Subject: U2

• Shell Hell

  January 25, 2007

• Shell Hell

  January 25, 2007

• Them’s Fighting Words, Broseph!

  August 1, 2007

• Fuck-off Friday: It’s Too Hot to Work Anyway

  August 10, 2007

• “Thunderstruck” on I-45

  August 22, 2007

• ACL Fest: Where the Streets Have No Name

  September 13, 2007

• U23D Marq-E = OK

  February 11, 2008

• XM Nation: Catching Up and Moving On

  September 8, 2008

• Were These Really the Best Songs of 2008?

  The Gutter Twins Maybe Rocks Off spent a lot of 2008 with his head in the archives, but he was paying attention to new stuff too. Occasionally. It's as easy as satellite radio, channel 47's (Ethel/Alt Nation) weekly new-music hour Submission/Transmission. Monday night, S/T happened to be playing its picks for the past year. One thing is immediately apparent: the '90s are back, big time. The Black Keys' "Strange Times" is total Soundgarden, the Kills' "Tape Song" almost out-Breeders Kim Deal

  December 30, 2008

• Retro Active: U2 Will Be With You Again

  Bono and Luciano Pavarotti, "Ave Maria" Every year, at almost exactly this time, if you're like me, you can't get U2's goddamned "New Year's Day" out of your head. And, if you're like me, it drives you insane, not because of the quality of the song, but ... well, yeah, it is the quality of the song. It's a great, stupendous and amazing song, full of life and optimism and righteousness and all that stuff that made us pay attention to U2 in the first place. But this year, as the publicity/market

  January 2, 2009

• U2 Lace Up Their Dirty "Boots"

  Among, you know, a few other things, the past 24 hours have been the start of a very, very big year for the band Rocks Off affectionately refers to as the Best Band Ever. U2 appeared alongside Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, "One" pal Mary J. Blige and many more as Barack Obama's opening acts at yesterday's massive "We are One" concert on the National Mall in Washington D.C. "Restraint" is not a word normally associated with Bono and the boys, but they showed it yesterday. Not so much in th

  January 19, 2009

• Rotations

  December 7, 1995

• Aftermath: The Killers at Verizon Wireless Theater

  Photos by Torey Mundkowsky Next year this decade will be over, and very few new bands have distinguished themselves either at the turnstiles or the cash register. Even one of the main ones that has, the Killers, chose to hit the theater circuit this winter after releasing its third album, Day & Age, instead of risking arenas - in most places, that is; about two weeks ago, the Vegas quartet and friends acquitted themselves at Madison Square Garden quite nicely. In the pro

  February 3, 2009

• Rotation

  March 6, 1997

• U2 Closer to Firming Up Reliant Stadium Date

  u2.com U2's free concert last Friday at Fordham University, the BronxUpdate: No Line did indeed debut at No. 1, selling 484,000 copies. U2 has sent out the equivalent of a "Save the Date" card. Today the Irish rockers, whose new album No Line on the Horizon opened to mixed reviews but debuted at No. 1 in most of Europe (UK, France, Germany, Czech Republic), Japan and - probably - the U.S., announced the first round of dates for their upcoming U2 360 stadium tour, where the

  March 9, 2009

• St. Patrick's Day Special: Ten Great Irish (Or Irish-American) Musicians and Bands

  St. Patrick's Day is, well, today, so, rather than hit the pub to celebrate - which we'll probably still do, to be honest - we thought we'd put together a mixtape for you of our favorite Irish and Irish-American bands along with a favorite tracks by them. Pint of Guinness and shot of Jameson sold separately, but still mandatory. Thin Lizzy, "The Boys Are Back in Town": Though founded in Dublin in 1969, Thin Lizzy was as diverse in its lineup as it was in its influences. Frontman Phil Lynott

  March 17, 2009

• Rumors Are Always True: U2 Hits Reliant Stadium October 14

  U2.comJust as Rocks Off suspected, U2 and Live Nation announced Tuesday evening that the Irish band's record-smashing 360 tour will stop at Reliant Stadium Wednesday, October 14, with "Supermassive Black Hole" UK space-rock trio Muse opening. Tickets for the Houston show - and, if you must, the October 12 date at Arlington's New Cowboys Stadium - go on sale at 10 a.m. Monday, April 20. Further ticket information will be available shortly. Don't dawdle, either. To date, the 360 tour h

  April 8, 2009

• U2 Ticket Presale Going On Now

  The back cover of U2's latest album, No Line on the Horizon.If you want to make sure you get tickets to U2's 360 Tour stop at Reliant Stadium October 14, your best shot is to sign up at www.reliantpark.com for the presale going on from now until 5 p.m. Thursday. Once you're registered, you'll be able to click the "Find Tickets" button and enter a special code to buy up to four tickets. Prices range from $32-$252 per ticket. Email information@reliantpark.com for more, well, infor

  April 14, 2009

• Don't Stop Believin'

  January 29, 2009

• Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. in Song

  January 15, 2009

• The Year in Albums

  December 25, 2008

• U2

  Rock’s biggest ego gets the biggest screen treatment

  June 26, 2008

• The Irish Tenors� Christmas Special

  The classical/pop trio makes its debut in Houston

  December 6, 2007

• Paul Oakenfold, Greatest Hits & Remixes

  Greatest Hits & Remixes

  November 8, 2007

• KTRU Outdoor Show

  The 2007 KTRU Outdoor Show with 120 Days, Ratatat and Despot is Saturday, April 7, at Rice University, 6100 Main, 713-348-0000.

  April 5, 2007

• Tech? No!

  An imaginary history of electronic music

  October 12, 2006

• MuteMath

  Saturday, January 21, at the Proletariat, 903 Richmond, 713-523-1199.

  January 19, 2006

• Walk Away, Walk Away

  And we will follow as local music figures recall tales of U2

  October 27, 2005

• Bono for Pontiff

  The only problem: Who could possibly replace him in the arena-rock pantheon?

  April 28, 2005

• Karachi Rock

  Haven't heard of Junoon? They've sold 20 million albums, and they're at the Meridian this week.

  April 14, 2005

• The Face of Rock and Roll

  A new coffee table book spotlights a vital, neglected art genre and gives a few Houston poster artists their due

  February 3, 2005

• How to Dismantle an Atomic Mom

  A critic debates the merits of U2's latest with his mother

  November 25, 2004

• Flogging Molly

  Friday, March 29

  March 28, 2002

• Nine Inch Nails

  And All That Could Have Been (Nothing)

  March 21, 2002

• Cordero: De Donde Eres

  May 28, 2009

• Cutout Bin: Censored and "Recalled" Album Covers

  The Beatles, Yesterday and Today (1966) We start with perhaps the best-known example of a "recalled" album cover. When advance copies were sent to stores and DJs, there was an immediate uproar over the cover, showing the band covered in baby parts and bloody meat. All copies were ordered to be returned to the manufacturer. These copies were "pasted over" with a new cover and sent back to stores. Only a handful of copies escaped the "repasting" and are of course valuable collector items. Many

  July 16, 2009

• Rocks Off's Brother Once Stepped in Human Shit at a U2 Show... Got a Better Astrodome Story?

  Smash Mouth had just finished playing, and not coincidentally, Rocks Off's brother John had just returned from a trip to the bathroom. It was November 1997, and we were watching the stagehands putting the finishing touches on U2's ginormous set in the Astrodome. The Irish rockers were touring behind Pop, an album as underachieving - and also underrated - as No Line on the Horizon, the reason for their October 14 stop next door at Reliant Stadium with Muse. Suddenly Rocks Off caught a whiff of a

  August 7, 2009

• The Dong Show

  Here at Rocks Off, we do a lot of research for our wildly popular and intellectually enlightening album cover slideshows. As part of that research, we've found many of those albums to be highly concentrated on the male goinrular area. So at long last, and just in time for the weekend, we've compiled many of them into one pace. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Dong Show. Prrrrrrrobably not safe for work. Black Dick for President: We're not sure what it means to be "black-rated," but we're ab

  September 18, 2009

• The Quotable Bono

  October 8, 2009

• U2 and Muse Set Lists from Cowboys Stadium in Arlington Monday

  Pete Freedman/ DC-9 at NightIndependence Day in Arlington? Nah, just U2's ginormous 360 "Claw" stage.​ It's a little less than 36 hours and counting until U2's 360 Tour stops at Reliant Stadium, and Rocks Off is starting to get excited. Really excited. Bono and the boys were in Arlington at Cowboys Stadium Monday night. "For about two hours, the U2 members sang and played with passionate precision," writes Mario Tarradell in the Dallas Morning News. "They backed up the spectacle with plenty of

  October 13, 2009

• Five Great U2 Songs Even the Band Has Probably Forgotten About

  Well, now you've seen the set list from Monday's U2 Dallas show, and it's pretty short on both pre-Joshua Tree songs and surprises in general. This will be Rocks Off's eighth U2 show since 1992, and we can't remember ever having seen the band do "The Unforgettable Fire" live, but besides the No Line on the Horizon stuff, everything else we have. So instead of cuing up "One" - which we fully expect to be played at our funeral - or "Where the Streets Have No Name" for the 16 millionth time,

  October 13, 2009

• Midweek Match-Up: U2 Vs. Wrestlemania In The Battle Of The Spectacles

  As you well know if you've been reading our sister blog Rocks Off (and Lord knows you should be), U2 is in town tonight.The new tour requires something like 90 huge trucks to cart around the massive stage they use so as not to detract from the quiet beauty of their ballads. Or to keep the people in the cheap seats entertained, we're not sure.At any rate, it's the biggest show at Reliant Stadium since Wrestlemania 25 came to town, unless you count the Texans' implosion against Jacksonville.Wrestl

  October 14, 2009

• Rocks Off Loves Muse - So What If Idiot-Arguer Glenn Beck Does Too?

  It's easy to forget that tonight another band is actually playing before U2 at Reliant Stadium. But Bono and the boys couldn't have found a better band to heat up their adoring throngs than space-rock overlords Muse. Hell, even conservative hand-wringer Glenn Beck likes them. We swear that that's not an indictment of the band. The English-bred trio just released its fifth album, The Resistance, last month, and almost immediately it somehow struck a chord with Beck, the author of such recent boo

  October 14, 2009

• With or Without You: Memoirs of a U2 Adolescence and Young Adulthood

  ...I may regret this.​So there was a time, not long ago by geological reckoning, that I was a U2 fan. Growing up during the pre-Internet late 70s/early 80s in a town where the only place to buy music was a Camelot Music in the mall limited your options somewhat. Nevertheless, the Edge's loud, ringing guitar on songs like "I Will Follow" (from Boy) and "Two Hearts Beat As One" (War) sought me out, appealing to that part of my adolescent male brain that liked loud, ringing guitars, and the lyric

  October 14, 2009

• The Best U2 Songs Not Actually Written by U2

  Anton Corbijn​U2 is one of the biggest, most influential rock bands of all time. Their sound has changed over the years, yet remains unique. Thanks mostly to The Edge's signature guitar playing, they've invented entire chunks of pop-rock along the way, and you know what that means: they've been ripped off. But sometimes, that's okay. Rock and roll bands steal from one another all the time - some would argue U2 themselves have been guilty of this - and the results aren't always dreadful. Here a

  October 14, 2009

• Rocks Off's Self-Guided Tour of U2's Stage Setup, and Other Fun Stuff We Learned About the Most Gargantuan Tour In Rock History

  Photos by Groovehouse/ Click here for a slideshowYes, "The Claw" is really fookin' huge.​"At a certain point, the only thing you can compare it to is the Stones. I've done the Stones. This is bigger." That's Jake Berry, Production Director for U2's 360 Tour, talking about the gargantuan "Claw" configuration stagehands were in the final, well, stages of completing at Reliant Stadium Tuesday afternoon at a media preview of the tour. This "Claw" is one of three custom-built for the biggest t

  October 14, 2009

• Aftermath: U2 at Reliant Stadium - One Love, We Get to Share It

  Photos by Groovehouse/ Click here for a slideshow​A day or two before U2 (and love) came to town, a friend emailed us a joke. At least we think it's a joke. It really doesn't have anything to do with U2, except that it has everything to do with U2. "I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, terrorism attacks, World War III, global warming, my retirement savings, Social Security, my job, national health care and my credit card debt that I called Lifeline. "Got a freakin' call ce

  October 15, 2009

• Season of the Witch

  October 22, 2009

• Want to Levitate the Pentagon? These Songs Might Help

  ​On this date in 1967, some 50,000 protesters marched on the Pentagon with the intention of levitating it and exorcising any "evil spirits" within. The effort was led by Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, poet Allen Ginberg, and Ed Sanders and satirically-minded rockers the Fugs. As we all know, the exorcism worked, the Vietnam War ended the next day, and peace and love have reigned supreme for over 30 years. Ha ha, no. But Rocks Off isn't all about sarcasm and laughing at hippies, we're here t

  October 21, 2009

• Aftermath: The Pogues Destroy House of Blues, and Rocks Off Is Ready to Move On

  Photos by Daniel KramerThis is about how we feel this morning.​Attention budding music writers, assuming there are still a few of you left who think getting into shows for free is a fair trade for your health, well-being, a decent paycheck and reasonably normal social life: It's not. It's pretty much the opposite. If you choose to go down that road, like we have, the payoffs get smaller as the physical, mental and social price of this life (and lifestyle) gets steeper. Once you reach your mid-

  October 30, 2009