Interview With PJ And Kelly
Earlier this year, PJ and I were interviewed by Soren Porter of the online literary magazine Mocking Owl Roost, which you can find here. Thanks for your questions, Soren, and we are pleased to reprint the interview here on Achtoonbaby in a futile attempt to explain ourselves.—Kelly
Soren Porter: When did you first hear of U2?
PJ DeGenaro: As a teenager in the early 80s, I basically “did” the history of 60s and 70s rock-n-roll in a two-year spree. I have older brothers, so I had access to their records. Their taste could be questionable, but I managed to separate the wheat from the chaff. I also read lots of music magazines...so, I read about U2 long before I heard them, and I remember thinking they sounded kind of interesting, most likely because whoever had written the article was already smitten.
I first heard U2 on a commercial rock station out of New York City. The song was “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and you will have to take my word as an Official Old Person that it sounded like nothing else on earth. The martial beat, the very spare guitar that managed to sound like a laser or a tangle of outraged cats. And then those voices. It’s funny to think about now, because who hasn’t heard Bono and Edge sing together? But at the time—I mean, I was probably on my bed doing homework or something. Imagine me just dropping my pen and looking up like, What the fuck? What are these guys? How does the word “tonight” become “tooo-Niiiigh-yut?”
Anyway, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” shocked me. It annoyed me! It was unmelodic and sort of nagging. But whenever it came on the radio, I had to listen. “New Year’s Day” was the song that made me go out and buy War. And that was that. I had a new favorite band, and they changed everything. They actually changed the way I heard music.
Kelly Eddington: I didn’t know anything about U2 until cable television and MTV came to my town in the spring of 1983. I was in 8th grade, and I loved being able to watch hour after hour of music along with those odd little movies. You had Duran Duran in glamorous places like Sri Lanka, Prince doing the splits and singing about sex, and David Bowie being some kind of alien clown on the beach. And then you had a little band called U2 playing a sort of religious-seeming song on a depressing brown barge somewhere.
Soren: What drew you to the music? How was this different from other musical acts at the time?
Kelly: That year U2 became inescapable on MTV thanks to three videos. Along with the depressing brown barge video, there was the one where they were performing live in the rain and they had that singer with the weird name who was kind of hopping from one foot to the other. Then they were all bundled up and riding those slobbery horses and looking really not-sexy and colorless in the snow. But wait a minute. Okay, there is a little color on that singer: part of his hair is kind of yellow (weird), and his nose and his cheeks and his mouth are red from the cold, and he has those blue eyes. Those...really really blue eyes. And that song? Yeah. You know what? That song is kinda great.
Soren: At what point did you realize that U2 was going to be something more than just another band, and something that changed your life?
PJ: I was in college when The Unforgettable Fire came out. By that point I had begun listening to a Long Island commercial radio station (the late great WLIR) that played what they called “new music”—basically anything that fell under the punk/new wave/college rock umbrella. I could write an essay about that station, but I won’t. Suffice it to say they played “Pride” nonstop for weeks. But for me, and probably for a lot of other people, the life-changing song was “Bad.” Don’t think about the LiveAid version or any other performance of “Bad” you might have heard. You have to imagine listening to The Unforgettable Fire for the first time, in your bedroom at night, and hearing the studio version.
I believe I’ve had a couple of bouts of mild clinical depression. They each lasted a long time and were really hard to shake off. And I’m the kind of person who will say, “This is depression, and as long as I know what it is, I’m not going to go see some dumb counselor or anything.” Genius, right? Anyway, I was kind of slipping into this in 1984-85, and when I heard Bono sing that he was wide awake, not sleeping, I just chose to believe him. I mean, I chose to believe that he was out there somewhere in the world, not sleeping, and sort of watching over me. Or at least, acknowledging me. I don’t think I was wrong. Talk to any U2 fan, and you’ll find this weird sense of mutual protection. This band has our backs. And we have theirs.
Kelly: For a few years, U2 was one of those “I’m aware of your work” bands. U2 was the nice boy in class who wasn’t as flashy as the cool guys I had crushes on, but we’d say hi in the halls and sit by each other at lunch sometimes. I was a senior in high school when The Joshua Tree was released, and what do you know? Looks like the nice boy had one hell of a growth spurt over the summer!
U2 has created musical touchstones every few years for the duration of my entire adolescent-to-adult life, and how special and rare is that? I’ve evolved, and they’ve evolved, and I’ve always been interested in what they’re up to because the music they create becomes an important chunk of my life’s soundtrack. They are about ten years older than I am, so their music also provides a glimpse into the future for me. I think U2 really began to get under my skin when I was beginning my first teaching job. I was overworked and isolated from people my own age, and, as usual, U2 were there for me. In their absolute prime. And that’s when we got married.
Soren: When did you two meet?
PJ: Kelly and I “met” on Tumblr about six years ago. You are allowed to look for her blog, which is mostly her art and nothing too embarrassing. (You may not look for my blog.) I’m not sure who followed whom first. I just remember I was thrilled to find her there, because I’d been admiring her from afar for years! A woman who does funny cartoons about her favorite rock band? Is that even allowed? That was exactly the kind of thing I liked to do when I was a teenager, but I figured my art professors would dismiss it out of hand. So to find a woman of my own generation who actually felt free to do this weird fan thing—and to do it so brilliantly!—was a huge deal. I’ve come to believe that fan art, fan fiction, and anything anyone creates as a result of fandom is actually a work of radical love and should not be set below other art forms.
Anyway, we started chatting, realized that we were pretty close in age, and just in love with U2 in a similarly idiosyncratic way. We’ve been talking almost every single day since then. We met for the first time in real life at AtU2s “U240” celebration at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2016. I was a nervous wreck, like I was going on a blind date or something. (Not exactly, of course, but a similar stress level!) We watched Rattle And Hum in a movie theater that first night, and it was just a blast.
Kelly: Achtoon Baby was originally a one-panel cartoon created by Jo Whitby. It was published monthly on AtU2 during the site’s early years in the late 90s. The ones I remember were drawn with ink and colored pencil. Way back in November 2002, AtU2 announced that Jo was going to retire, and they were looking for someone to replace her. My little tribe of online U2 pals encouraged me to try out for this non-paying but fun-sounding gig. So I did, and I got the job.
I worked happily at AtU2 creating watercolor-based U2 humor for almost eighteen years, right up until the final days of the site in October 2020. The title of the comic was something I inherited. I don’t know the story behind it, and to be honest, I’ve never been crazy about it. But I’m stuck with it! I’m like Larry Mullen, who famously said, “Achtung Baby? I can barely say the bloody words.”
I was overjoyed when PJ joined AtU2, albeit just as the site entered its death throes. During this period of upheaval, things were not always easy for her as an essayist and news writer. While I had complete creative control over my cartoon, it was tough to always have to rely on other people to post my work for me (an insane, 19-step process on a website whose clunky backend reminded me of a Soviet-era washing machine).
In our chats, PJ and I had been low-key dreaming about a website where we could take all the things we loved about working for AtU2 and leave behind everything we didn’t. When it became apparent that it was only a matter of time before AtU2 would disappear forever, taking with it nearly two decades of my work, I knew I had to create a new home for it. And instead of just creating an archive, why not make that feminist fangirl U2 website PJ and I had been dreaming about?
Soren: What is your long-term vision for Achtoon Baby?
PJ: I want to keep writing about U2 for as long as Kelly wants to keep the site going. As we say on the “Kelly & PJ” page, we want this to be an “online zine with a feminist/fangirl point of view.” We’ve both observed that the most vocal music fans tend to be men, and that men tend to sublimate the more personal aspects of fandom into activities like obsessive collecting and “rating.” Kelly can speak to her own experience, but for me, if I love the music, I can’t help but love the artist. And as a woman of the “into men” persuasion, this can be, you know, a bit of a thing, which makes the pursuit of a good spot in general admission that much more important. As long as I can find interesting ways to write about that, I’ll do it.
Kelly: When AtU2 folded, I knew I wasn’t ready to stop making cartoons about U2. (And they’ve never really been proper cartoons, by the way. I call Achtoonbaby.com “the U2 art project that attempts to be amusing.”) I wanted to give my old and future Achtoons a colorful, lighthearted home. And I am such a fan of PJ’s writing—and artwork! PJ can draw, too!
I knew we would have a blast being our feminist, fangirl selves on a site where we could create artwork and jokes and poetry and PopMart gif parades to our hearts’ content. Additionally, a couple of fake rock legends have joined us with a column that answers their fans’ burning questions. PJ and I are ecstatic to have Fake Bono and Fake Edge on board.
Fan sites tend to be either curatorial or transformative. Curatorial sites concentrate on stats, collections, news, setlists, rumors, and trivia, and they’re often male-oriented. Transformative sites create and challenge the source material (in our case, U2) through things like fan art, podcasts, essays, fan fiction, cosplay, humor, poetry, and whatever you’d call a 1400-word ode to Edge’s bone structure, for example. These sites tend to be non-male-oriented, and while there’s plenty of room for overlap between curatorial and transformative content on fan sites, Achtoon Baby is gleefully transformative.
As far as I’m concerned, I plan to create original U2 content for at least as long as the band stays together, assuming I can continue to handle the workload. Painting is a physical skill. Right now, I have the hands of a surgeon, but I do not take them for granted. PJ’s presence on the site makes this work so much more fun and less like I’m screaming into the void. Praise from her means the world to me and keeps me going. We love working as a team, and we appreciate our readers’ feedback so much. While Achtoon Baby does not enjoy the same number of readers that AtU2 did, we truly do not care because our Twitter and Instagram audiences make us feel loved and appreciated, and we thank them very much for that.
Soren: Favorite U2 Album?
PJ: You know, it’s really hard to pick a favorite. It changes. I’ve grown up with this band and each record has its own particular associations—a relationship, an apartment, a job, a friend, a loss, a birth. But if you held me at gunpoint, I’d probably say Achtung Baby.
Kelly: Achtung Baby, although this is an unfair question.
Soren: Favorite U2 tour/concert?
PJ: This is complex because, while I always listened to my U2 records and always considered them my favorite band, I didn’t see much of them for years. Decades, even. My first U2 show was in New Jersey on the original Joshua Tree tour. I had dreadful seats, I couldn’t see; I could barely hear! And I just wasn’t feeling it. So I foolishly decided to stick with bands I could see in small venues.
This all changed with the Songs Of Innocence phone controversy and Bono’s bicycle accident. I think there’s a connection there. I was so angry about the public reaction to SOI, and then I was so upset about Bono. On top of which I’d just moved my mother into assisted living, and I realized that I couldn’t take U2’s—or my own—continued existence for granted anymore. So I went all out to see them multiple times in 2015, 2017, and 2018. My favorite show—apart from the ones I saw with Kelly, because being at a show with someone who feels just the way you do is the best—was at Nassau Coliseum on June 9, 2018. This was the E+I tour. I was on the e-stage rail and Bono spotted me during “Elevation,” and that is all you need to know. (The man owns my heart.)
Kelly: ZooTV would have been incredible to witness, but alas, the band pulled out of playing a show at my university, and I was unable to go to any of the others. But I have watched ZooTV: Live From Sydney so many times that I might as well have been there. And other than the shows I’ve seen with PJ, which were their own unique blasts, including the Apollo in 2018, my favorite U2 concert was in Portland during the Vertigo tour. Like PJ, my first U2 concert had me sitting in the next-to-the-last row in the United Center (Chicago). It never quite took off, and when it was over, I felt like I could only appreciate them in recorded form. Six months later, a freak ice storm kept me trapped in Portland, where I was miraculously granted a ticket with general admission ellipse access. As I stood fifteen feet away from Adam Clayton that night, I saw the light.
Soren: Which album do you feel is the most overlooked and underappreciated?
PJ: How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. I think people see it as a companion to All That You Can’t Leave Behind, but it’s quite different. It’s almost a precursor to Songs Of Experience, in that a lot of it takes the form of messages to friends and relatives. I never get through it without crying. “Original of the Species” is a song that deserves a lot more love and attention.
Kelly: Pop is a masterpiece. Pop forever, man!
Soren: Favorite(s) band/artist that isn't U2?
PJ: Nine Inch Nails. I sometimes feel like Trent Reznor is Bono on the other side of the looking glass. Don’t get me started. Also: R.E.M., Patti Smith.
Kelly: Prince inspires so much of what I do. I’m sorry, U2. You know I adore you, but you stole his Grammy for best album. As much as it pains me to say it, Sign o’ the Times > The Joshua Tree.
Soren: Any advice for people who are interested in starting projects deeply rooted in fandom but are unsure of what to do with it?
PJ: If you love something, and it inspires you, just do something. Do anything. Pick up a pen or start typing. You have no idea what’s brewing in your soul until you get started. You will surprise yourself. Tumblr is a silly place, but it’s a great resource for fandom. Some of the art and literature I’ve found there is brilliant, and many times it’s based on a TV show or a movie that I wouldn’t even have thought about otherwise.
Kelly: I think most fandoms can be broken down into two factions: fans who consume and fans who create. U2’s consumer fans are the ones who express their devotion by attending as many shows as possible and amassing enormous collections. Periods of band inactivity are difficult for them because they have all of this love and nowhere to put it. Creative fans always have somewhere to put it, so the years of band downtime are not as bleak. I live in the middle of nowhere. Traveling to multiple shows is a hardship for me, so I saw only two dates on the last tour. For a superfan, that’s not many! But at the same time, I consoled myself with this idea: I don’t have to see them as much because I can make them. I can paint a Bono so uncanny he gives me chills. If you can pour your love into a fandom-related project, believe me, the kick you get from it can definitely be as good as buying something and almost as good as seeing the real thing. And you just might make other people happy with it, too!
Soren: What is the most important memory you have related to AtU2 and Achtoon Baby?
Kelly: In April 2018, AtU2’s Sherry Lawrence wanted me to create a sort of last-minute picture for the Experience + Innocence kickoff party the site was planning. This would take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I think Sherry made greeting cards from it and gave them to attendees. I was unable to go to the tour opener, so when Sherry asked me to paint a cartoony interpretation of “Love Is All We Have Left” for her, I said I’d do it as long as she got Bono to sign this throwaway painting for me, haha, total joke. Well, somehow she made that happen, and when he autographed my work, Bono said, “Oh, that’s so cool. Isn’t that brilliant?” Sherry FedExed the picture to me along with the Sharpie he used. Needless to say, all of this blew my mind.
A close second: two of my U2 paintings are now part of The Little Museum of Dublin’s permanent collection, and my fan art has been shown in actual museums, including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Finally: validation for my beyond-geeky hobby!