioned that the political unrest of the Reagan-Thatcher era felt like it had come full circle.
Songs like "Bullet the Blue Sky" or "Red Hill Mining Town"—which, surprisingly, they had never played live until the 2017 tour—suddenly felt like they were written about modern headlines. "Red Hill" was originally about the 1984 miners' strike in the UK, but in 2017, it sounded like a requiem for the Rust Belt.
Expert Take: The Production Secret
Willie Williams, U2's long-time creative director, did something brilliant with the 2017 stage. He didn't just build a big TV. He built a "CinemaScope" experience. They used Arri Alexa 65 cameras to film the visuals because they needed a resolution higher than 6K just to keep the images from looking "pixelated" on that massive wall.
If you shot that show in standard HD, it would have looked like a Lego set.
Actionable Insights for Fans and Collectors
If you're looking to dive deeper into the history of the u2 joshua tree tour, don't just stick to the Spotify hits.
- Check the 1987 Bootlegs: Look for the "Live from Paris" (July 4, 1987) recordings. It’s the band at their most volatile and exciting.
- The Documentary Angle: Watch Rattle and Hum, but watch it with the understanding that the band was exhausted. It explains why they pivoted so hard to the "irony" of the Zoo TV era afterward.
- The 30th Anniversary Box Set: It’s actually worth the money for the "Live at Madison Square Garden 1987" disc alone.
- Visual Literacy: Look up Anton Corbijn’s photography books. The man is the reason we associate U2 with black-and-white desert landscapes.
The legacy of these tours proves that U2 isn't just a band that plays songs; they’re a band that builds environments. Whether it was the minimalist, dust-covered stages of '87 or the high-definition monoliths of 2017, they redefined what a stadium show could actually say to an audience.