The biggest rock tour of the year is coming to the largest room in Minnesota.
U2's mega-scale Joshua Tree 2017 Tour — marking the 30th anniversary of the Irish rocker's MTV-era breakthrough album — will land at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on Sept. 8, part of a second leg of the ambitious trek announced Tuesday.
Tickets for the Friday night concert go on sale Monday at 10 a.m. through Ticketmaster, with fan-club pre-sale offers beginning Thursday. Prices were not made public by the promoter Live Nation, but tickets in other cities have generally been in the $35-$250 range.
Like all venues on the tour, the new Vikings football palace will feature a general-admission, standing-room-only stadium floor for the concert, tickets for which will cost $70. That configuration should push attendance up to or above the 50,000-person record so far set by Metallica last summer, should U2 sell out — and it almost certainly will.
It should be quite a test for the stadium's crew, which will need to get the field ready for some football again three nights later for the Vikings' home opener vs. the New Orleans Saints on Sept. 11, a "Monday Night Football" game. U.S. Bank Stadium is also playing host to three other big concerts before the season begins: Guns N' Roses (July 30), Coldplay (Aug. 12) and Justin Bieber (Aug. 18).
During the first Midwest dates on U2's tour last weekend — two sold-out shows at Chicago's Soldier Field — the 60,000-plus fans each night saw Bono and the boys play four songs on a small, stark thrust stage before climbing onto the massive main stage for their song-by-song live interpretation of "The Joshua Tree." Their performance of the album — inspired by their travels through America — was backed by a 200-by-45-foot, tree-adorned, high-definition video screen showing footage of the U.S. landscape.
Released in 1987, "Joshua Tree" was the album that pushed U2 into megastar status with such MTV hits as "With or Without You," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Where the Streets Have No Name." The quartet played two sold-out nights at the St. Paul Civic Center that year (Nov. 3 and 4) to support the record.
U2 skipped the Twin Cities on its 2015 arena trek, the Innocence + Experience Tour, so this will be the band's first time in town since a rain-defying date at TCF Bank Stadium on the 360˚ Tour in July 2011.
