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‘Imagine’ was the first really powerful thing to you?

Imagine and Bob Dylan. “Blowin’ in the Wind”—all that stuff—and the folksy thing. Which is, I suppose, what set me up for John Lennon.

Dylan set you up for John Lennon?

Because it’s folk. If you’re interested in folk, in words and whisperings, that quiet thing. I was in my room listening on headphones on a tape recorder. It’s very intimate. It’s like talking to somebody on the phone, like talking to John Lennon on the phone. I’m not exaggerating to say that. This music changed the shape of the room. It changed the shape of the world outside the room; the way you looked out the window and what you were looking at.

I remember John singing “Oh My Love.” It’s like a little hymn. It’s certainly a prayer of some kind—even if he was an atheist. “Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes can see/I see the wind/Oh, I see the trees/Everything is clear in our world.” For me it was like he was talking about the veil lifting off, the scales falling from the eyes. Seeing out the window with a new clarity that love brings you. I remember that feeling.

Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, “You are John’s son.” What an amazing compliment!

About the band, you said, “We come from punk.” What does that mean?

Now it’s 1976. I was in school. It was the obnoxious-teenager phase. Schoolwork’s gone to shit, angry, living at home with two men. My friends are all gonna have big futures, ’cause they’re very clever. I’m probably not gonna be able to concentrate enough to be that clever.

I’ve always had these melodies in my head. In quiet times—at the local club, in a church hall—if I’m beside a piano, I put my finger on a key. I figured that if I press a pedal under that—boom—this note can fill the whole hall. Reverb, you know. It turns this church into a cathedral. I hear a rhyme for the note in my head—I really do. I can find another note that sounds good with it—but I’ve had no way to express it.

Then a note appears from this kid twenty-nine years ago last Saturday. Like really a kid—he’s fourteen, and I’m sixteen. He wants to start a band. He plays the drums. So my friend Reggie Manuel says, “You have to go.” He puts me on the back of his motorcycle, and he takes me out to this suburban house, where Larry Mullen lives. Larry is in this tiny kitchen, and he’s got his drum kit set up. And there’s a few other boys. There’s Dave Evans [Edge]—a kinda brainy-looking kid—who’s fifteen. And his brother Dick—even brainier-looking—who’s built his own guitar. He’s a rocket scientist—a card-carrying genius.

Larry starts playing the kit—it’s an amazing sound, just hit the cymbal. Edge hit a guitar chord which I’d never heard on electric guitar. I mean, it is the open road. Kids started coming from all around the place—all girls. They know that Larry lives there. They’re already screaming; they’re already climbing up the door. He was completely used to this, we discover, and he’s taking the hose to them already. Literally, the garden hose. And so that starts. Within a month I start going out with Ali [his future wife]. I mean, I had met her before, but I ask her out.

That was a good month.

Yes, a very good month. What’s interesting is, in the months leading up to this, I was probably at the lowest ebb in my life. I was feeling just teenage angst. I didn’t know if I wanted to continue living—that kind of despair. I was praying to a God I didn’t know was listening.

Were you influenced by punk rock then?

No, this has nothing to do with punk. This is September of ’76. Punk has just started in London that summer. Adam [Clayton] goes to London the next summer. London was burning. And he comes back with the Stranglers, the Jam, the Clash. Oddly enough, though, in our very first rehearsals, we were talking about what music we should play. Everyone got to make suggestions. I wanted to play the Rolling Stones, from the High Tide and Green Grass era, and the Beach Boys. I was getting