![]() ![]() A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal. 1987’s The Joshua Tree was a record concerned with the. Adam Clayton discussed the desert influence in the following way, The desert was immensely inspirational. The album art for the record actually depicts photos of the desert. The band wanted to bring listeners into the fields, deserts and open areas of America. The wood is a harsh, rasping fibre knife blades long hard and keen fill the place of leaves the flower is greenish white and ill smelling and the fruit a cluster of nubbly pods, bitter and useless. Even following 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, few could have guessed that U2 would drop one of the greatest rock albums of all time. The ‘Joshua Tree’ album was largely inspired by the band’s tours of America. The lyrical idea came from Bono’s Amnesty-sponsored visit to the Central American countries El Salvador and Nicaragua, where he witnessed poverty and struggle. A misshapen pirate with belt boots hands and teeth stuck full of daggers is as near as I can come to a human analogy. The hardest, heaviest song on The Joshua Tree and one of the angriest of all U2’s songs, Bullet the Blue Sky put paid to any notion that U2 had gone soft. ![]() One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant. That same year, Joseph Smeaton Chase had this to say about the Joshua tree, which he wrote about in his book, California Desert Trails: In 1919, Los Angeles writer Francis M Fultz wrote about the Joshua tree in Scientific American: “Whenever I see the Joshua-Trees I think how considerate they have been in choosing to make their home where few men have a desire to live.” Ouch! Frémont of the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers was the first settler to write about the Joshua tree in 1844: “…their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.” The remains of the tree featured in the album artwork of U2's 1987 album 'The Joshua Tree' is shown with a copy of the album outside of Death Valley National Park along California State Route 190. ![]()
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