U2’s climb since the beginning of the ’80s was a steady one, but 1987’s The Joshua Tree catapulted them from mere superstardom into the pantheon. After years of hearing how his stage presence was magnetic and borderline messianic, Bono dropped any pretense that this was anything but his sole intention. These were open-air songs built to be played for 70,000 people at a time. Lucky for them, it just so happened that’s how big their audiences were at this point. In a 2017 interview with Zane Lowe, Bono described what made the tour’s opening song, “Where the Streets Have No Name”, so majestic. “What’s powerful about it is that it’s an invocation where you say to a crowd of people, whether there’s a hundred or a hundred thousand, ‘Do you want to go to that place?’” he said. “‘The place of imagination, the place of soul, do you want to go there?’ And when you say that, the hairs go up on the back of my neck. Because you’re going.” While the sets featured all the songs from The Joshua Tree at one point or another, the band used their moment to introduce newcomers to deep cuts like “Trash, Trampoline, and the Party Girl” and the immortal “Out of Control”, along with a steady smattering of classic-rock covers that fit the cycle’s America-fuck-yeah vibe. Nearly a decade after they started making intimate clubs feel like football stadiums, they were now making football stadiums feel like intimate clubs.