After the Bodie shoot they drove toward Joshua Tree National Monument, along the way they stopped at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Monument (also a National Park today) and shot the cover photograph, then on Highway 190 just outside Death Valley they saw a lone Joshua Tree in the distance, it was then that the band began thinking of The Joshua Tree as a possible name for the album. Steve says the end photos for The Joshua Tree were the result of a “happy accident”, we had stopped and shot at a ghost town in Nevada (actually Bodie, California), and their photographer, Anton Corbijn wanted to shoot at Joshua Tree National Monument (now a National Park) next. According to the designer of the album sleeve, Steve Averill, the band rented a coach in Reno, Nevada, at the time the cover was shot, The Joshua Tree album was tentatively titled “The Two Americas” with another alternate name being “The Desert”, the band wanted to capture the part of the United States where “nature and industrialization meet”.
The band U2 were aware of the mythology of the Mojave Desert, this is part of the reason they used it as a backdrop to their album. They well knew of the story of Gram Parsons and how he died, his body was stolen and burned, all centered in the Mojave Desert, link. Later they would return to film videos in Los Angeles and Las Vegas after the album was released. Let’s start with what we know for sure, in 1987 U2 released an album called “The Joshua Tree”, before the album was released they traveled from Reno to Joshua Tree with a few stops in between to take pictures. This blog, The Mojo on the Mojave is about things that are located or happening in the Mojave Desert, part of this story lies outside the Mojave’s reaches but we will touch on the entire bus trip that the Irish rock band U2 took before they released the album that was destined to be called “The Joshua Tree”, we will mainly focus on the portions of that trip that lie within the Mojave Desert. Let’s Trek Across The Mojave And Find Out About Their “Harmony”
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