Sometimes I Wish I Were a Bigger Football Fan

It doesn't happen very often, but every now and again, I miss something because I don't follow football more closely. On Monday, it happened again. No, of course I knew the Superdome was opening for the first time since Katrina. I had mixed feelings about that--you can't deny that a big, dynamic display of progress is a very good thing, but I wonder if the spectacle is so huge that those of us in other parts of the country can simply file New Orleans away as "back to normal" even though great swaths of the city remain in ruins.

But I'm not writing to ruminate about the double-edged sword of Monday Night Football. Before the game, U2 teamed with Green Day, and one of the covers they performed was a song from Skids, one of the great lost bands of the second wave of punk. Skids featured Richard Jobson as frontman and Stuart Adamson on guitar, and they did three powerful albums together at the end of the '70s. The albums seem to come in and out of availability on CD, but they're worth keeping an eye out for. All three are worth getting, but they get progressively better, so start with The Absolute Game, and if you like that, move back in time to Days in Europa, and finally pick up Scared to Dance (or you can get a compilation, which gives you tasty bites from each album). One thing to watch out for, though, is an ill-conceived folk album called Joy that Jobson put out under the Skids name after Adamson left to form Big Country.

Nowadays, Richard Jobson writes and directs films. Stuart Adamson, sadly, took his own life about five years ago.

The Skids song that U2 and Green Day played was the undeniably appropriate "The Saints Are Coming," a single from the first album, Scared to Dance. They also recorded a studio version that you can get at Rhapsody, where it's on sale as charity single for Music Rising, an organization started by The Edge to help replace musical instruments lost in the Gulf hurricanes.