U2 to play open first post Katrina NFL game in New Orleans with Green Day.. 9/25

[John]

I'm a huge U2 fan and thought I'd pass this along to anyone who's interested...

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/lagniappe/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_lagniappe/archives/2006_09.html

Thursday, September 14, 2006 

U2, Green Day to help reopen the Dome
By Jeff Duncan and Keith Spera
Staff writers

The pre-game show for the first post-Hurricane Katrina football game in the Superdome will feature two of the most popular and acclaimed rock bands in the world: U2 and Green Day, performing together publicly for the first time.

The bands will share top billing with Reggie Bush and Michael Vick when the Saints open their home season against the Atlanta Falcons on Sept. 25, a homecoming after Hurricane Katrina caused tens of millions of dollars in damages to the Dome and displaced the Saints for the 2005 season.


“This is New Orleans doing things on a world-wide level,” said JazzFest producer Quint Davis, an organizer of the pre-game festivities. “U2 and Green Day together – I’ve never heard of such a thing. It’s a steppingstone in reclaiming, in a positive way, a space and a place from the annals of horror.”

The bands are part of a nightlong extravaganza built around the game, featuring live music, entertainment and children’s activities, National Football League officials announced Thursday.

Gameday festivities will begin at 3 p.m. with a free football festival on the ramparts outside the Dome that will include “The NFL Experience,” the league’s interactive theme park featuring participatory games and displays. Pre-game entertainment includes the Rebirth and Storyville brass bands and the GooGoo Dolls. The GooGoo Dolls are expected to perform their anthem “Better Days,” with a chorus that proclaims “tonight’s the night the world begins again.”

The official re-opening of the Dome will begin at 5:30 p.m. The first people allowed to enter the Dome will be 150 first-responders from Gulf Coast search and rescue teams.

Local favorites Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas are slated to sing the national anthem. Former President George H. Bush will preside over the coin toss.

The pregame festivities also will feature a kabuki drop — a large curtain drop from a hanging rod — to honor 150 first-responders who participated in relief efforts during Katrina.

Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and his successor, Roger Goodell, and Gov. Kathleen Blanco are among the dignitaries scheduled to attend the game.

It will be broadcast to a national television audience on ESPN’s “Monday Night Football.” The last Monday night broadcast at the Dome was Dec. 17, 2001, when the St. Louis Rams defeated the Saints 34-21.

“The Gulf Coast experienced the Super Bowl of all natural disasters last fall, and working with the Saints, ESPN and SMG, we look forward to bringing Super Bowl-like pregame festivities to help re-open the Superdome,” said Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s director of corporate communications. “We recognize that this transcends a football game. We’re working with all facets of the Saints’ organization to make sure that it’s a great opening.”

Davis credits the NFL in general, and Tagliabue in particular, with elevating the significance of the game and its associated entertainment to near Super Bowl levels.

“The reopening of the Dome has so much symbolic importance,” Davis said. “This is another thing like Mardi Gras and JazzFest that will make the entire world sit up, take notice and look at New Orleans. If you want to cleanse the spirit of the Dome and bring people back in, this is a pretty damn good way to do it.”

Fans will want to be in their seats early enough for the special Green Day/U2 collaboration.

Details are subject to change, but the plan is for Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong to open the show on the floor of the Dome with “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a track from the band’s most recent CD, “American Idiot.”

Then Green Day and U2 will jointly render the 1978 post-punk rave-up “The Saints Are Coming,” followed by U2’s “Beautiful Day” – the song the Saints had already planned to use as the theme music for their pre-game warm-up video throughout the season.

“The Saints Are Coming” is an appropriate choice for the U2/Green Day summit. As first recorded by the Scottish punk band The Skids, the lyrics allude to salvation and determination in the face of floodwaters. The chorus – “the Saints are coming!” – takes on a whole new relevance in the context of the team and figures to become an anthem in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Producer Bob Ezrin, the studio wizard who crafted Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and other classic albums, is writing horn arrangements so New Orleans brass band musicians can play along with U2 and Green Day. Dozens of second-line marchers are also expected to participate.

Plans for the performance only came together in late August. Ken Ehrlich, producer of the Grammy Awards telecast, is producing the pre-game show in association with Davis’ Festival Productions Inc. The two last collaborated on the “From the Big Apple to the Big Easy” benefit concert last September at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

U2 is no stranger to the Dome. The band played a poorly attended show there in November 1997 during its “PopMart” tour. They returned as the halftime entertainment for Super Bowl XXXVI in February 2002. During a pre-game press conference, the band joked about how much larger the crowd would be for Super Bowl than the “PopMart” show.

Since Katrina, U2 guitarist The Edge has made two trips to New Orleans, as he, Bob Ezrin and Gibson Guitar chairman Henry Juszkiewicz established their Music Rising charity to assist Gulf Coast musicians.

Edge first toured Katrina’s destruction last fall. The visit included a dinner at Restaurant August with Quint Davis, where they discussed the possibility of U2 performing at JazzFest.

The full band didn’t make it, but The Edge showed up for the first weekend of the 2006 JazzFest. He collaborated with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on a jazzy cover of U2’s “Vertigo,” then sat in with both the New Birth Brass Band and the Dave Matthews Band at the Fair Grounds.

At the time, he reiterated his commitment to helping New Orleans and the city’s musicians recover.

“I get a sense that there’s progress, but I’m in no doubt that there’s still a hell of a lot to do,” Edge said in April. “We’re going to continue doing what we can to try and support the musicians and the music, getting it back.”

Music Rising has reportedly provided instruments and other aid to more than 2,000 musicians. The second phase of the program extends assistance to churches and schools.

RealNetworks’ online Rhapsody digital music service will stream the U2/Green Day performance live from the Dome, then sell downloads, with net proceeds earmarked for Music Rising.

a couple of pics from a trip we took to NO in June of last year just a few weeks before Katrina:



and I've wondered if this was still there: