People were wearing their jackets when we started out in Bodie. We deliberately made it look warmer than it actually was. When we were shooting the actual Joshua Tree shot that’s in the center gatefold, it was actually very early in the morning, and it was cold, but it was a very still, quiet kind of cold. We shot in November and we knew it was going to be cold, but I didn’t think it was going to be that extreme, or get as hot. It was kind of a weird experience to have that change of weather in such a short period of time, you know? It was basically freezing with snow on the ground, and within 24 hours, we were in the baking sun in the desert. So we set up a route plan to follow to go see which ones - which locations - were the most interesting. We were in Reno first, and then we went to Bodie in Nevada and shot for a day - a very interesting place to shoot. And initially, Anton Corbijn, the photographer, went out a week ahead of us on location scouting, and he checked all the locations he photographed. Going there really came out of discussion of the music and what the direction was. We wanted to find places where nature and civilization met. It made you realize the size and scope of America.
Steve Averill: This was my first time in the States, and it was fairly incredible. Mike Mettler: What was your initial reaction to being in the Western part of the United States? There’s no doubt that, in this case, U2 found exactly what they were looking for. It was an iconic tree in itself, but it didn’t even know that it was.” And now it’s become one with the good earth of all God’s Country.ĭuring my call to his office in Dublin, Ireland, Averill also talked about how they came across these storied locations, the quite deliberate typographical choices, and a not-so-hidden “surprise” that’s in the iconic gatefold shot. “I saw a shot of it online – it actually keeled over and died. “The tree has fallen down since we were there, yes,” confirms Averill. And, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the fabled tree is no longer with us. Averill, Corbijn, and U2 collectively felt the cover photo of just the band and the landscape was more appropriate for where the music was going. The iconic Joshua Tree itself appears to the right of the band on the back cover and also directly between them in the middle of the inside gatefold shot. It made you realize the size and scope of America.” That whole area, the valley, was fairly incredible. The American landscape is quite different from where we had been shooting in Ireland, that’s for sure. That landscape is weird, you know? It’s kind of lunar. The cover was actually shot at Zabriskie Point, says Averill: “We were up high where the telescopes are, and we walked into the dry bed where the rainfall goes. (You can see some of his more historical handiwork in the “iNNOCENCE” portion of the current iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour book.) “My intention was to give a Sergio Leone/John Ford kind of feel to it by using a shot where the band was off to the left as opposed to being in the center.”
“What I was trying to do with the way we shot the pictures and framed the cover was to suggest the landscape vision and cinematic approach that was taken to the recording,” explains Averill, who continues to work with the band to this day. The black-and-white widescreen cover shot of the band in the foreground with such majestic valley terrain behind them was – and still is – quite a stark image to behold. The Biblical side of it all, and being in America, resonated with Bono and everybody else in the band, so that became the title.” “The title came up during the journey, an idea Anton had to go to Joshua Tree National Park. “It originally had the working title The Two Americas,” Averill reveals. That wasn’t always the name of the record, though. The whole idea, the theme, was desert and ghost towns,” says cover designer and art director Steve Averill about the iconic late-1986 shoot that begat the indelible images used for the band’s mega-multiplatinum 1987 watershed album, The Joshua Tree(Island/UMe). “We wanted to find places where nature and civilization met. When the Irish band U2 began work on their fifth album in 1986, they had one destination in mind to capture the accompanying visual: the American West as personified by the Coachella Valley in Southern California.