1987-11-15 Oakland "In U2 I Trust" Silver CD02/23/2009 11:21:12 AM
Forgive me if I am a little distracted today. We're having a baby tomorrow. Anyway, if you haven't picked up on the pattern of bootlegs around here yet, I started with the Boy tour some weeks ago and have been doing a show from each tour since then. This week: The Joshua Tree. I was surprised to discover that we haven't had a JT tour show here since June of last year! In point of fact, I uploaded that one, a concert from Syracuse, just two days before we found out that there was a bun in the oven. Somehow this feels like a nice bookend, then - JT at the start, JT at the finish. Also trying to keep up with the pattern I had going for a while of mostly silver CDs, I dug up a nice silver CD (from an audience recording) near the end of the tour in Oakland, California. This one is called "In U2 I Trust" and is composed of just the concert itself, no bonus tracks this time. There are two versions of this silver CD from the same manufacturer, but this one is definitely the better sounding of the two. The sound is clear, vocals are good, but the highs are much more prominent than the bass. Even starting from the Rock EQ preset in iTunes I still found I was turning up the bass a bit. That might be a problem more with the crap speakers I currently have, so I am inclined to believe that the sound on a decent system will be good. It's even a bitter better coming from the stock earbuds on my iPod. The audience is up front, and can be a little obnoxious at the start with lots of people whistling, but that pretty much disappears during songs and tends not to be as common between songs as the show progresses. I didn't really come across any major stand-out tracks in this recording. It's an even-paced, solid performance throughout. It never really reaches powerful emotional heights, but neither does it ever get boring. If you listen to enough of U2's shows, that's a fairly predictable result of a late-tour gig: they have the performance perfected, but they've mellowed.
