Review: U2 – Toronto – Rogers Center

Around noon, I was sitting outside Joelle’s house waiting for her to arrive for the grand U2 trip.  She was already prepared when she pulled up in her car including her excellent concert going shoes which increases her height of 5’3″ to 5’8″.  May I also point out that I notice Bono was wearing the same shoes at the show?

We then headed to Barrhaven to pick up Claude, or rather, have him pick us up as we were taking his sweet Mazda6.  We didn’t have time to peruse his new house as we had to hit the road!

I will admit that I had been stressing out over the logistics of the trip….”Will we hit rush hour if we arrive in Toronto around 4:30-5:00?”, “Will we be able to find a decent parking spot?”, “Will we get a decent spot on the General Admission floor area?”, “Will we have time to eat before the show?”.  The entire summer long I had played it cool and then cracks in my mental foundation started appearing and people were having a good chuckle over it.

In the end, we packed some food for the trip down just in case we couldn’t make it with time to spare.  In the same end, we arrived in downtown Toronto around 5PM with no traffic encountered whatsoever and we managed to find a great parking spot (actually, it was the same exact parking spot that I had used when seeing Pearl Jam the month before, which in turn is the parking lot that Dana parks her car in!) and headed to the Rogers Center which was within view of the lot.

Claude had a few tickets to get rid of so he managed to get rid of them at a loss.  We then scoured some merchandise booths to find out where I could get a Toronto specific poster.  The booths said I would have to go inside to do so and I couldn’t exit the building after.  Luckily, I thought ahead of this eventuality and packed a poster tube to carry it in.  However, just before entering the building we spied another merchandise booth that DID carry the Toronto specific posters so Claude and I picked one up and he returned to the car to drop off the tube.  The poster has now replaced my Vertigo tour poster in my living room.  It’s good to switch it up once in awhile.  I actually like this poster a lot better as it doesn’t have Bono in a ridiculous cowboy hat and is four times larger than all the other members.

We then entered the Rogers Center and made our way down to the General Admission area on the baseball field.  The 360 Tour stage (aka The Claw) was quite a marvel.  It was massive!  I have read a few articles about it…costs $40M to create, takes four days to assemble and two days to disassemble.  It consists of a 360 degree big screen so that anyone in the stadium can take a look.  All in all, it looked like a giant spaceship!

We made our way down to the floor and planted ourselves about five meters in front of the front rail.  Joelle was about four meters away as she wanted to be in the best spot possible.  So to explain where we were in terms of the stage…there is a stage.  Then out from the stage is a pit of people.  Let’s say that pit of people is about 15 meters deep.  Then you hit the catwalk which is a ring around the stage.  Well, we were five meters from the catwalk which was great.  So when the band members would come onto the catwalk, we were quite close.  In fact, even with them on stage, I found myself watching the stage more than the big screen as we were close enough.

Krista, Ben and Vince finally found out is in the crowd (they had come up in a separate car).  They had a beer in hand but I had decided that in a moment like this, it’s impossible to move in and out of the crowd to get a beer.  From 6:00 onwards, no drinks or food were to be had in order to maximize our spot.  Claude, unfortunately, had a headache, got some water which led to him leaving for the washroom at one point and he never made it back to us.  There were just too many people.  There were 13,000 people on the floor, 50,000 people in the stands!  We held our ground.

Snow Patrol opened for U2 and they put on a great show.  Krista introduced me to Snow Patrol and I quite enjoy their second album.  They played quite a few tunes from it and the frontman, Gary Lightbody was quite the entertainer while he laid on top of amplifiers or walked around the stage trying to get the crowd into singing along.  They played all their great hits and we were all impressed by their show.  I was quite impressed when the 360 degree big screen turned on and it was quite brilliant and clear.  What a massive screen!

After Snow Patrol left the stage around 8PM, we waited until 9PM to finally hear the opening song Space Oddity (David Bowie) playing over the PA.  This was it!  The crowd was wild at that point.  Many people were trying to get in front of us.  One girl said “Our friend is right in front of you!”  I asked “What’s his name?”.  They replied “John.”.  “John!  JOHN!” I cried to the people in front of us…alas, no one turned around.  Nice try ladies.

The lights descended and it was a beautiful sight.  Let me tell you something that was extra special about this night….the roof on the Rogers Center was open.  In the history of the Rogers Center, they have only done that for one other band…Bruce Springsteen in 2003.  AC/DC couldn’t get permission, Coldplay couldn’t do it either…but when U2 comes to town…Wow!  The sight was amazing…to my right, the CN tower (which I never knew had a light show at night!  Also…someone on the U2 Interference forums indicated that the opening song had their light show synced to the CN Tower, or vice versa.  Nice!)

The band came out in a stage full of lights and smoke.  They all took their place and ripped into Breathe from their new album No Line on the Horizon.  The crowd was loving it.  I coull tell it would be a better night compared to the night before where I heard the crowd was a little mellow.

They played a string of four songs from their new album…I really enjoyed the live version of the song No Line on the Horizon.  Get on Your Boots is also a fun one even though Vero despises it!

Then the hits came…starting out with Mysterious Ways, they level of enthusiasm skyrocketed.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off the entire scene surrounding me…63,000 fans, a beautiful starry night, the CN Tower beside me and U2 in front of me!  Incroyable!

They went through a good selection from all of their albums.  Claude was quite disappointed that they cut Pride (In The Name of Love) from their set (which was quite strange as it’s a staple song from the past two decades.)

Here’s some general comments of the show:
– First time we had ever heard New Year’s Day in concert.
– Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of…acoustic…excellent.  I had a laugh when Bono was chatting away while The Edge got his guitar and mic set up and he finally said “Edge, what’s taking so long?” and it turns out that his ear-speaker hadn’t been working for the last couple of songs so they had to fix it.  Also, at one point, Bono stopped the song and asked the apartment buildings overlooking the Rogers Center to flick their lights on and off if they were watching.  Sure enough, a slew of apartments started flicking their lights on and off!  We loved it, the crowd went wild.  Imagine the view from up there!
– During City of Blinding Lights, Bono pulled up a boy from the pit and ran around with catwalk with him and lent him his glasses for awhile.  It was quite a great moment for that kid.  The newspaper had interviewed Lucas the next day and he was ecstatic!  Turns out that a woman I work with knows the kid’s parents.  Fancy that.
– The remix of I’ll Go Crazy was quite fun and different to hear.  Larry Mullen Jr. walked around the catwalk pounding his jambe drum.
– I should mention that the cooler stage device was the big screen which actually separated to form a large bee-hive cone at various parts in the show!  Also, the band had a couple of bridges linking the main stage to the catwalk.
– Walk On was an interesting ending of the main set.  They had volunteers with cut-out masks of Aung San Suu Kyi fill the catwalk.
– I personally felt that the main set ended on a down note with Walk On.  I think if they would have continued with One and Streets, it would have been killer.  But they left the stage for a few minutes, returned to play One and then played Streets.  Streets usually evokes this powerful energy in the crowd and I didn’t feel it this time around.  Something was missing.  The second encore started out awesome with Ultraviolet and Bono with his coat full of frickin’ lazer beams (!!!), ended with some killer version of With or Without You which had me yanking Joelle back over to our area and then they ended with Moment of Surrender from the new album.

All in all, while the show was quite amazing, I preferred the structure of the set lists from the previous Elevation and Vertigo tours.  The energy was lacking near the end of the show and I think if they cut out one encore and coupled One and Streets into the main set, it would have made a giant difference.  I can’t complain too much though.  It was a really, really great show and I hope that everyone out there reading this gets a chance to see them when they’ll return to North America in 2010.  I will probably go out again.  But we’ll see.

After the concert, it took us awhile to find Claude but we did, and then we headed for home.  Unfortunately for us, our trip was marred with the disaster of construction on the 401 Express Lane.  It was my own fault…I read the sign on the DVP that said “Express Lane closed for Construction.” but when we saw people entering it I said “Let’s take it!  Maybe the sign is wrong!”.  Sure enough, it was not wrong and it took us 45 minutes to crawl two kilometers while we stared at the collector lanes zooming by.

We arrived in Barrhaven around 4:30AM, picked up my car and then headed for Orleans.  5AM I snuck into the house and stayed up for awhile.  I guess my body was trying to compensate for staying up that late and my brain was saying “It’s alright, we don’t need sleep!”.  But as soon as my head hit the pillow, I slept like a baby until 3PM the next day.

Good times were had all around and I think for Vince, Krista and Ben’s first time, it was legendary.  I did manage to get a bootleg of the concert which isn’t half bad and I have a lead on a DVD of the show as well that I may pursue.

Setlist:

Breathe
No Line on the Horizon
Get on Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways
Beautiful Day
Elevation
Still Haven’t Found
Unknown Caller
New Year’s Day
Stuck In A Moment
Unforgettable Fire
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I’ll Go Crazy If I don’t Go Crazy Tonight Remix
Sunday Bloody Sunday
MLK
Walk On

Encore:

One
Streets

Encore:

Ultraviolet
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender