Coffee For Two Blog: The Toll, “Jonathan Toledo”

At the Coffee For Two Blog, Dan Seeger looks back 30 years to The Toll's debut:

I think of the nineteen-eighties as a time when any band that sounded even the slightest bit like R.E.M. could get a record deal and a concerted push on college radio. I tend to forget that the smash success of The Joshua Tree, released in 1987, rejiggered the algorithm, at least for a little bit. Any band that evoked the anthemic propulsion of U2 (even those that had been around for a bit) could get the brightest spotlight turned on them. The Toll made music that was earnest, political, guitar-driven, and, yes, a little pompous. Surely Geffen had visions of the band planting their boots squarely in the footprints laid out by Bono and the boys. 

The label must have been incredibly confident in the Toll’s prospect for U2-level success. That’s the simplest explanation for the pure bravado of releasing “Jonathan Toledo” as an introductory single. It ran over ten minutes and included a lengthy spoken word interlude railing against historic and ongoing cruelty against Native Americans. Geffen didn’t really trim it down, either. Aside from the mini-epics Michael Jackson was allowed to deliver, the “Jonathan Toledo” music video evidently set a record for the longest clip added to the MTV rotation.