Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story
With Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, it should not be surprising that so many of his rock ’n’ roll colleagues have felt compelled to indulge their literary ambitions. The last fifteen years have seen a flurry of memoirs written by Dylan’s rock ’n’ roll cohort. The best of these books—Keith Richards’s Life (2010), Questlove’s Mo Meta Blues (2013), Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (2015), Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (2016), Elton John’s Me (2019)—all smartly play with the conventions of the musical memoir, rejecting the simple rise/fall/redemption narrative arch that makes so many memoirs and biopics of musicians feel so restrictive. At their best, these books do more than give the gossip on our favorite rock stars—what Keith really think of Mick Jagger solo records (not much) or Bruce Springsteen’s best route for driving out of New Jersey1—but instead reflect on the connection between the life of the musician and the music that so frequently enthralls us. The pleasure these books generate can be wonderfully minor—Elton John recounting a game of charades with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel where he grows increasingly angry at Dylan for failing to understand the basic rules of charades stands out as one of the best comic scenes I have read in quite some time. “One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and [Dylan] can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or syllables or what it rhymes with,” John recounts. “He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him.”2
With his wonderful gift of the gab, it is perhaps only surprising that it took Bono so long to enter the fray. The lead singer and primary lyricist of the long-running rock band U2, Bono has never exactly been the shy type. Outside of Elvis posing with Nixon, no rock star has seemed so comfortable posing with so many politicians, and Bono has perhaps set the record for the most Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction speeches given.3 A preacherly ambition propels Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, as the book chronicles U2’s forty-odd-year career, and the book’s impact hinges on your openness to Bono’s expansiveness. While no fruit is thrown at rock royalty, Surrender as a whole offers a smart and charmingly self-deprecating portrait of Bono and his three friends from Dublin as they propel themselves from scruffy post-punk band to one of the last of the great rock ’n’ roll acts, one of the few bands from their era that can stand with the Stones and the McCartneys in the cavernous sports arenas around the world. If a talking head is needed to wax poetic on America, rock ’n’ roll, debt relief, religion, sex, life, death—I am sure he has an opinion on cross-stitching—Bono is the person to turn to. At the heart of Surrender, however, is a rather sincere consideration of the intersection of religious belief and artistic inspiration. Informed by Bono’s open-heart surgery, which he underwent in 2016, Surrender is permeated by a moving sense of mortality that makes it something of a rarity in the genre of the rock star memoir. No snorting of your father’s ashes ala Keith Richards in Life. Not surprisingly, Bono discusses his long-standing Christian faith at great length in the book. Born to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, Bono largely attended the Anglican Church of lreland, with his mother and older brother (21), but as he was founding U2, Bono moved away from the traditional Church to join a Shalom prayer group, a collective that was propelled by what he identifies as the “Charismatic Renewal” that swept through both Catholic and Protestant churches in Ireland in the late 1970s. “Depending on what you believed,” Bono recalls, “you might say it was a ‘revival,’ a movement of the Holy Spirit. Gatherings took place all over Ireland where people seemed to be surrendering to their higher power in dramatic ways, the likes no one had seen before.”(137) As Bono recounts, the Shalom group was pivotal to the band’s early years—only bassist Adam Clayton refused to participate—and it almost led to the group’s demise as Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. struggled to reconcile their Christian calling with the more earthly callings of a rock band.
Early in Surrender, Bono recounts how the band almost broke up over their faith until their manager, Paul McGuinness, asked the band how “could it be possible for this God of yours to want you to break the law and not fulfill your responsibilities” to go on tour. (142) Much like the video to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” where he slinks off into the Las Vegas night with sly grin on his face, Clayton never fell under the sway of the Christian calling and struggled to understand his bandmates’ impulse to break up the band to devote their lives to Christ. The video for that song is how I will always remember the band; it played each morning as I was getting ready for third or fourth grade. The image of Clayton, cigarette in mouth and beer in hand, hopping into a cab to see what the night may bring was such a contrast to his bandmates: Bono prancing in the streets of Vegas, rolling on tops of cars and hugging every tourist in sight, Mullens looking cool but unsure, and finally, The Edge looking hopelessly bored as he strummed his acoustic guitar as he put up with all this nonsense. More than any of their albums, the video perfectly captures the contradictory impulses that, to me, make the band so interesting.4 The religious crisis in the band soon abated, but Bono’s Christian faith remains central to his music and the story that he tells in Surrender. “I, too, wanted to make music capable of carrying our own weight, even the weight of our own contradictions,” Bono writes of the aftereffects of the religious crisis that almost broke up the band. “To be ‘in the world but not of it’ was the challenge in the scriptures that would take a lifetime to figure out. As artists we were slowly uncovering paradox and the idea that we are not compelled to resolve every contradictory impulse.” (143) Punk rock and Christianity are not things usually associated with one another, but the book is in many ways as much focused on Bono’s spiritual experience as it is on his musical journey.
At the heart of Surrender, however, is a rather sincere consideration of the intersection of religious belief and artistic inspiration. Informed by Bono’s open-heart surgery, which he underwent in 2016, Surrender is permeated by a moving sense of mortality that makes it something of a rarity in the genre of the rock star memoir.
A few words before proceeding with this review. I was born in late 1977, which puts me on the tail end of Generation X, and U2 remains central to my musical education, a gateway drug of sorts into the more obscure worlds of Brian Eno, Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, and Berlin-era David Bowie. Alongside their Southern counterparts REM, U2 was the other great group from that era, who moved from indie rock (or college rock as it was called back then) during the early 1980s to more mainstream success at the end of the decade. Both bands also gained mass critical acclaim and popularity in the early nineties—REM with the release of Automatic for the People (1992) and U2 with Achtung Baby (1991). The success of those records suggested a viable way of maintaining artistic viability in the second act of a career, something that many of their idols had seemingly failed to do if they had had the luck or perseverance to stick together. Collectively, U2 and REM illustrated a way out of Neil Young’s line about “burning out or fading away”—you could reject either option and keep on making great records. Simple formula. And even when the records got a bit wobbly in the new century—here is looking at you How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) and Around the Sun (2004)—they were still interesting records, ones where their flaws ultimately made them more endearing.5 I was also a teenager when both Automatic and Achtung came out and so my impressions of both of those records are colored by how the music you listen to as a teenager tends to stick with you and inform your taste. This is all a way of confessing that I am sort of an ideal audience for a book like Surrender. While I do not spin their records with as much regularity as I did when I was in college—and there are plenty of other bands and musicians that mean much more to me now—I will always believe that U2 is one of those bands that matter.
Like the “preacher stealin’ hearts at a travellin’ show” featured in “Desire,” the lead single off the band’s (completely unfairly) maligned 1988 record Rattle & Hum, Bono has more than a bit of the evangelist in him. The memoir is not exhaustive—as a fan, I would have liked to have read more about the process behind creating The Joshua Tree (1987) or Zooropa (1993)—but it instead is expansive as Bono considers both his development as an artist and as a political activist, from campaigning against apartheid in the 1980s to advocating for debt relief for African nations. Comparing himself to the Edge, the band’s longtime guitarist and Bono’s friend from adolescence, he observes “Edge is a minimalist by nature. I am not. I am a maximalist.” (60) At over five-hundred pages, Surrender would seem to confirm Bono’s self-diagnosis as it chronicles his troubled childhood-like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bono also lost his mother as a teenager, a loss that would inform many of his lyrics, including the band’s first hit in 1980, “I Will Follow.” “Abandonment is probably the root of paranoia,” Bono confesses early in the book, considering how his mother’s death impacted his sense of the world. “John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, John Lydon, so many rock ’n’ roll singers lost their mothers at an early age. There must be something to this. A friend tells me of a parallel abandonment in hip-hop. Abandonment by the father drives that car.” (28)
Bono’s Christian faith remains central to his music and the story that he tells in Surrender. “I, too, wanted to make music capable of carrying our own weight, even the weight of our own contradictions,” Bono writes of the aftereffects of the religious crisis that almost broke up the band.
Bono, however, moves quickly from his teenaged grief to forming U2, and in the memoir he contemplates how the trauma of losing his mother propelled his artistic ambition. “The sorts of kids who write songs or poetry or paint pictures are the sorts of kids who feel too much at times,” Bono reflects a little later in Surrender. “The sorts of kids whose feelings can overpower them. In writing this now, I am brought back to the green briar and leafy trees at the edge of the school grounds in Mount Temple. I am brought back to a fretting teenager standing by the train tracks and imagining the comfort they might offer if I lay across them and gave up on hope and love.” (111) Answering a flyer posted on his school’s notice board reading, “Drummer seeks musicians to form band,” Bono finds himself in a room with David “The Edge” Evans on guitar, Adam Clayton manning bass, and Larry Mullen Jr playing drums. “How casually our destiny arrives,” Bono notes of the circumstances that led to U2 forming that day, its line-up remaining remarkably stable until Mullens had to miss the band’s recent residency at the Las Vegas Sphere as he recovered from neck surgery. Reflecting on the band’s name, Bono suggests how wonderfully random the whole gig has been: “There it is, a letter and a number, perfect to print large on a poster or a T-shirt. If I think about it as a spy plane, as in the U-2, I like it. But if I think about it as a bad pun, as in ‘you too,’ I really don’t. I don’t think I voted for it, but I certainly didn’t stop it. I’m one in four and a real rock ’n’ roll band is not run by the singer. Led maybe, not run.” (63) The band’s democratic spirit has been one of the reasons for its longevity and stability-qualities not usually associated with rock groups—and Bono is careful throughout Surrender not to probe too deeply into his bandmates’ lives or the squabbles that any band goes through.
Surrender is divided into three parts, with each chapter being attached to a U2 song.6 The first section is perhaps the most exciting, as Bono recalls the band’s early days to the band’s conquering of the United States in the aftermath of The Joshua Tree, a record inspired by their fascination with the American landscape. The latter two parts chronicle the band’s reinvention in Berlin—the sincerest of all rock bands morphing into an irony-laden rock band in the early 1990s—and then Bono’s political and philanthropic endeavors in the opening decade of the new millennium. A few surprises enter the last section of the book: Bono movingly chronicles his father’s passing and the revelation that his dad had fathered another son with his wife’s sister. On a lighter note, he recounts falling asleep in the Lincoln bedroom while visiting Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House, an episode he amusingly attributes to a wine allergy: “The president woke me up, and as I came around, I tried to laugh as hard as he and [Bono’s wife] Ali. [Obama] doesn’t for a minute believe I have this allergy. He thinks Ali made this up to cover for me. He tells people he can drink me under the table. Rubbish. But he does make a strong martini.” (469) Such episodes suggests how Bono uses the song titles as an entry point for whatever moment of his life that he wants to explore: the chapter on “Pride (In the Name of Love)” discusses Bono’s attempts to convince President George W. Bush and Republican congressional members (who knew former Republican congressman and presidential candidate John Kasich was a Radiohead fan?) to support debt cancellation for African nations; the chapter on “Until the End of the World,” the greatest rock song from the perspective of Judas Iscariot,7 has nothing to say about the song but instead relays Bono’s encounters with Mikhail Gorbachev and Angela Merkel. While the approach might be disappointing for those readers who want more insight into U2’s creative process-with a few exceptions, Bono has little to say about the actual making of the band’s records and smartly refuses to probe too deeply into the complexities of the band’s internal dynamics-the approach is largely a winning one, allowing Bono to riff on a range of subjects (punk rock8, Christianity, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland that shaped Bono’s childhood and adolescence, international politics, married life, the nature of performance).
The memoir is not exhaustive—as a fan, I would have liked to have read more about the process behind creating The Joshua Tree (1987) or Zooropa (1993)—but it instead is expansive as Bono considers both his development as an artist and as a political activist, from campaigning against apartheid in the 1980s to advocating for debt relief for African nations.
Bono in many ways is a ridiculous figure—Surrender has as many politicians in it as it does rock stars—but he possesses the right amount of self-awareness and self-deprecation that makes his engagements with global politics engaging and winning. Bono may have the gift for grandiosity, but he is charming about it, with a keen awareness of how others frequently perceive him. “Welcome to White Messiah Syndrome,” he writes late in the book as he discusses his work advocating for antipoverty policy reforms. “If you’re fronting a rock ’n’ roll band, you need a bit of a messiah complex, but such a complex is less helpful for the antipoverty activist.” (450) At its best, however, Surrender is an emotionally honest and moving read, as Bono recounts the long-standing relationships with his bandmates and his wife, Ali, whom he also met as a teenager and with whom he has been married to for over forty years and has had four children. There is a bit of wistful to the memoir’s closing chapters, as Bono considers the future, his own and those of the world. He laments the promise of the Obama years while grieving the trauma of the Trump administration. “America lives in my imagination,” Bono affirms late in the book. “The campaigning senator (sic) Obama spoke of there being no red states, no blues, on the United States, but I’ve always seen two Americas. Not a Republican one, or even a rich one and a poor, rather a real one and an imagined one. An operational America whose entrepreneurial capitalism is a changing and charging the world and a mythic America that is a poetic idea in which we have a stake.” (463) The book’s closing section, however, deals with more personal matters, as Bono considers his long relationship with his wife and their four children, his bonds with his bandmates, and his connection with his craft. Humming the Lord’s Prayer, Bono recalls momentarily encountering his “original deity, my real self behind whatever masks I am wearing to cover up fear of abandonment or loneliness. The masks of a performer who’s long believed that his insecurity has been his best security.” (542) Not the stuff of most rock bios—no thrown fruit or snorted remains—but a moment of genuine searching that reflects the sincerity, the punk rock desire for authenticity, that has made Bono and his bandmates such compelling company for the past forty decades.
