Alright, this will sound crazy, but that’s okay:

Any true U2 fan has their favorite live recordings of the band, right? U2 has always allowed for free trading of their shows among their fans since day one. But what are the very BEST live recordings of U2, from their early days (since they became U2 in 1978 up through their Love Town Tour in 1989)? Good question, right? There is a great book called U2 Live: A Concert Documentary , which attempts to document all of their live shows, but it doesn’t provide much detail on which ones were recorded for posterity. Then their is the For Love or Money website, which is an archive of U2 bootlegs throughout the years, but it doesn’t provide much in terms of the BEST from the hundreds of recordings available. So our mission is clear:
FIND THE TOP 40 BEST LIVE RECORDINGS OF U2 FROM 1978 to 1990.

While we would like to believe that Aimee and I are some of the biggest fans of U2 this side of the Mississippi (or at least in Wisconsin), we would never pretend to represent the millions of U2 fans across the globe who have made U2’s music an important part of their lives. The only way our list can be legit is to solicit these fans and get their top 10 favorite live recordings and compile the results - QUICKLY.

For the next three weeks (until Sunday, Sept. 11th), we want to know what every U2 fan’s Top 10 live recordings are, ranked from 1 to 10, focusing only on the 1978 to 1990 recorded performances. Obviously, fans of our little radio station know that is the era we have focused all of our music and media recordings on. Then mark your calendars for September 23, 24 & 25th. Starting on Friday, September 23rd we will start to play EACH of the 40 best concerts, in their ENTIRETY, ending with number one live recording on Sunday Sept. 25th. Why is that day important? Well, we have tickets to see U2 in Milwaukee that day! When we go to Milwaukee we will be bringing 500 DVD-ROMs with us (plus a few dozen 80sAirwaves t-shirts). Our goal is to create a 4 DVD-Rom set of U2’s Top 40 live performances (10 shows per disc) and give those away randomly to obvious U2 fans attending that nights show. We will also reserve a few sets for those who help us acquire any shows we might be missing (lossless only - no mp3 sourced material).

We’ll provide more details on how we expect to give all these away, once we confirm this with the Bradley Center and U2’s management company in NY. But the most important thing we need now is the opinion of EVERY U2 FAN IN THE WORLD: Send us your top 10 favorite live recordings, from 1978 to 1990. Is it the Boston Tapes from May 6, 1983 or Rock’s Hottest Ticket in Chicago 1987? Don’t forget the New Years Night in Dublin (Dec. 31, 1989). If you don’t have 10, send us three or five or just your one favorite. Email us at feedback@80sAirwaves.com and put U2 TOP 10 in the subject. Please try and include as much detail about the recordings as possible (date/location/source/name) and please rank them - we need to know which is number one and which is number 10!

For the next few Sunday’s we’ll be posting updates on our website to let people know where the results stand in terms of votes and favs, but we need to start TODAY. Send us your list NOW!!

-pjc

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2005 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.