There’s nothing like a band on top of its game to energize a city.

“We needed that,” said Tom Tewskbury of Cockeysville after the show. “It was a real kick in the ass for the city. Not just from a revenue perspective, but for our psyche.”

The 97th show of the U2360 tour was a mesmerizing blitzkrieg of rock-and-roll and digital technology, from the first note to the last on Wednesday night in the M&T Bank “of Dublin” Stadium. As hot as it was during the day, the band provided a searing evening performance, amidst an intermittent summer breeze.

It was an aerial display that Joe Flacco would’ve been proud of.

Opening with a raucous “Even Better than the Real Thing,” the band transported us back to their November 1991 release, “Achtung Baby” and stayed there with three more songs in succession from an album that was recorded in Berlin as the wall came down.

“The Fly,” “Mysterious Ways” and “Until the End of the World” put us all in a 20-year time warp.

During “The Fly,” the camera video projected a black-and-white Bono as DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, as he delivered the lines, “Every artist is a criminal/Every poet is a thief.”

Running on all cylinders from the opening gun, the Dublin gang held Charm City in a thrall, performing 24 songs in more than two-and-a-half hours.

They played with reckless abandon underneath what looked like the four-legged underside of the lunar module. At times, the appendages glowed red and crab-like. It’s best described by the Bowie song which introduces the show, “A Space Oddity.”

Smalltimore rose to its feet, danced, jumped, sang and planted its flag on the U2 planetary landscape.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the experience from start to finish,” said Nicole Kendzejeski of Perry Hall.

“I Am Grateful To Be Here”

Without the histrionics of Mick Jagger or the remoteness of Sting, the accessible – and, at times, humble-sounding – Bono commanded the stage with power and grace. He wove his activism throughout the evening, thanking the crowd for raising awareness about world hunger and AIDS and helping to free the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi last fall.

“Maryland, sweet Maryland… I am grateful to be here,” said Bono.

Almost effortlessly, The Edge scaled up his sound and overflowed the stadium bowl with electronically enhanced riffs, on several occasions to the point of frenzy. He employed a lavish array of axes including a Rickenbacker, Stratocasters, a Telecaster and Gibsons galore – a Les Paul, an Explorer, and an acoustic Hummingbird – to generate his ringing guitar harmonies.

“For a small band of only four players, that’s a lot of sound,” said Carlo Perry of Brooklyn, New York. “And the camera work, it’s like you’re watching a perfectly shot video as it happens.”

There were some surprises. “Beautiful Day” included a video appearance from Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of wounded congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. “It’s a beautiful day, Baltimore,” he said.

The song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” morphed briefly into Springsteen’s “Promised Land” with Bono ending the transition by saying, “Alright, Clarence.” It was just one of the occasions Bono took to pay tribute to Clarence Clemons, the legendary saxophonist from Springsteen’s E Street Band who died last week. Bono invoked his name again prior to the evening’s last song, “Moment of Surrender.”

Among the highlights of the evening was a blistering mid-set “Vertigo,” which augmented an already peaking energy level. It included a cylindrical LED waterfall of cubist imagery, interspersed with the movements of band members. The powerful transition from “Amazing Grace” into “Streets Have No Name” also created a boost of adrenaline that coursed through the body like a rocket lifting off.

Borrowing from the parlance of Spinal Tap, it appeared that the U2 amplifiers could achieve “11” at will.

Guinness-Hoisting Enthusiasts

The low points were few. After the four opening gems, the band tried to elevate the song “Put On Your Boots,” a single from their last album, but the material was no match for what came before.

The crowd, officially 75,000 strong according to Live Nation, which ranged from high-schoolers to baby boomers, sang portions of several songs a capella, eliciting Bobo’s head-nodding, hand-clapping approval. Irish flags waved, 24-ounce Guinness cans were hoisted, and many golf shirts and Ravens jerseys could be seen.

“My father has played the music for me since I was two,” said a 15-year old exchange student, Maria Vittoria, from Umbria, Italy.

Later in the show, the band returned to “Achtung Baby” with their songs “Ultraviolet” and “One,” an homage to the band’s conflicts in the studio during the recording sessions of the album – arguably one of their greatest songs.

I remember going to Tower Records in Lower Manhattan as soon as it opened to buy the CD fresh from the carton in 1991, similar to the way I would walk to the long-defunct Recordmasters in Yorktowne Village to buy the latest Rolling Stones release with proceeds from my piggy bank.

“What a great show. I remember when they played at the University of North Carolina in 1983,” said Steve Martel, of Towson, who attended with his son Finn. That music festival included Grandmaster Flash, Joan Jett and Todd Rundgren.

“Bono was climbing all over the stage back then,” Martel recalled.

With a spaceship capable of beaming him up at any moment, he doesn’t need the extra theatrics. And maybe, when they’re finished with trying to perfect Spiderman on Broadway, they will go back into the studio to create another masterpiece.

Yah, bitte.

During a night that invoked many tributes, Bono also included Shakespeare. Looking out at the ecstatic crowd, he observed, “It’s a beautiful midsummer night’s dream.”