Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of WAR!
Sunday, July 13th 2008
1982-02-11 New Orleans "Riverboat President" Soundboard Silver CD07/13/2008 08:52 AM 
October has received perhaps the least amount of attention from U2unes in it's three years with only three shows from that tour appearing here. Unlike the Lovetown tour, it has nothing to do with a dearth of quality recordings. Indeed, the October tour provides us with a wealth of excellent soundboard, broadcast and audience recordings, and I think it's time to balance things out a bit. So I hope you like material from October because it's what you're going to get for the next couple weeks.
I had a rare problem selecting this week's bootleg. Normally, I try to find something good in a mountain of okey-dokey-ness. The proverbial diamond. While digging through my October tour archive, the problem was sorting through a mountain of diamonds for the one I would be most excited about out of many that amaze me. In the end, I whipped up a list of over a dozen recordings, blindfolded my oldest boy, and told him to just touch the screen at random. After wiping off the smear he left on the monitor (I didn't think that through very well), I found "Riverboat President" for this week. Pretty scientific, huh?
Let me start with the technical difficulties. The first track, "Gloria", has some noise and drop-outs in the right channel. That disappears after the start of the second track. After that, you are left with clear sound for what is very nearly a studio-quality performance, unless you count a minor drop during "I Will Follow". All instruments and vocals are perfectly clear. The audience really only shows up between tracks and does not interfere with the music at all; it almost seems as if whoever was working the soundboard had a mic to pick up the audience and did an admirable job turning that mic on and off at the best times. All things considered, it's an impressive show made unique by being perhaps the only U2 concert performed on a boat. The silver CD included two tracks at the end from a gig in London, and I kept them in here for you to enjoy. You can use the link in the box at the upper right, or you can simply CLICK HERE to grab the torrent. And, yes, the Red Rocks show is still available. Wow.
Oh yeah, my wife and I are expecting.
(3)Saturday, June 28th 2008
1987-10-09 Syracuse (fixed and patched soundboard)06/28/2008 10:00 AM 
It's been too long since the Red Rocks show was posted. I spent the last several weeks focused on family and friends and had a very good time, but obviously U2unes and sharing bootlegs with you became a distant second (more like fifth) in my list of priorities. To make up for it, I hope you will enjoy this soundboard recording from the Joshua Tree tour. Here's a quick link to the torrent to get you started.
To be accurate, the original source of this recording is a pro-shot VHS, which means it's basically (but not exactly) soundboard. The material did not originally include the complete concert, suffering a fade-out before the end of "With Or Without You". However, in this edition, a competent enthusiast took the time to correct the speed of the recording (it ran too fast), and to patch WOWY as well as add the last tracks from an alternate source of the show. So, yes, near the end of the concert the sound quality does change suddenly (probably could have been transitioned better, but not by me) but I think fans of that song will forgive the change when presented with the ever-popular "shine like stars" version of the song.
Those of you stumbling upon this site late in the search for the Red Rocks show take heart - it's still seeding very well. Follow the links.
(2)Thursday, June 5th 2008
Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Red Rocks performance!06/05/2008 07:54 AM 
Today is the 25th anniversary of U2's famous performance at Red Rocks. It was a defining moment for the band, a standout performance in rock history, and it's just so much fun to listen to over and over. To celebrate, U2unes is sharing the complete Red Rocks soundboard with all of you once again. Yes, it's been here twice before, and I can't think of any other bootleg that's graced this page more than twice. I bet most of you long-time readers already have it, but those of you who've only been coming here for a year of less are in for a treat. I'm not going to spend any time gushing about how good this recording is and why you should download it. It's a classic must-have, and that's all you need to know until it's reverberating in your ears. If you feel you simply must have more, you can click the Read More link below to see an article from the Denver Post that should take care of any need you may have for eloquent descriptive prose.
So start downloading already! You can use the link in the upper right box, or this one right here straight from the tracker.
(5)Sunday, June 1st 2008
1984-11-15 London "Autumn Fire" Silver CD06/01/2008 10:14 AM 
A couple days ago, I received an email from a reader with a fun question: Which concerts did the live tracks on the EP Wide Awake In America come from? Yes, it's true - I have an immensely vast wealth of knowledge about all things U2. It's called Google. ; ) But I was actually surprised to find an excellent answer to that question at Wikipedia of all places. I would have figured some U2 fan site would have been at the top of the list but that was not the case. I know Wikipedia covers a lot of topics, but this was still a neat treat. So the live version of "Bad" came from a performance in Birmingham (1984-11-12) and "A Sort Of Homecoming" was taken from the London show a few nights later (1984-11-15). Naturally curious, I went to my archive to see if I have those dates, and sure enough I do. Indeed, the London show ended up as the silver CD I am sharing with you today.
This silver CD might not be a soundboard-sourced recording, but if it's merely an audience recording it's a darn good one. There is no audience interference though the crowd is present when it needs to be. The sound is clear overall. A bit high, there's not much bass, but I found it improved when using iTunes Rock EQ preset. Bono gets chatty between songs, and is obviously very excited to be on stage this evening, which translates into a lot of enthusiasm during the songs. Regular readers will know how much I like a good rendition of "Bad", and like-minded people will be happy to hear an 8 minute version. The actual concert would fit just perfectly on a regular 80-minute CD, which might be handy for you folks who like to burn discs and listen in the car on the way to work. However, the silver CD included 9 bonus tracks from a performance in Australia a few months earlier. The bonus tracks are muffled and the lyrics are almost inaudible. I include them for completeness, but they really are only of value to the hardcore collectors who don't like their silvers split up.
You can grab the torrent from the usual spot there in the upper right-hand corner, but I am finding people seem to have better luck with the download working if you grab it from TPB directly.
Enjoy!
(7)Saturday, May 24th 2008
1990-01-05 Rotterdam05/24/2008 09:47 PM 
Over the last month or two, I have received one persistent request - more music from the Lovetown era. Normally, I would readily satisfy such requests, but the Lovetown tour has one unique quality to it: very very very few actually good or better recordings. With all due respect to the dozens of tapers who captured and shared the Lovetown shows, most of them are not listenable. The quartet of shows in Dublin right after Christmas are almost the sole exception in terms of recording quality. Did the concerts suck? No! In fact, if you can force yourself to listen to an average Lovetown gig, you will find that many of the shows are highly enjoyable. It's just the overall recording quality is rarely up to my standards; I simply wouldn't share this stuff here.
So with such a persistent request for Lovetown material, I spent the better part of this week going through my collection trying to find a good or better recording that I had not already shared before. Let me tell you, it's not much fun to spend hours pouring over stuff that sounds like you are listening to an AM (not FM) broadcast of a guy with a cheap walkman using a built-in microphone standing at the far end of a large stadium with a dozen of his drunkest friends talking while their obnoxious kid sisters scream unintelligibly coming through your $10 pocket transistor radio from the '70s (and you are getting poor reception cuz your antenna is bent).
Welcome to Lovetown!
Gah! I almost gave up. Fortunately for my persistent requestor, I finally did find an acceptable show just this morning. It's the first of the Rotterdam make-up shows that took place in early January of 1990, in this case, the 5th. You can grab the torrent either by clicking the link up there on the top right-hand side, or just use this link to grab the torrent directly from the tracker. Enjoy!
(5)Wednesday, May 21st 2008
We're back05/21/2008 10:42 AM Here we are, back in action. Almost. The troubles seem to have been two-fold over the last several weeks. First, there was some kind of network attack against the server. The ISP was a little pissed off, but they worked with me to get that resolved (by rights I probably could have been dropped and forced to find another provider, but these gals were U2 fans). And then I burned out the memory in the computer. Not quite sure how that happened, but I guess it's like anything else in a computer - crap just dies. It probably didn't help matters that I was overclocking things just a little bit. I found a local shop with excellent prices and replaced all of that. The server has now been perfectly stable without any software related crashes for several days now, so I am hopeful that firing up the U2unes server software won't bring it back down. I'm not going to be seeding anything for just a few more days. Give this a chance to settle in and run happy for me before putting it back to serious work.
If anyone has an requests for what they would like to see on U2unes over the US Memorial Day Weekend, leave a comment or send me an email.
Cheers! (2) Monday, May 5th 2008
2005-04-06 Los Angeles2008-05-05 18:51 
Now, to set things back into something resembling a regular weekly schedule, here's an excellent recording from the early Vertigo tour. This show from Los Angeles might possibly represent the first U2 bootleg captured using a hard-drive based recording device, the Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. Granted, the mics used and the location of the taper are the two most important factors, but it's good to see that other storage formats work as well as the old school best. Check out the sample to determine what the sound is like for yourself. I'd call it crisp and clear, cool - at times almost cold but never quite crossing that line to harsh. Maybe Bono sounds the tiniest bit distant, yet the clarity might lead you to think his distance is more emotional than technical. Of course, you have to look at history, and it's important to remember why Bono was talking about the Pope.
For those of you who don't follow the latest at U2Torrents, yet another JEMS master surfaced late last week. It happens to be a very good recording from the night before this one. I think it might have to make an appearance here next week, but if there's anyone who would like to hear something else, just let your opinion flow in the comments.
And yes, Bono, you do have a rockstar complex.
UPDATE: I have received several complaints of people only reaching 99.9%. I have also been having problems with all torrents I have recently uploaded using The Pirate Bay as the tracker. Problems appear to have started on Monday. At this time, I have no obvious solution because I can't quite tell what the problem is. Some testing shows that you might be able to complete the torrent to 100% if you delete the torrent you have now - JUST the .torrent file, not all the data. Remove the torrent from your bittorrent app. Then download the torrent directly from The Pirate Bay rather than from U2unes. Here's a link to it. Good luck and let me know how it goes. (3)Friday, May 2nd 2008
Four Wild Irish Roses Volume II2008-05-02 12:33 
Let's keep playing catch-up here and share another U2 bootleg, shall we? Yes, we shall. Today I feel like handing out a copy of the silver CD known as Four Wild Irish Roses Volume II. It's a compilation of various demo tracks from the very early 80s along with several live cuts from the later 80s. There's even a couple Larry Mullen solos to enjoy (try not to laugh too much, he really wants to be the lead singer, ya know). The sound quality varies from track to track from very good to listenable. Click the Artwork & Detail link below to get the full tracklist and other tidbits.
I always enjoy filling requests, so if there is something in particular you would like to hear, feel free to send me an email with your request and I will do what I can to get it on the tracker. For example, I've had a request to re-seed the Red Rocks concert, and will probably do that some time in the next couple weeks. So if there is something any of you want that happens to be in my catalog, just let me know. Cheers!
(3)
Sample: Twilight
1982-02-11 New Orleans
