I started the site because I felt like I was behind and wanted to catch up. I had joined American Management Systems out of college, a newly minted BS in Physics with no marketable skills. I learned to program there, but I was developing enterprise software, back when that meant client-server instead of cloud. I saw what was happening in the dot-com era and wanted a piece of that excitement. I figured I could start with flexing one of my dormant muscles, my writing, and combining it with my small knowledge of the web.
I had been reading Dave Winer’sDaveNet email newsletter for some time, and he was in the middle of helping to invent blogging—or at least blogging software. He had written a module for his object database that translated nodes of the object outline into web pages. It was part of something called Aretha, a free release of the Frontier software that was the evolution of what Dave had written as a platform level scripting tool for the Mac. I downloaded Dave’s free version and created a web pages in the outliner, and ran it on my Mac. I was one of the first people in my neighborhood with a cable modem, so I more or less permanently claimed an IP address (their DHCP server didn’t play nice with my Mac’s Open Transport networking stack). For about a year you could find my content there, if you knew where to look (http://209.8.158.74, back in the day).
Then we moved to Cambridge so I could attend grad school. Dave opened up a hosted blogging solution based on his Frontier platform at editthispage.com. The software had evolved to something called Manila—more powerful, and you could edit in the browser instead of the object database. I moved my site’s content there, but for a long time it was just the equivalent of a static page. I posted some vacation photos there and the occasional note, but that was it.
When I spent the summer in Seattle for my b-school internship at Microsoft, I started writing something every day—specifically, on June 11, 2001. And, with the exception of a few hiatuses here and there, I haven’t really ever stopped since. So I date my blogaversary to June 11, but it all really started over a year before, 25 years ago.
We’ve heard Decoy, Miles’ 1984 attempt to equal Herbie Hancock at jazz-funk, and we’ve heard the alternate vision of jazz presented by Wynton Marsalis. But Miles was continuing to evolve his sound, even at this point in his career. The result was You’re Under Arrest, an album featuring original music and pop covers. It drove the Marsalis camp crazy.
I know this because when I saw Stanley Crouch (the critic who wrote the liner notes for Wynton’s albums) speak at the University of Virginia in 1991, following Miles’ death, he still insisted that Miles’ material from In a Silent Way on was garbage, saving special venom for You’re Under Arrest and its pop leanings.1 He spoke with horror of the cover, which showed Miles in a leather suit and hat, holding a Tommy gun. That there was role play here—Miles playing the part of the gangster, the well-off scofflaw—appears to have gone over Crouch’s head.
And yes, in some ways You’re Under Arrest is all about role play—the opening and closing tracks are scenes with dialog (and special guests). But there’s also role play of a different kind here. Miles still had plenty of funk in him, but he also appears to have been alert to what was going on in pop music, where a new embrace of melody was fueling the rise of a New Wave of musicians. Miles and his band, which for this outing included Darryl Jones on bass, Al Foster on drums, Robert Irving on synths, Bob Berg on tenor and soprano saxophone, and both John Schofield and—for the first time since the early 1970s—John McLaughlin on guitar, shifted direction and, improbably found their way inside that pop sound.
That’s not to say that the funk was gone. “One Phone Call/Street Scenes,” featuring dialog between a police officer who’s pulled Miles over in his Ferrari and Miles insouciantly responding, “Arrest some of this!” (with both voices done by Miles), features an incessant bass, drums and synth riff over which John Scofield wails and Miles plays a tight riff in the higher end of his range. At the end, another conversation, this time between a Spanish speaker, a Polish speaker, and a French policeman (played, improbably, by Sting), who issues a translation of the Miranda warning.
The second track is done with playing around, but it’s not heavy—in fact, it’s “Human Nature.” The track, written by Steve Porcaro of Toto, had caught the ear of Michael Jackson while Porcaro was assisting with the production of Jackson’s monster album Thriller. Jackson had John Bettis, a lyricist who had collaborated with the Carpenters (“Top of the World”), the Pointer Sisters (“Slow Hand”), Barbara Mandrell (“One of a Kind Pair of Fools”), and others,2 rewrite the lyrics. It became a top 10 hit, which is presumably why Miles had heard it. But listening to him play the melody, it’s clear that he found something deep in it. His clear trumpet plays it straight, as a ballad, giving the same sort of space to the track that he once found in “My Funny Valentine.” And his technique is at a much higher level than it was on Decoy, where he seemed to still be suffering from health challenges. Here the trumpet is front and center; indeed, if there’s anything to criticize about the track, it’s that the rest of the band is basically used only to provide a pop background. There’s very little of interest in the arrangement from a jazz perspective, but it’s very pleasant as pop music.
“Intro: MD1 / Something On Your Mind / MD2” takes us back into the funk, but thankfully gives the band way more to do. Scofield gets a few fierce solos, and the band’s pulse is tight beneath both him and Miles. The trumpeter’s solo splits the difference between the pure funk of “One Phone Call” and the pop melodicism of “Human Nature.” The track ends in a swirl of synthesizers and a hint of a march rhythm.
Miles’s trumpet introduces “Ms. Morrissine,” a relentlessly funky pop track that features washes of distinctively mid-1980s synthesizer sound (there’s a certain watery quality to some of the sounds, including the drums, that couldn’t come from any other time) beneath Miles’ lyrical playing. John McLaughlin, who hadn’t played with Miles since 1972’s On the Corner, adds hints of rhythm and brief guitar lines that twine around the edges of the band, but gets a proper solo at the end. A McLaughlin overdub introduces the tag, a brief excerpt from “Katia: Prelude” that fades out the first half.
“Katia” fades in to start the second half of the album, with McLaughlin stating the first melody and taking a lead role for the first two minutes. Miles’ improvisations here are less melodic, more funky, and the track feels more alive and less programmed; even where Irving’s keyboards take over, McLaughlin torches the edges of the track and takes over again. He and Miles trade leads throughout the second half of the song. It’s a workout but a fun listen.
“Time After Time,” written by Cyndi Lauper with Rob Hyman of the melodica-heavy band The Hooters, returns to the format of “Human Nature.” To my ears the effort here is less successful. Miles’ playing is solid but mixed lower relative to the backing track, and he finds less swing in his melody. There are hints of interest in some of Scofield’s contributions, but the synths ultimately swamp this one for me. Miles would revisit the track live throughout the rest of his life with more satisfactory results; I especially like the version from the 1991 Vienne Jazz Festival, recorded a few months before his death; Miles was playing a lot less, but the arrangement was sparser and gave each musical utterance room to shine.
“You’re Under Arrest,” credited to Scofield, returns to the jazz-funk well once more for a thorny blues. After the guitarist introduces the number, Miles unleashes a blistering set of runs, trading off with Scofield as he did with McLaughlin on “Katia.” The melody is recapitulated by Irving, then Bob Berg takes a brief solo on tenor sax before Scofield rips through a set of fiery improvisations. Throughout Jones plays fluidly beneath the brisk keyboard runs, providing an elastic low-end.
“Medley: Jean-Pierre/You’re Under Arrest/Then There Were None” closes as the album opens, with a conceptual piece. A wistful ballad is slowly covered by the sounds of catastrophe: a crying child, wailing women, the sound of a massive explosion, and a tolling church bell. It’s an unexpectedly somber end, left unexplained in the liner notes.
But the likely answer is that the track marked an ending; specifically, to Miles’ thirty-year-long association with Columbia Records. While on tour in early 1985, after recording You’re Under Arrest but before its release, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and recorded the rest of his career on the label. He moved on to new collaborators, with bassist Marcus Miller playing the arranger role that had been Irving’s for the first half of the 1980s. Other members of the band scattered, but several of them went on to non-traditional roles on the other side of the jazz/pop fence. We’ll hear about that in a few weeks. Next week, though, we’ll give a listen to another outing from the Marsalis brothers, this one considerably more successful than Hot House Flowers.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Miles was listening to a lot of pop music in the mid-1980s, and recording arrangements of it. Not all the covers from this session made it onto the album, though. Here’s his cover of Tina Turner’s comeback single, released for the first time in 2022 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: That’s What Happened:
BONUS BONUS: Miles’ way with pop songs and his insistence in updating the American Songbook with more modern material influenced many later jazz musicians. One direct influence is the adoption by other jazz musicians of the material he covered in his 1980s albums. Eva Cassidy covered “Time After Time” on the posthumous album of the same name in 2000, and pianist and composer Vijay Iyer covered “Human Nature” on two separate albums, 2010’s Solo and 2012’s trio recording Accelerando. Here’s a live version with the trio:
This lecture was my first attempt to ask tough questions of a speaker with whom I disagreed. I asked Crouch, regarding his words on Miles, how he felt about Branford Marsalis’s work with Sting, given that Marsalis had previously played more “straight” jazz with his brother. I recall Crouch gave a non-answer, which I suppose was inevitable. ↩︎
Among other later collaborators, Bettis would work with Madonna on “Crazy for You,” Peabo Bryson on “Can You Stop the Rain,” and New Kids on the Block on “If You Go Away.” That’s what you call range. ↩︎
The good thing about being the hot young artist on a major label is that the label will sometimes throw a lot of resources at your recordings. The bad news is that’s maybe not always the best idea.
Wynton Marsalis burst out of the gates as a performer, performing with Herbie Hancock, signing a contract with Columbia Records (Miles’ home) in 1982 at the age of 20 and releasing three albums—two jazz, one classical—in the first year. In 1984, the Juilliard-trained Marsalis was the first performer in history to win Grammy awards in both jazz and classical. His technique and sound were undeniably wonderful; listening to the early recordings, you hear the soul of Louis Armstrong alongside the virtuosity of a young Freddie Hubbard.
He also had strong opinions, and wasn’t shy about sharing them. And he brought additional voices to the fight along with him. The strongest voice standing alongside him was Stanley Crouch, a one-time poet, avant-garde jazz drummer, and civil rights activist (he worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) turned fiercely neo-traditionalist jazz critic. Crouch felt that jazz fusion and avant-garde were ultimately empty, even phony, artistically and called for a return to more traditional jazz values. Marsalis felt the same, ultimately setting out a sort of manifesto for jazz. To be considered jazz in his eyes, the music had to have the following: the blues, the standards, swing, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship, and “a mastery of the tradition” going back to New Orleans times. The definition left out much jazz between 1960 and 1970 and everything from the fusion era; the albums I’ve reviewed from CTI and much of Coltrane’s work would be out of scope, as (notably) would all of Miles’ work starting with Bitches Brew. Wynton may have idolized Miles, but the reverse was not true; on meeting Wynton, Miles is said to have remarked “So here’s the police…”
With that as a background, Wynton’s third album feels deliberate, a sort of provocative retrenchment into standards, strings, and beautiful melodic playing, the polar opposite of Decoy. It could very well also have been Wynton deciding to record a standards album and the studio adding strings for commercial reasons; we’ll never know. At any rate, in addition to the orchestra there’s a proper group behind Wynton on the recording, and what a group! In addition to his brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophones, the group featured Kenny Kirkland, who had played with Miroslav Vitouš before becoming Wynton’s pianist; Jeff “Tain” Watts, an often ferociously muscular (but here restrained) drummer from Pittsburgh who had gotten his professional start on Wynton’s first album; and the redoubtable Ron Carter on bass.
But all of that aside: how does it sound? Overall it’s beautiful, but careful. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” opens with strings backing Wynton’s note-perfect solo. Ron Carter’s bass begins the verse with a simple walking figure, but accelerates into something a little more adventuresome; he’s the only one of the quartet (Branford sits this one out) to come out of the background. Mostly we’re left to a reverie.
“Lazy Afternoon,” written by Jerome Moross and John La Touche for the 1954 musical The Golden Apple, is more band-forward. Kenny Kirkland takes a solo opening, setting up Wynton’s entrance. The trumpeter chooses a Harmon mute, the same that Miles used for much of his classic recordings, and the solo sounds deliberately evocative of Miles. The mood is abruptly changed by the swelling of the strings, who signal a change to a different space. Wynton plays a phrase or two on the unmuted trumpet, setting up Branford for a solo on the tenor which is considerably less pyrotechnic but more evocative than the work he did on Decoy. Ron Carter underscores the second verse with gravely chosen notes accented with slides and vibrato, descending to the lowest tonic as the strings reenter with a chromatic climax. The coda has Wynton playing pointillistic passages over a single harmonic from a plucked bass string. It’s among the more successful tunes on the session overall.
J. Fred Coots and Sam Lewis’s “For All We Know” gives us something roughly in between “Stardust” and “Lazy Afternoon.” There’s almost a duet between Wynton and Ron Carter being played out against the background of the orchestra. The string arrangement feels deliberate throughout, as though walking on eggshells in the adagio tempo, until suddenly Wynton and Carter break into a swing rhythm two-thirds of the way through, giving the tune sudden life. The strings try to get the last word, swooning into a major-key finish, but a portamento plucked note from Carter and a modal riff from Wynton close things out.
Leigh Harline and Ned Washington’s “When You Wish Upon a Star” is a welcome surprise: an uptempo introduction in the bass and drums, Tain finally given a little room which he uses to underpin the melody with massive snare hits and cymbal accents, and Carter providing a pedal point on the dominant and its octave. We’re not out of the lugubrious yet though, as the orchestra drags things down to a rubato with each entrance. On the third one, Wynton uses it as a way to switch to a hard-swung tempo that the strings punctuate rather than swamp. Branford takes a tenor solo that points up the rhythm, then swings into the strings and a sort of trading eights between the horns and Kenny Kirkland. If this kept on the same sort of boil as the opening it would be exhilarating, but the temperature cools down past a simmer as the musicians bring the work to a close. I’d love to hear a small-group reworking of this arrangement minus the strings and the rubato; the opening bars show just how much this particular group could cook when given the chance.
“Django” gets the same lento opening tempo as in the classic Modern Jazz Quartet version, but with just strings backing up Wynton’s introduction we don’t get the rhythmic imperative that drives the John Lewis classic until Carter, Kirkland and Tain swing into the verse. The band points up a tango-like rhythm under the solo, driving it forward to a climax and then a final orchestral swoon. Wynton gets the last word, as always, playing a tart tag.
Duke Ellington’s “Melancholia,” first recorded in a trio on his 1953 recording The Duke Plays Ellington, gets a muted introduction from Wynton leading into a rubato string section. There’s not much special going on here aside from some nice playing from Wynton throughout. “Hot House Flowers,” the sole original here, seems doomed to the same fate. There’s an orchestral swoon that’s interrupted by a series of puckish outbursts from the trumpet and drums, but we seem firmly stuck in low gear until about a minute and a half in when things get interesting. Carter and Kirkland propose a circling rhythmic figure that drives us forward to a bracing flute solo from Kent Jordan. Carter then takes a solo of his own, playing against the rhythm with a series of sallies, that circles to a conclusion with a final sting from the orchestra. As a composition from a 23 year old it’s highly promising start, and one wishes for more of it on this album.
“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” starts with an orchestral jog into a swinging solo from Marsalis. Here the orchestra functions less as a blanket and more as a punctuation, with both Kirkland and Tain underscoring the melody. Wynton concludes his solo with a high stretto, leading into a solo for Kirkland. Kenny’s style is instantly recognizable, with block chords and runs in the right hand that give a percussive emphasis to the chord progressions while also making them more interesting with swerves into minor, blues, and modal moments. Branford takes a straightforward solo that swings its way around the melody before taking a run of off-beat hits. The band plays an intricate 12/8 interlude and then swings to the finish, with Wynton playing a 16-bar passage in triplets without a breath, and finishing with a run of deliberately breathless leading notes leaning into the submediant (6th) over Carter’s final pizzicato.
Hot House Flowers is a frustrating album. One can’t help but think there’s a pretty good quintet performance here, if we could just get the orchestra out of the way. But it’s not a bad way to hear why Wynton was both praised—that trumpet tone is extraordinary—and derided for what is ultimately an extremely buttoned-up sound. He would record far better records, and we’ll hear them soon. We’re going to give Miles one more word first, though.
In the course of writing Ten Thousand Voices, I had the opportunity to read a lot of other histories of the University of Virginia. It occurred to me that others might appreciate the reading list of books I have consulted and found, so I pulled together this bibliography. In some cases I’ve quoted my reviews of the books from Goodreads.
Note: I’m going to keep this a live post as I identify additional books worth adding (or move things on my shelves and discover some more…).
Older
Adams, Hubert Baxter (1888). Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. The earliest full history of the University, this handsome book (which you can read on Google Books) contains plates of photographs and architectural drawings of the University. It’s also the first to quote Emerson’s epigraph, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” in the context of the University.
Bruce, Philip Alexander (1921). History of the University of Virginia, 1819 – 1919: The Lengthened Shadow of One Man. The granddaddy of all UVA histories, this five-volume book used student magazines and newspapers, official records (at least, those that survived the 1895 Rotunda fire), and a great many other sources to tell the story of Mr. Jefferson’s University. His coverage of the Glee Club was one of the reasons I started pulling together the history that ultimately became Ten Thousand Voices. Best way to read it is online, so you can search for the parts you want rather than having to read the entire thing.
Dabney, Virginius (1981). Mr. Jefferson’s University. A single (large) volume, it’s much more readable than Bruce’s work—and more contemporary as well. Dabney does a good job of covering the University’s transformation in the 20th century from a school for wealthy Southerners to a world class university, including its integration in the 1950s (of which Dabney was a strong proponent) and coeducation in the 1970s. Bonus: Dabney legendarily wrote about the best way to make a mint julep.
Patton, John S. (1906). Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia. Another early 20th century attempt to tell the history, by the University’s librarian. There is accordingly additional detail about the history of the library as well as student groups and publications—and one of the earliest retellings of the 1895 Rotunda fire.
Clemons, Harry (1972). The University of Virginia Library, 1825-1950: Story of a Jeffersonian Foundation. Completing a tradition of two, following John Patton’s 1906 UVA history, Harry Clemons confines his writing to the history of the library. His engaging history tells the story from the beginning but also describes the creation of Alderman (now Shannon) Library.
Wood, Thomas Longstreet and John W. Fishburne (1890, rev. 1894). Arcade Echoes. A collection of student poetry from the University of Virginia, works spanning 1856 to 1890 and most originally published in the Virginia University Magazine (later University of Virginia Magazine, later Virginia Spectator). Relatively little UVA specific content, but if you want to feel the gulf of years between today and the students of more than 135 years ago, this is your best bet.
Rothery, Agnes (1944). A Fitting Habitation. Dodd, Mead & Co. A page-turner from 75 years ago. This is the history of author Agnes Rothery, her husband (and Virginia Glee Club conductor) Harry Rogers Pratt, and the houses of their married life, which included a former slave quarters behind Pavilion III that they christened The Mews. By turns funny, insightful, old fashioned, modern, and touching. Fun read.
McConnell, James Rogers (1917). Flying for France. A short, thrilling and sobering memoir from McConnell, who writes briskly and unsentimentally about his life as a volunteer aviator for France in the American Escadrille. He died in aerial combat a few months after the book was published, shortly before America officially entered the War. UVa friends will know McConnell (king of the Hot Feet, member of the Seven Society) from his statue on Grounds.
Vaughan, Joseph L. (1991). Rotunda Tales: Stories from the University of Virginia, 1920 – 1960. This book was on sale in the University bookstore when I was a first year student. Engaging (if occasionally quite dated) stories of life in the first half of the 20th century at UVa.
Clover, Cecile Wendover (1995). Holsinger’s Charlottesville. Spectacular collection of the work of early photographer Rufus W. Holsinger and his studio, which forms an invaluable record of life around the University and the town at the turn of the century and into the 1920s.
Contemporary and still available
Aprey, Maurice & Shelli M. Poe (eds) (2017). The Key to the Door. Thorough and engrossing history of the integration of the University of Virginia and first person histories of some of the trailblazing African American students. Should be required reading for those interested in Mr. Jefferson’s University and its imperfect embrace of the promise of his preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
Barefoot, Coy (2001). The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia. An engaging, well-researched and photographed history of the other side of the street from the University, invaluable when you’re playing the game of “what was there before it was …?” that inevitably marks my visits to Mr. Jefferson’s stomping grounds.
Briggs, Frank (2021). The Old U(Va) and I: 1961 – 1965. A memoir fascinating, funny and infuriating by turns. I was a UVA grad but not part of the fraternity system, and Mr. Briggs’ stories about pledging Beta and some of the subsequent hijinks recounted remind me why I made that choice. Points given, though, for the honesty with which he recounts his attitudes as a student toward matters such as desegregation and the Civil Rights movement. It would have been very easy to tell a rosy story in hindsight rather than acknowledging the painful truths that these matters received no attention from most UVA students in the early 1960s, including himself. Ultimately the honesty and depth of story means that it’s a worthwhile read even though it left me not knowing whether to yell at Mr. Briggs or to shake his hand.
Gardner, Joel B (2018). From Rebel Yell to Revolution: 1966 – 1970. The back half of the 1960s are represented by Joel Gardner’s work, about which I wrote, “Full marks for the thoroughness and generally balanced nature of Mr. Gardner’s history of the transformation of the University from ‘Old U’ to its more modern incarnation. Points off for occasional unevenness of tone.”
Graham, Chris and Patrick Hite (2014). Mad About U: Four Decades of Basketball at University Hall. Good history of Virginia basketball during the University Hall days. Pluses: the coverage of the women’s basketball (hail Debbie Ryan! Hail the Burge twins!). Minuses: ends with Dave Leitao.
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler (1999).The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History. Hard to believe this one is twenty-five years old now. A turn of the century update on a popular staple, the coffee-table history.
Howard, Hugh (2003). Thomas Jefferson, Architect. A well-photographed book on the architectural side of Jefferson’s legacy. I wrote about it in 2020, “Not bad for a used bookstore find. There are better books on Monticello and the Academical Village, but the chapters on the Virginia Capitol and the private houses that Jefferson may or may not have designed were worth the price of admission. Nice photography too.”
Howard, Thomas L. and Owen W. Gallogly. Society Ties. This well-researched history of the Jefferson Society was (together with Michael Slon’s history of the Cornell Glee Club) what spurred my determination to write the history of the Virginia Glee Club. If a book could be published about the oldest student organization at the University, I reasoned, surely one could be published about the oldest student musical organization.
Spencer, Hawes (2018). Summer of Hate. A summary of the events of the “Unite the Right” march on Charlottesville and the University. Spencer’s shifts in time, topic, and perspective are disorienting and frustrating, but might just be a good way to process the chaos of the awful weekend of August 11 and 12, 2017. It could use an update for what happened to the rioters afterwards: the few convictions, and then the participation of some of them in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and attempt to steal the presidential election.
Willis, Garry (2006). Mr. Jefferson’s University. A slimmer re-telling of the origin of the University. Not as meaty as Dabney’s work but still a worthwhile read.
Wolfe, Brendan (2017).Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope. A slim coffee-table book showing 100 artifacts from the University’s history. Fascinating read.
It was bound to happen. After two months of pop music we’re right back with Miles. That’s no accident; as Sting left the Police behind for a solo career, he sought out jazz musicians, and found several of them in Miles’ band.
The last Miles album, in his recording chronology, that we wrote about was Champions, recorded in 1971. Miles’ fusion years were musically exploratory and often fruitful—a listen to “He Loved Him Madly,” Miles’ tribute to Duke Ellington from the compilation Get Up With It, puts the lie to any assertion that Miles was slacking as a composer during this time. But by the same token, his worsening physical health was leaving him in constant pain, and his various addictions were taking a toll on his emotional state. Following appearances at the 1975 Newport Jazz Festival and the Schaefer Music Festival in New York, he dropped out of music.
He spent the next few years wallowing in sex and drugs, but also in finally getting a long postponed and much needed hip replacement. After a failed attempt to form a band with guitarist Larry Coryell, keyboardists Masabumi Kikuchi and George Pavilis, bassist T.M. Stevens and drummer Al Foster, he withdrew again. Finally getting back into the studio in 1980 and 1981, he released his first new album in six years, The Man with the Horn. Touring with a new group consisting of Foster, saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation), bassist Marcus Miller, and guitarist John Scofield, he recorded a few albums but suffered a relapse with alcohol that led to his having a stroke. His then-wife Cicely Tyson helped him recover and also helped him finally give up drugs and alcohol.
He also heard what his erstwhile collaborator Herbie Hancock had been doing in the studio. Realizing that Herbie had achieved mass success and a new audience by combining jazz and hip-hop on “Rockit,” Miles set out to do the same thing on his new album Decoy, adding more synthesizers and more prominent bass, this time played by Darryl Jones, who went by the nickname “Munch.” The band was also joined by saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother; the brothers had played together in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Branford was playing in Wynton’s quintet; he recorded his debut record Scenes in the City the same year that he joined Miles in the studio.
That said, it’s a synth bassline that greets us first on “Decoy,” played by Robert Irving III, who wrote this track. There’s not much tune here, but there’s a lot of funk. When Jones’ bass comes in, it anchors and propels the track along with Foster’s insistent drumming. Miles’ trumpet is in fine form, but he spends the track interjecting two bar riffs. About halfway through, Branford Marsalis takes a solo turn on soprano saxophone. Breaking free of the robotic rhythm, he seems to fly above the dense robot-funk texture. Scofield is just another part of that texture on this track until his solo, where he raises the interest as well, but ultimately the constrained modal scale doesn’t provide enough of a melody to make the whole thing work.
Miles seems determined to keep us in robot-funk land, with the appropriately named “Robot 415,” this one a scrap of a tune that nevertheless gets him a co-writing credit along with Irving. Here he gives us another not-quite melody over the difficult meter, one that comes and goes in less than a minute.
“Code M.D.,” while still on the robotic side, has a little more of a blues melody across the two-chord vamp. It helps that Scofield is let loose much earlier on the track; his first solo enlivens the song, lifting it from something that feels like mostly backing track to a blues inflected raga. When he steps back and it’s just the horns in the pocket on the track, it feels like a holding pattern. Branford’s solo doesn’t soar quite as much here; he’s only given about sixteen bars. But we finally hear Miles take a solo, and he essays up into the upper end of the horn range, tailing off into a wistful melody at the end, and playing a modal scale against the funk. He sounds properly enlivened, in fact, right up until the track’s fade-out.
“Freaky Deaky” is credited solely to Miles, and he’s at the synthesizer over Foster and Jones, as well as playing a trumpet run through an effects pedal joining to add a little textural interest. It’s a noodle, nothing more, a sort of aimless jam, but the melody played by the trumpet is at least ear-grabbing while it’s there. I don’t know why they put it on the record, to be honest, especially after hearing the recording session version on the Miles Davis Bootleg releases, a burning blues jam in twoparts.
“What It Is” shifts us into a very different gear to open Side 2, which is entirely co-written by Miles and Scofield. Recorded live at the Montréal Jazz Festival in 1983, the energy level is off the chart, and if Irving seems to be leaning against the keyboard on his cluster chords, at least there’s plenty going on in that acrobatic electric bass part, providing a proper hook. It’s saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation) here rather than Marsalis, and he plays with more abandon and less piercing fire. Miles makes the interesting choice to overdub an additional trumpet line over his solo, setting up an almost-conversation. It thickens the texture and somehow strips back a little of the urgency from his actual solo. It stops abruptly.
“That’s Right” gives us the slow-jam version of the music that Irving has been providing throughout the whole album, with a slow but funky pulse in the bass and a drum hit that mostly stays out of the way. It’s all the better to let Miles rip out a melodic line that pushes against the weird tension between the bass line, which mostly hugs the dominant (the fifth) of the scale so that the rest of the players can shift between major and minor at will, and the synths, which hover on every other degree of the scale. Scofield’s guitar is a force of nature here, beginning the solo with a bluesy skronch but quickly shifting to a more virtuosic expression and then back again. When Branford comes in, he hews more toward the virtuosic, with an occasional blues lick near the top of the range to establish continuity with Scofield’s concept. What’s interesting is that, even in this context, Branford swings, playing against the rhythm in a way that the other players don’t. It’s an interesting collision of swing and funk, which insists on a strong rhythmic pulse on the One. When Miles comes in, it’s an echo of the soaring melodies that he would have played ten years prior on tunes like “Honky Tonk.” But there he was playing against a firm rhythmic footing and a halo of odd electric textures that translated to something that was 100% blues; here the timbre of the keyboards seems to sap some of that rhythmic energy at the end.
That’s okay, because “That’s What Happened” has energy in spades. Another live track from Montréal, this seems to pick up where “What It Is” left off, acting like a coda to the earlier track, and very much in the same spirit. It closes out the album with a funky flourish.
Miles may have set out to record “Rockit,” but that definitely didn’t happen; between Scofield’s virtuosity, Branford’s imagination, and the odd harmonic statements of Irving, this band was still firmly in a jazz space. But this material did keep him exploring the boundary between jazz and more popular forms of music—something he leaned into even further on his next release. Before we go there, we’re going to hear how other voices—and coincidentally another Marsalis—tried to pull the form back to something closer (perhaps) to its roots.
All good things come to an end, especially when the things that make them great are also tearing them apart. The creative tension between Sting’s pop instincts, Stewart Copeland’s intense rhythmic drive and post-punk brilliance, and Andy Summers’ guitar skills had combined in a heady brew overfourLPs, many b-sides, and a soundtrack. Now they were in the studio one last time, and at each others’ throats.
Maybe not constantly at each others’ throats. You have to be in the same room to have a physical fight, and for most of the recording of Synchronicity the band was not. Back at AIR Studios in Montserrat where they had recorded Ghost in the Machine, the band was spread across the residential studio: Stewart Copeland and his drums were in the dining room, Sting was in the control room with his bass, and Andy was in the actual studio. Hugh Padgham, back behind the console, did this both to get the best sound out of each instrument and “for social reasons.”
Tensions were high because the band was pulling in two different directions. Sting had come in with songs in a very pop direction that left most of the reggae influences behind; Stewart and Andy still wanted to have a go at creating the songs as a collective. Sting and Stewart did actually come to blows over “Every Breath You Take” as these approaches collided. Ultimately, while the sound of the album is remarkably consistent, it reflected this tension, with more experimentation and group energy on Side 1—including a song each by Copeland and Summers—and an almost unbelievable lineup of pop songs on Side 2.
“Synchronicity I” starts side 1 off strong. A synthesizer part written by Sting, sounding enough like a marimba to throw off listeners and reviewers, plays for six bars in 3/4 time, with Stewart’s cymbals coming in on the last two bars. Then the drums and the bass come in with an all-out assault, with Andy’s guitar providing washes of texture behind it all. Here the benefits of Padgham’s approach can be heard, as each musician takes their intensity to the utmost in a way that would almost have been painful if they were all playing in the same room. Sting’s vocals are dual tracked in harmony on the verses and overlap each other on the chorus, with vocals in the right and left ear of the stereo mix that seem to tumble over each other in their speed to express their ideas: “A connecting principle / Linked to the invisible / Almost imperceptible / Something inexpressible/Science insusceptible / Logic so inflexible / Causally connectable / Nothing is invincible.” Sting was reading philosophy again. Returning to the works of Arthur Koestler, whose The Ghost in the Machine had lent the prior album its title, he found The Roots of Coincidence, a 1972 work that argued that some parapsychological phenomena should be investigated more closely through the lens of modern physics and built on Carl Jung’s work on the concept of synchronicity. Sting built on this concept of apparently unconnected events appearing to have a deeper connection throughout the first side of the album.
“Walking in Your Footsteps” settles down the tempo considerably, and dials back the intensity of the arrangement. There’s a loping bass and percussion underlay (again, likely synths), with a flute overtop and washes of guitar that sound like great bellows from some ancient animal. It turns out that is exactly what is on Sting’s mind, as he contemplates the rule of the dinosaur and their fall from power, and wonders “don’t you have a lesson for us.” One of his more direct expressions of anti-war sentiment, he wonders “if we explode the atom bomb/would they say that we were dumb?” Stewart keeps time during the verse by hitting the drumsticks together, and emphasizing the turn into the third verse with hits on the tom. This was one of the songs that the band continued to assemble until late in the game, to the point that the album’s lyrics sheet included a quatrain at the end that was recorded but omitted from the final mix: “Fifty million years ago/they walked upon the planet so/They live in a museum/It’s the only place you’ll see ’em.” (You can hear some of the alternate takes on the 2024 deluxe reissue of the album.)
I’ve read reviews of the album that talk about “Synchronicity I” as a jazzy song, perhaps because of the 3/4 meter, but “O My God” feels more tethered in the jazz idiom to me. That’s only appropriate, since it is the very last of the songs from Sting’s jazz fusion band Last Exit to be re-recorded by the Police. The version by the Police couldn’t be further from the Last Exit version, though; instead of Hammond B3 organ and jazzy chord changes, we get a tight chromatic bass line and a rewritten, considerably more concise lyric sheet. The line “How can I turn the other cheek / It’s black and bruised and torn” has been on my mind a lot lately; in the original version it’s a subliminal lament in the last verse, but here’s it’s almost howled in the second as the lead-in to the chorus “Take the space between us/and fill it up, fill it up, fill it up.” The other thing providing the jazz impetus is the saxophone. Sting’s playing has gotten considerably better since Ghost, and the sax lines here are tight, concise in some places and Coltrane-esque in others … and thankfully much better in tune. The guitar provides washes of sound and syncopated rhythm behind the bass and, especially, Stewart’s drums. (The snare pattern that introduces the second verse is one of the all time great moments from a great drummer.) The other thing to love about this song, despite what I saw as a very naïve 10-year-old as borderline blasphemy in the lyrics, is the humor in it all. You have “O my God you take the biscuit,” AND you have the recapitulation of “Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met?” from “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”—only here addressed to God. And then, of course, a free jazz freak out courtesy of layers of Sting’s saxophone, ending in an ascending scale up to the fifth, from which we drop a fourth into the key signature of the next song.
There’s definitely humor under the middle eastern guitar riff and screamed lyrics of “Mother,” but it might take a while to find it. Another Andy Summers song that Sting would not sing, Andy has said in interviews that it was in fact about his mother. It’s also easily read as being about the tense relationship between Summers and Sting; the vocal, with its note of deranged exasperation, could as easily be about an overbearing bandmate. The vocal filter used by Padgham here lends an edge to Andy’s “mother”s, especially the one in the lowest end of his range and the almost comical one that precedes the final verse. By contrast, Stewart’s “Miss Gradenko” is far less experimental and more likable. With a brilliant fingered guitar part throughout the verse and a locked-in bass and drum section, the story of the Soviet bureaucrat who seems “much too alive” in her uniform comes to life in the dual vocals from Sting and Stewart. It seems like it’s over too quickly.
Then there is a howl from the guitar, signaling “Synchronicity II.” Originally intended to proceed directly from “Synchronicity I” via a murky synthesizer interlude later named “Loch,” this bookend to the first side gives us the story of the narrator of “On Any Other Day” turned up to 11. Facing humiliation, frustration, and the end of love both at home and work, as the narrator drives home to “the pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache” we get the visual of something rising to the surface of a dark Scottish lake, as if synchronously called into life by his submerged rage. It’s all accompanied by the most straight ahead rock music the Police ever recorded. The music shifts from F♯ minor in the chorus (with Sting howling a wordless minor 3 – supertonic – subtonic) into F♯ major in the verse and back into minor, ending on an endless repetition around the fifth, leaving the synchronous rage and pain unresolved. It’s full of dark comedic touches in the verse (“We have to shout above the din of our rice krispies”) and near-apocalyptic fury in the instruments. It’s all very operatic. A wide eyed younger me had no idea what to make of it; I only knew the lyrics made me as uncomfortable as the music made me excited.
Side two opens with “Every Breath You Take,” the Police’s best-loved, most successful song (in 2010 it was estimated to generate between 25% and 30% of Sting’s publishing income), and the most unsettling song ever sung from the perspective of a stalker. The song itself was hard to nail down, as we’ve seen. After struggling to recreate it in the studio, the band agreed to work from the basic demo, but it needed a guitar part instead of the original organ that Sting had used. Sting told Andy “Go and make it your own.” Andy recalls, “I was kind of experimenting with playing Bartok violin duets and had worked up a new riff. When Sting said ‘go and make it your own’, I went and stuck that lick on it, and immediately we knew we had something special.” The guitar riff he came up with is simple – tonic to supertonic to mediant, but stepping down to the dominant between each note – and then repeating the pattern in two other modes before returning to the major scale. If “Synchronicity II” reflected anger over the dissolution of his marriage—a common reading of the album as a whole—“Every Breath You Take” seems to be stuck in the bargaining phase of grief as he sings “Oh can’t you see/you belong to me?” Sting himself told NME that it was “a nasty little song, really rather evil.” That it transcends all the circumstances of its origins and the sardonic irony of its lyrics has everything to do with the bridge (“Since you’ve gone I been lost without a trace”) and those descending single piano notes that underscore it, in which we hear the deep anguish at the heart of it all. The song went to Number One, giving the band their only chart-topping hit, and it stayed there for eight weeks.
That anguish leaps off the edge of the cliff of grief and into full blown despair on “King of Pain,” which continues Sting’s exploration of symbolism and unexplained synchronous events in a song that found metaphors for a darkened soul in everything from sunspots to a “flagpole rag.” The arrangement here begins in minimalism, bass and piano rocking back and forth on two notes with a marimba (or synth) in counterpoint; Stewart and Andy join on the second verse, still restrained until the chorus when the guitar finally rings its chords. It’s a literate exploration of an adolescent kind of pain, and ten to eleven year old me ate it up. (I especially thought the bit at the end, when the narrator repeats “There’s a little black spot on the sun today/It’s the same old thing as yesterday”) from the beginning over a descending glissando in the guitar, implying a perpetual, personal Sisyphean hell, was deep. I was a depressed kid.) Lots of people liked perpetual Sisyphean hells, but not as many as liked stalkers; this one went to Number One on the Mainstream Rock chart but topped out at Number Three on the Hot 100.
The last song of this side to be released as a single, “Wrapped Around Your Finger” was also a top 10 hit, peaking at Number Eight. It was also the sound of the life being slowly strangled out of the interplay among the trio. Copeland’s drum flourishes are all but gone; his rhythmic genius is still present as he chooses different beats to accent with a hit to the tom or the cymbal, but none of the splashy flourishes from the old songs are present. And Andy Summers’ guitar plays precisely on the hook in the opening verse—over the synthesizer—and echoes at the end of each phrase, but otherwise is kept on a tight leash until the final verse. Even then the rising energy is conveyed by playing a single note over and over again. It’s perhaps musically appropriate for a song that is all about control; the lyrics revisit the themes first explored in “Secret Journey” of someone seeking wisdom and knowledge, but this journey does not end in enlightenment, only in bondage. The narrator flips the Faustian story at the end, having “listened hard” to the tuition of the unnamed master until he gains the power to reverse the relationship and take control. But the central metaphor Sting uses throughout, of being wrapped around the finger of the other, can also be read as a ring; in the context of the failing relationship of “Every Breath” and “King of Pain,” it’s hard not to view “Wrapped Around Your Finger” as an exploration of emotional bondage in the aftermath of a failed relationship.
If “Wrapped Around Your Finger” is the end of the life of the trio, “Tea in the Sahara” is its afterlife—wandering endlessly in the desert, an eerily arid soundscape constructed of the drums and bass with only the echoes of a guitar washing across the sky with a distant saxophone (almost sounding like a shofar). Sting was, at this point in his writing career, superb at plucking out bits from his reading and turning them into the raw materials for his grand theme. In this case, the grist for the mill was Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky, which yielded the entire plot of the song. The story of the three sisters who danced for joy when the stranger promised to return to their company to take tea, reduced to burning in the desert “with their cups still full of sand” when the stranger never returns, feels like the ultimate metaphor for the demise of love and of this band.
Synchronicity is a record that started as many things as it ended. For one, it marked the end of the Police’s studio album output—though not all its studio output! There was an abortive attempt to record a sixth album in 1986 that went poorly; Stewart Copeland broke his collarbone the night before the sessions in a horse accident, and the hoped-for magic didn’t materialize in the sessions. Ever artisans, the band accepted that they weren’t going to build a table in the sessions, but came away with two lovely chairs—the 1986 remade versions of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”
For me, this is the album that started listening me to the Police, when our babysitter brought it over one day. I was ten and my sister was seven or eight, and while we weren’t ready for the first side (up until that point, music in our family was either classical radio—thank you, WGH and WHRO—or the easy listening station in the car), I connected hard with the second side. It started me opening my musical ears, without which I wouldn’t be writing this series.
This album also, by closing the door on the Police, started Sting down a solo path, going in a very different direction. After years of punk, prog, and new wave, he decided to return to his jazz roots. But where, exactly, was jazz in the mid-1980s? There were very definitely two competing visions for where jazz music was headed, and that’s what we’re going to step aside and listen to next week and the following.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: The first of this week’s bonuses really is a bonus track; it was left off the vinyl pressing for reasons of running time, but included on the cassette and CD versions. It’s probably the most darkly funny lyric Sting ever wrote, and you can definitely hear his jazz roots in the waltz-time arrangement. Here’s “Murder by Numbers”:
BONUS BONUS: Sting did a few recordings with jazz legend Gil Evans (yes, that Gil Evans) and his orchestra in the late 1980s, and this absolutely killer arrangement of “Murder by Numbers” was one of the outcomes:
BONUS BONUS BONUS: I always thought it was an urban legend, but the recent massive Synchronicity Deluxe Edition included this track, an anti-war version of “Every Breath You Take” with new lyrics and vocal recorded by Sting in 1985 and included on a “Spitting Image” collection. Here’s “Every Bomb You Make.”
BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS: The reason Sting’s publishing revenues are so overwhelmingly dominated by “Every Breath You Take” may well be due to the song’s afterlife. In 1997 a young Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs wrote a farewell ode to slain rapper “Biggie” Smalls around Andy Summer’s guitar lick and the verse melody of the song, titling it “I’ll Be Missing You.” It was a number one song for 11 weeks. (Stereogum’s The Number Ones column does a great job of writing about Combs’s song; I like columnist Tom Brennan’s take on “Every Breath You Take” too.) Sting sang it with Puff Daddy (now calling himself “Diddy” and awaiting trial on allegations of sexual assault) at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards in a performance that opened with a rendition of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei (his choral setting of “Adagio for Strings”); here’s that moment.
Let’s cut to the chase. Why am I writing about an obscure British movie soundtrack in the middle of this series of posts about the Police? I have one good reason: Sting singing “Tutti Frutti.”
Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about movie soundtracks.
Movie soundtracks are profoundly strange, particularly if you never see the movie. There is presumably some underlying narrative or unifying conceit in a reasonably well made movie soundtrack, but rarely does the soundtrack by itself provide a clue as to what happens in that narrative (in this way, at least, Brimstone & Treaclewas an exception to the rule). Or the musical selections may provide an idea of the aesthetic of the film; probably the best example of this is the soundtrack to any Wim Wenders movie (Wings of Desire or Until the End of the World).
Then there’s Party Party. A British comedy film in the style of John Hughes, most of the material on the soundtrack is cover songs—many of which are of 1950s rock’n’roll tunes, but some of which are of much later material—by a who’s who of early ’80s British pop artists, including Elvis Costello, Bananarama, Madness, and Sting. I can’t imagine a narrative that would string all these songs together, and my attention span long ago shortened beyond my ability to sit and watch a movie from start to finish. So we’ll have to take the material on the soundtrack solely on its musical merits. Whether this is advantageous to the material remains to be seen.
“Party Party,” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, appears to have been written specifically for the movie; it doesn’t appear on any of the earlier albums or odds-and-sods collections. This was 1982, the year Elvis released Imperial Bedroom, so the band was at one of its career peaks of musical energy and the lyrics were at his acidic best: “The last thing I remember I was talking to some fellas/Then she said to me she’d have a word with her good-looking mate/And handed me a pint pot filled with Advocaat and Tizer/And I woke up in the flowerbeds of beer and fertilizer.” The sound of the song is baroque in the spirit of Imperial Bedroom but takes its point of departure from Motown rather than the Beatles, with a fantastic horn section over Bruce Thomas’s agile bass line and Steve Nieve’s boogie-woogie piano part. It’s a pretty great opener.
The movie Party Party is apparently set at Christmastime, judging from the next cover: Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” here covered by pub rocker and Nick Lowe collaborator Dave Edmunds. Edmunds always had a taste for 1950s rock and roll, and this faithful cover leans into that lane; it’s well made but not especially eye opening. At least the next cover takes some risks. “Little Town Flirt” was a Del Shannon number before Scottish new wave band Altered Images got hold of it, and you can hear the bones of the song but it’s fully transformed by Michael “Tich” Anderson’s Siouxsie and the Banshees inspired drums on the opening and by Clare Grogan’s adenoidal vocal, as well as the constant heartbeat of Johnny McElhone’s bass. The only part of the arrangement that hasn’t aged well is the cheap synthesizer line, but at least that updates the song.
Bad Manners was a “two-tone” and ska band, but you’d never really know it from this cover of the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” at least not the very end when the outro is transformed into a ska number. The saxophones do some mildly interesting things at the end of the verse, but otherwise there’s not much to talk about here.
That’s not true about “Tutti Frutti.” 1982 was not a year in which Sting had great fun, between the collapse of his first marriage and the tense partnership with the Police, so hearing him do a howling, hooting Little Richard impression is astonishing. It feels ungenerous to complain about such a performance, but I have to note that his vocals are not completely in the pocket; then again, neither is the pub rock band that backs him up. They’re convincing at the chugging undertone but don’t quite capture the manic energy of the original. Then again, Sting does a good job of making up for it, especially on the wordless third verse.
Bananarama’s version of the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings” should feel out of place, given the twenty year jump forward from Little Richard, but the band invests it with a driving energy and just enough handclaps to underscore the 1950s flavor lurking beneath the sleazy punk surface of the original. The band’s vocals pull the song forward to the New Wave moment; you can imagine it being played on radio alongside the Go-Gos.
“Driving in My Car” by Madness is one of the other originals on the record, and was a hit for them on the UK Singles chart. Its energy is squarely in line with the New Wave moment, but the arrangement, with car horns and even dog barks, feels more like a novelty record. More successful is Modern Romance’s cover of R&B single “Band of Gold,” given an electro-pop makeover with synthesizers and Chic-esque guitar, along with the quintessential British New Wave vocals that somehow call to mind a little Erasure mixed with a touch of Duran Duran. It’s a lot of fun in a way that feels like a precursor to Wham!
Bad Manners makes up for the disappointment of “Yakety Yak” with “Elizabethan Reggae,” a piece with a complicated history. Beginning life as “Elizabethan Serenade,” a piece of light orchestra music originally performed by the Mantovani Orchestra, the 1968 reggae cover by Boris Gardiner and the Love People became a hit single. Bad Manners plays it as a straight ska number, and it’s a blast. The same, regrettably, cannot be said for Pauline Black’s version of “No Woman, No Cry.” Her vocal is fine, interesting even, but the leaden arrangement, particularly the joyless bass, take all the air out of the performance.
Sting’s “Need Your Love So Bad” is more successful. Here he proves adept at R&B balladry, displaying the wonderful flexibility of his lower range, and is able to overcome the unremarkable guitar (played by Micky Gee, the guitarist in Dave Edmunds’ band) in a convincing version of the bluesy song originally performed by Little Willie John. The backing vocalists (unfortunately uncredited) definitely help, as does the gospel-tinged piano. Sting knew the material well, having sung it in Last Exit, and he inhabits the pleading lovesickness of the narrator.
The big tonal shift on the second side is the Midge Ure cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Ure’s voice strongly recalls Bowie’s, and the late post-punk synths make for a good arrangement of the original, but it’s a complete left turn stylistically, presumably coming at the big plot climax of the movie (I love you, my readers, very much, but I’m not going to spend time watching this movie to find out where the song comes in). The arrangement slowly falls away, leaving just the synths to take the song out. It’s a pretty great cover, just a strange choice here. Chas & Dave’s version of “Auld Lang Syne” returns us to the 1950s-esque world of the rest of the soundtrack with a rockney (their word – Cockney rock) cover of the New Years Eve favorite.
There are a lot of inessential soundtracks out there, but sorting through the chaff can occasionally bring some reasonably good wheat to the surface. Sting’s tracks are probably the best reason to check this album out, but the title track is a great find for fans of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and “Elizabethan Reggae,” “Band of Gold” and “The Man Who Sold the World” are all highly successful covers. Not a bad strike rate, on the whole. Thankfully Sting had bigger horizons that he was working toward, in the form of one more tensely-recorded record with the Police. We’ll hear that next week.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: I may be too chicken to watch the movie, but it turns out that it’s on YouTube, so you can if you want:
When you’re the frontman of an increasingly successful band, with multiple Grammy awards to your name,1 and you’re photogenic to boot, the well established career move is to extend your brand to other arts—specifically, film. Sting was not immune to this trend, but, as befits a cerebral songwriter given to quoting philosophers in his writing (and rhyming “shake and cough” with “Nabokov”), his initial movie roles were art-house rather than blockbuster: first appearing as Ace Face in the film version of the Who’s Quadrophenia, then his first starring turn in an art house film.
Brimstone & Treacle started out as a BBC television play by Dennis Potter (who also wrote the television serial Pennies from Heaven, substantially rewritten into a 1981 flop starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters). The play, about a woman who becomes nonverbal and disabled following an automobile accident, and a mysteriously charismatic young man who charms her religious family with his piety, with predictably awful results, was withdrawn before broadcast by the BBC due to the final scene in which the angelic, or devilish, young man attempts to rape the disabled girl, who is subsequently returned to consciousness and regains full control of her body. —I watched this movie as a Blockbuster rental in 1989, having no idea what I was getting myself into, and was sorry.
The soundtrack, on the other hand, has some redeeming virtues, though tonal consistency is not one of them. The opening begins with a fairly ominous chord in the synths with a rolling slightly squelchy sound atop it, but fades out after about eight measures to the sound of a small brass band and the Finchley Children’s Music Chorus singing “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” (a recording that does not appear to be on YouTube), a Christian hymn written in 1893. In the film this accompanies a scene of happy choristers leaving a church, at which point the camera cuts to a brooding Sting in a raincoat, watching them. (Sting broods a lot in this film). The music too changes, returning to that squelchy synthesizer over the sound of the wind, for the title piece. “Brimstone & Treacle” is mostly dark atmosphere, but it introduces a catchy theme (V – XIII – V – VII – V – V – IVx3 – VII – V), here played in a high register on a keyboard, that repeats over and over. If you feel like we’ll be hearing that theme again, you’re right.
But first: a saxophone and some echoing marimba introduces “Narration,” wherein Sting reads somewhat ominously from the script of the television play, introducing the choirboy scene we’ve just heard and the sudden appearance of Sting’s character, Martin; the introduction of Mr. Bates (the father of the disabled girl), who’s shown writing treacly verses to his wife with a “face heavy with contempt”; and a series of images of the end of day commute home, bookended with the ominous whisper “Which one? Which one will it be?” As a teenager hearing this track, I was impressed with the use of music and spoken word; it is still musically interesting and appropriately moody, but the narrative seems less ominous and slightly forced now.
This bit of writing leads into the first of three tracks by the Police on the soundtrack. “How Stupid Mr. Bates” features some of the same squelchy synth in the introduction, but this is quickly overcome by Andy Summers’ guitar synth and the throbbing bass line, which stays constant on the tonic throughout the song. Stewart Copeland lays down a consistent backbeat with slight flourishes of irrepressible high hat magic around the edges, and the guitar and synth duet on the theme, a rare major key punctuated by intervals of modal suspension. As Police instrumentals go, it’s no “Shambelle” (the brilliant Andy Summers-penned B side to “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” which might be their best non-album track), but it’s no “Behind My Camel” either.
We stay in a pop vein with “Only You,” a Sting solo number that feels as though it was written with disco in mind—just listen to the play of that funky bass line against the saxophone and that four-on-the-floor drumming (here performed by Jeff Seitz, Stewart’s drum technician!). But the instrumental and the chorus are a jam—at least, until we hear Sting start to shout Martin’s prayer that he offers up for the healing of the disabled Pattie for the benefit of her gullible mother. (He has by now insinuated himself into the family, presenting himself as an upright, devout young man who wants to help them and their daughter.) The combination of the disco and the prayer are, to quote a line from “Narration,” “ridiculous… incongruous… disturbing.” Someday I’d like to hear “Only You” without the prayer atop it; I think it’d take its place alongside some of the other great early 1980s funk classics.
This leads us to “I Burn for You,” a song that Sting had carried around since the days of Last Exit, and which he had offered to the Police during “Zenyatta Mondatta.” The band rejected it as “too sentimental,” so Sting gave it to the dance troupe Hot Gossip, who released it as a single. Perhaps as result of hearing their performance, the Police finally agreed to record it (see: “Demolition Man” and Grace Jones), and it showed up here. Where the Hot Gossip version was pretty faithful to the Last Exit original, the Police did much the same as what Miles Davis did to Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”: played it a little faster, a lot more ominously, and with an absolutely incredible drum part. The ominousness is largely courtesy of the washes of guitar under the verse that rise like a tide under Sting’s lyrics; the drums mostly lift themselves out of the mix in the chorus and in the extended outro, where the “Brimstone” theme, played in the bass, merges into the song and the band members wordlessly sing and shout with the rising energy of the thing like a ritual. Stewart’s drums sound like Can’s Tago Mago collided with Tony Williams and Fela Kuti, and then it all rises to a crescendo and a sudden end. “I Burn for You” bookends a tight, spellbinding first half of the album which is musically and thematically consistent throughout. If the second half of the album continued this way, it might have been numbered among Sting and the Police’s best.
Instead, we open with an incongruity: Sting’s solo cover of 1929 musical comedy song “Spread a Little Happiness.” Released as a single, the first by Sting as a solo artist, it hit #16 in the UK charts, and is meant to underscore the insincere optimism of the slippery Martin. It is deliciously ironic and fun to sing along with, but definitely a break from the mood set by the first half.
As is “We Got the Beat.” Yes, the Go-Gos single from their first album. Aside from their position as the Police’s labelmates on A&M/IRS Records, it’s not entirely clear what the song is doing on the soundtrack. It does appear in the movie, in a disturbing scene where Martin puts on Mrs. Bates’ necklaces and and lace glove, gazing at himself in a trifold mirror, but it’s an interruption of the steadily bleaker mood.
That mood returns with “You Know I Had the Strangest Dream.” Functionally “I Burn for You, Pt. 2”, the soundscape expands the quiet two bar intro of the earlier song in a quiet meditation until the “Brimstone” theme loudly returns once more.
If “We Got the Beat” is incongruous, “Up the Junction” is a complete non sequitur. While it too technically appears in the movie (ten points to the first person who can tell me where), the only reason for its appearance here seems to be Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford’s mention of the devil in the penultimate verse, as we start to get an idea of the monster that lies beneath Martin’s pious surface.
“Bless This House” is the ultimate moment of disconnection on the album, an impromptu choir singing the hymn as the bourgeois Mrs. Bates enjoys a moment of domestic bliss, all while Martin rapes her daughter in the next room. This bridges crashingly into “A Kind of Loving,” featuring a full-out trio jam by the Police with the screams of actress Suzanna Hamilton (Pattie) and Martin’s vicious command to “shut up!” over the top. While the jam is top notch, high form Police, I literally cannot bring myself to listen to the track because of the screaming as Pattie awakens from her nonverbal prison. After Martin makes a hasty exit, she is shown to be fully restored in body and mind, leaving the question: was the devilish young man the agent of her restoration after all?
We’re left to ponder this question as “Brimstone 2” plays us out. An extension of the theme with an interpolation of the “I Burn for You” tune, it attempts to wrap the album up with a bow. It does a better musical job of this than the film does in bringing closure; we are left with a foul taste in our mouths from the thoroughly malicious Martin, magnetically watchable though he might be thanks to Sting’s movie-star cheekbones.
BONUS BONUS: Here’s the Last Exit version of “I Burn for You,” with a video taken from Brimstone and Treacle.
BONUS BONUS BONUS! The Hot Gossip version of “I Burn for You” is … something else.
(The Police had won their first Grammy, for best rock instrumental performance, for “Regatta de Blanc” in 1981 (yes, two years after its release. What can I do? It’s the Grammys), and their second for “Behind My Camel” in 1982. Also in 1982 they won a Best Rock Performance Grammy for “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” meaning that for the first time one of the band’s singles featuring Sting’s singing received the award. One imagines that was a validating moment.) ↩︎
A benefit show that was initially held only every two to three years, hosted by British comedians whose television heyday was a decade earlier and featuring a clutch of rock musicians playing in acoustic settings, would seem to be an odd source for transformative insight on anything. But when the benefit show is for Amnesty International, the comedians were Monty Python, and the musicians included the likes of Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Bob Geldof, Phil Collins, and Sting, literally anything could happen.
Amnesty International loomed large in my 1980s teenagerdom, thanks to their work to bring attention to abuses of human rights such as torture, miscarriages of justice and prisoners of conscience. The way they chose to bring attention was to involve musicians and other celebrities to perform at events designed to raise awareness of the international problem. The Secret Policeman’s Balls were the first of these benefit events, coming 18 years after Amnesty’s founding and two years after the group won the Nobel Peace Prize.
We’ve talked about how the Police’s touring in 1979 and 1980 began to open Sting’s eyes to poverty and injustice on a global scale. When comedian Martin Lewis, who had partnered with Python alum John Cleese to create and produce the Amnesty International benefit shows, invited Sting to participate in a four-night benefit concert series at the Drury Lane theatre in London in September 1981, Sting wasn’t a hard sell. Never mind that he had never performed solo before, ever; he was game not only to play some Police songs live, but also to lead the assembled musicians in the theme song.
These initial performances, later released under the title of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (a sequel to the original The Secret Policeman’s Ball from 1979), offer a unique view of Sting as he takes the first steps away from the Police and into solo performing. And he wasn’t alone; both this record and its predecessor are full of unexpected performances and pairings.
The Drury Lane concerts happened just a month after the final recording sessions for Ghost in the Machine, which as we discussed last week were full of challenges and confrontations among the members of the Police. It may very well have been a relief for Sting to perform on his own these nights, even they were his first-ever solo performances. What we know is that he went back to his two oldest, biggest hits with the Police and remade them as solo arrangements that allowed him to take total control.
The record opens with “Roxanne,” here re-imagined as a gentle ballad. Sting accompanies himself on guitar, outlining the chords of the song but otherwise leaving the focus directly on his voice. This performance, coming a few year’s after the song’s 1978 debut, showcases the evolution of his voice. In the original performance it’s an uncannily high tenor, but much of the color is provided by his diction. In this performance the first verse feels a good deal like the performance with the Police, but in the chorus he lengthens syllables for emphasis, and going into the bridge he lowers his volume considerably, pulling the listener in closer. In the final chorus he replaces the fade-out of the record with a descending chord, adding a syllable and singing to “Roxanna.” It’s an effective performance and presages the way he would treat the song for years to come.
“Message in a Bottle” gets a similar treatment, but with Sting playing the arpeggiated riff throughout the verse, turning to chords on the chorus beneath an intimate rendering of the chorus that outlines the musical pivot and pulls the listener in even closer. On subsequent choruses he improvises on the melody, moving around the chords and bringing the vocal line higher to emphasize the alienation of the narrator.
Confession time: I have never been a Jeff Beck fan, and my respect for Eric Clapton has gone dramatically downhill in the last ten years. The performances here don’t really shift my opinions that much. “‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” is a meh ballad, and “Farther Up the Road” an OK blues number. When “Crossroads” arrives it’s a relief; Clapton’s retelling of Robert Johnson’s pivotal Delta blues song is iconic enough to survive any number of re-arrangements and retellings, let alone the blues-rock guitar flourishes both men bring to the performance.
Bob Geldof was, at the time of the recording, probably best known as the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, whose 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” is an unlikely single about a school shooting (specifically, the Cleveland Elementary shooting in San Diego). Here the song is given a vocal and piano performance by Geldof and Johnnie Fingers, the Rats’ keyboard player and co-author of the song. After the blues rock of Clapton and Beck, it’s a bracing performance, especially the final verse and chorus as Geldof embraces the madness of shooter Brenda Ann Spencer. (Geldof was among the musicians whose career was radically changed by his work with Amnesty International; in 1984 he responded to television coverage of famine in Ethiopia by writing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, collaborating with a who’s who of rock and pop musicians to record it under the name of Band Aid, and then organizing the massive sixteen-hour cross-Atlantic all-star benefit concert Live Aid. That “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” also spawned the maudlin charity single “We Are the World” cannot be entirely laid at Geldof’s feet.)
The second side opens with another musician in the process of going solo for the first time. Phil Collins had released his first solo album, Face Value, earlier in 1981, and the lead single “In the Air Tonight” had been a huge hit, reaching #2 on both the UK and US charts and Number One in several European countries, largely on its use of gated reverb on the massive drum solo that arrives at the climax of the song. But this performance is more restrained, with Collins on piano and longtime guitarist Daryl Stuermer playing acoustic. While the performance loses something in drama, it does underscore Collins’ songwriting and vocal abilities on the cusp of what would turn out to be international superstardom in the 1980s. (Famously, Collins played in both the London and New York Live Aid concerts, taking the Concorde across the Atlantic so that he could both perform his own solo material and take the drums with an attempted Led Zeppelin reunion.) Collins’ first album was all over the place musically, and the folk-inspired “The Roof is Leaking” is a less iconic performance, though Collins’ vocal performance tells the story effectively and Stuermer’s banjo adds some welcome texture.
There were two types of artists involved in the concert series; the up-and-comers like Sting and Collins, and the established draws like Clapton and Beck. Folk singer Donovan clearly fell more into the latter category than the former, perhaps even inhabiting his own category: the legacy artist. He had gone to a good deal of effort in the 1960s and 1970s to shed comparisons to Bob Dylan, but here he was in 1981 performing “The Universal Soldier” and “Catch the Wind,” two of his most Dylan-like songs from the earliest days of his career. Perhaps the overall atmosphere of protest and social justice inspired him to return to these tunes; “Catch the Wind” in particular is effective here, with a gentle but steely vocal and understated harmonica.
The concert and the album close with an all-star performance of Dylan’s own “I Shall Be Released,” acting as an informal sort of theme song for the night and resonating with Amnesty’s core mission. The band plays what is credited as Sting’s arrangement of the song, and Sting performs admirably on lead vocals, backed by every performer on the rest of the album and then some (Midge Ure and a large group of singers that includes Sheena Easton join on vocals, Python-adjacent musician Neil Innes on guitar, and a full horn section including Mark Isham). The performance devolves into a full on jam session, particularly in the reprise that follows the applause break at around seven minutes. Oddly, it would not be Sting’s only collaboration with Eric Clapton; we’ll hear more from that odd pairing later.
The Secret Policeman’s Ball concerts were the start of a number of influential threads in 1980s pop music, notably star-studded charity singles and concerts and political activism by artists. As we’ve noted above, this performance led directly to “Band Aid”, Live Aid, and “We Are the World”; it also was Sting’s introduction to both solo performance and activism, both of which would be threads of his career for years to come. Next week we’ll look at another (mostly) solo excursion that he undertook following Ghost in the Machine that picks up another thread of his career.
You can watch the whole program, including both the comedy and the music bits, on YouTube (the video is age-restricted thanks to the comedy so can’t be embedded on my page).
BONUS: The video that was released of the event included a few songs from the 1979 Secret Policeman’s Ball, including what I believe are definitive versions of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Drowned” (from Quadrophenia), performed solo by Pete Townshend. You can watch that bit here:
He had been writing the song for five years; it predated the Police. “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” had been written while Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were all members of Strontium 90 with Mike Howlett from the psychedelic rock band Gong. Sting recorded it as a four track demo in a loft in Howlett’s home, playing acoustic guitar and bass. He took it to the band early in their career, who objected that the song was “soft”; he said, “no, look, this is a hit.” He was right, of course.
Sting’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” became the second of the “strong three” opening songs on their 1981 album Ghost in the Machine, following the same programmatic approach as they had previously employed on Zenyatta Mondatta. (Tip, kids: starting an album with three strong songs is the way.) The lead-off, “Spirits in the Material World,” sets up the album and “Every Little Thing” is followed by lead single “Invisible Sun.” Both the other two songs continue the theme of dissatisfaction with the realities of the world, this time writing about dictatorial leaders and continual war.
For such strong lyrical content, the album was recorded in an idyllic place. AIR Studios was in Montserrat in the British Caribbean, a residential studio where the band could live as well as record. They were joined by producer Hugh Padgham instead of their prior producer Nigel Gray; Padgham was notable for helping to invent the “gated reverb” drum sound that became a staple of 1980s rock while recording Peter Gabriel’s third solo album with Phil Collins (later perfected on Collins’ first solo album); he had been producing albums for Collins and Genesis (Abacab), helping them get more of a “pop” sound. As the Police began shifting away from their raw trio sound of the earlier records, Padgham’s experience was helpful, even if not completely welcomed by Copeland and Summers. Copeland recalls, “I was getting disappointed in the musical direction… With the horns and synths coming in, the fantastic raw-trio feel—all the really creative and dynamic stuff—was being lost. We were ending up backing a singer doing his pop songs.”
Picture sleeve for Ghost in the Machine, slightly more literal than the album cover.
The first sound you hear on the album (after a brisk drum hit from Copeland), in the opening to “Spirits in the Material World,” underscores Stewart’s point. The Police had kept to guitar, bass and drums during their first three albums, but here the hook is played prominently on a Casio keyboard. Sting claims to have accidentally written the hook while messing about with a Casiotone “while I was riding around in the back of a truck somewhere.” Sting liked the synthesizer sound so much that he wanted to record the song without guitar; after much arguing with Summers, they compromised and the lead is played by both guitar and synthesizer, albeit with the guitar buried in the mix. Copeland’s drumming is jaw-dropping here, especially considering the tricky rhythm, shifting from a syncopated four in the verse with no clear downbeat to a clearer backbeat in the chorus.
I should also say a word here about the lyrics. I neglected last week to note the most remarkable thing about “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” the offhand reference to Vladimir Nabokov in the last verse. If the slant rhyme of “shake and cough” with “Nabokov” and the casual introduction of a parallel to Lolita stands as the principal reminder in Sting’s songwriting that he was an English teacher,1 the reference in this song to the philosophy of Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine must stand as a close second.
“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” also has non-traditional instrumentation. While the other keyboard parts on the album are played by the Police (according to various sources, even Stewart Copeland was programming and playing synth parts), the piano on this track was played by session musician Jean Roussel. Originally recruited by Sting to play on the second demo for the song, recorded in Le Studio in Morin Heights, Quebec, Roussel’s piano part from the demo survives on the final track; the band was unable to better his part in AIR Studios, and they simply played over the demo. To be clear: it’s a great song, singable but musically deep, featuring a tension between D minor and D major and a memorable lydian scale in the bass line. It also features one of Sting’s great lyrics: “Do I have to tell the story / of a thousand rainy days since we first met? / It’s a big enough umbrella / But it’s always me that ends up getting wet.” (It should be noted that Ghost was recorded while Sting was separating from his first wife, Frances Tomelty, following the birth of their second child.)
If “Every Little Thing” is poppy and personal, “Invisible Sun” returns to the world of Zenyatta Mondatta for its inspiration. Sting had become a tax exile living in Galway in 1982, and strongly felt the psychological impact of the ongoing troubles in Belfast. He wrote the song about the persistence of the everyday people who lived through the hunger strikes and bombings, feeling that there had to be a light at the end of the tunnel to give them hope. For Stewart Copeland, the “invisible sun” also shone on Beirut, where he had grown up thanks to his father’s travels in the CIA; he accordingly also felt the song in a deeply personal way. Sting refers in the opening lines to “looking down the barrel of an ArmaLite,” the rifle used by paramilitary organizations including the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The song’s subject matter, reinforced by its video showing clips from the Irish conflict, led to its being banned by the BBC, a first for the Police. It would not be the last time Sting wrote about war and its horrors, but it was the first time such a song took the Police to almost the top of the UK charts (it stalled at Number Two the week of September 27, behind “Prince Charming” by Adam and the Ants. Welcome to 1981).
After the powerful one-two-three punch of the opening comes a different kind of run, unusual for a Police album. Where previously there would have been a left turn into something goofy, maybe with a Stewart Copeland song, on Ghost there’s another three-song run by Sting that takes us through the end of the A side and into the B, and introduces another new instrument. I don’t know at what point Sting picked up the tenor saxophone and decided that he needed to play it on Police records, but here he was on “Hungry for You (J’aurais toujours faim de toi),” playing a persistent (and slightly flat) hook — and singing in French. Almost the entire song is in French, except for the final chorus. And it’s horny. Apparently Tomelty’s best friend, Trudie Styler, helped with the translation into French as well as the circumstances of the composition; it was during this time that Sting started a torrid affair with her (spoiler: they got married in 1992 and are still married today). The song itself is slightly overwhelming in its instrumentation; the band appears to have thrown everything at the composition.
“Demolition Man” is similarly rich, but it started life during the Zenyatta Mondatta sessions. Written in the summer of 1980 while Sting was living at Peter O’Toole’s house in Connemara, Ireland, the song wasn’t used for Zenyatta, and Sting ended up offering it to Grace Jones, who recorded it for her 1981 album Nightclubbing. When the Police heard their version, they were inspired to re-record it, or as Andy Summers puts it, “Sh*t, we can do it much better than that.” Summers, indeed, is the hero of the song. If he spent most of his time playing in a relatively restrained way on Ghost, here he is unleashed, and the guitar solo he performs is absolutely magnificent. In fact, it’s better than the lyrics, though there’s a fair amount of obscure Britishisms buried in the song (a “three line whip” refers to British parliamentary politics).
“Too Much Information,” the third horn-driven workout in a row, is a groove, and with the shouted “Oh!”s I wonder if the band had been listening to Fela Kuti—or at least the Talking Heads. The lyric, meanwhile, is one that deeply resonated with me in high school: “Too much information/runnin’ through my brain/Too much information/drivin’ me insane.” Stewart’s drums are tight, with only the occasional splash on the high hat or fill at the corners hinting at his prowess. Summers gets to unleash his guitar in the last 30 seconds and it brings the song alive just as it fades out.
“Rehumanize Yourself” continues the horn-driven instrumentation but moves away from funk grooves and back to something closer to New Wave (of course, it’s a Stewart Copeland co-write). The lyrics continue the theme of humanistic opposition to industrialization and racism, and include the only moment in the Police’s work that has made me turn down the volume to avoid playing a four-letter word in front of my kids (“Billy’s joined the National Front / He always was a little runt / He’s got his hand in the air with the other c***s / You got to humanize yourself”). Sting comments on and condemns the undercurrent of violence that causes the police to embrace firearms and leads street gangs to kick immigrants to death and join far right fascist movements. Need I mention the song’s continued relevance?
The follow-up, the reggae-inflected “One World (Not Three),” attempts to offer a recommendation for how, exactly, one is supposed to re-humanize one’s self. Sting takes the perspective that borders are arbitrary human constructs (“lines are drawn upon the world / before we get our flags unfurled”) that distract us from the truth that “we can all sink or we all float / Cause we’re all in the same big boat.” Were it not for the overdubbed saxophone chorus, this song could have fit comfortably on Reggatta de Blanc, as Stewart is let loose to provide any and all drum wizardry that he can.
The mood shifts on “Omegaman,” the sole Andy Summers track. Unlike “Behind My Camel,” all three Police participate on this track, but the expertly layered guitar is the main attraction behind the dystopian lyrics, as we follow a narrator contemplating suicide through deserted streets beneath “skies alive (like) turned-on television sets” (William Gibson, call your office). Apparently this high-energy track was originally supposed to be the lead single from the album, at least in the mind of A&M Records executives, before Sting put his foot down and insisted that it not be issued. (Small wonder that stories continue to be told of the bad blood between Sting and Summers.)
“Secret Journey” opens with the last new instrumental sound the band pioneered on the album, the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer. The story, about a man seeking joy in sadness and the “love you miss” from a blind holy man, revisits the plight of lost love that appeared in their earliest songs. But where the narrator of “Does Everyone Stare” or “Can’t Stand Losing You” wallowed in self-pity, this narrator’s fate is ambiguous. Did he find the love he missed, or did he make his secret journey, become a holy man, and ultimately abandon his original goal? Sting’s purported inspiration for the song, Meetings with Remarkable Men by the mystic George Gurdijieff, would suggest the latter. But this path to re-humanization feels quantifiably different from that suggested in the earlier songs, seeming to lean toward a path of abstinence and avoidance of other people. We’re in a darker place as the song draws to an end.
Literally so, as the portamento bass note leads us into “Darkness,” Stewart Copeland’s brilliant drum work our guide as synthesizers and guitar accompany us ever deeper on our journey. Copeland wrote the song, and in it we begin to hear articulated some of the threats that would ultimately tear the band apart: “I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark / I could be replaced by any bright spark… Instead of worrying about my clothes / I could be someone that nobody knows.” But if the lyrics explore the temporary prison of fame, the song is a perfect blend of high hat, saxophone and guitar, and the crackling thunder of the snare.
Sometimes your vinyl collection is beautiful pristine original pressings, and sometimes it’s a BMG Record Club (aka RCA Music Service) pressing. C’est la vie.
Ghost in the Machine was a big step forward for the Police, in terms of popular recognition and sales, as well as in songwriting and the making of a coherent concept album. But the forces that pulled them along the path to greater market success were also pulling at the carefully knotted strings that held the trio together. Soon after the recording of Ghost, one of the members was getting his first taste of life as a solo performer. We’ll check that out next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Some of the b-sides for Ghost in the Machine were fantastic. We’ll get to my favorite one soon, but “Shambelle,” which appeared as the b-side for “Invisible Sun” (and “Every Little Thing” in the US), is a great instrumental—much better than “Behind My Camel,” which actually won a Grammy for best instrumental rock performance.
Thanks to the reference in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” I searched my local public library shelves (shout out to Grissom Library) for Nabokov’s works and was reading his collections of short stories and translations of his early works in my senior year of high school. I ended up taking a course on Nabokov’s novels during my third year at the University of Virginia, studying with the great Julian Connolly, during which I read just about everything Nabokov had published, including the astonishing late novels Ada, or Ardor and Pale Fire. I highly recommend taking the opportunity to go down a rabbit hold of this kind if you ever get it. Hey, who said rock isn’t educational? (And what would have happened if I went down an Arthur Koestler rabbit hole instead?) ↩︎
It had to be recorded quickly, and it couldn’t be recorded in England. Both essential points of how the Police’s third album came to be were symptoms of their burgeoning success, which had exploded ever since Reggatta de Blanc and “Message in a Bottle.” They were now touring constantly, reaching out to and building up the fan base, not just in the US and the UK but worldwide, so the recording for this album was recorded in four weeks while they were on their second ever big tour. Stewart Copeland specifically recalls finishing the album at 4a.m. the day they were to head out on the road for their next tour.
And the recording location? It couldn’t be recorded in England for tax reasons, because the Police were now making serious money. So they brought producer Nigel Gray, who had also done their first two albums, to Wisseloord Studio in Hilversum, Netherlands to do the sessions.
There was another key difference with these sessions too. Where Reggatta de Blanc included songs composed by the band and some credited solely to Stewart Copeland, here there are only two from Copeland and one (his first) by Andy Summers. Sting’s songwriting had strengthened and sharpened and he was writing more and more material—a trend that would continue through the rest of the band’s recordings. And he was writing material that was informed by what the band saw on tour—especially the extremes of wealth and poverty in the countries they toured.
That sharp writing begins with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Opening with an unfamiliar sound on Police albums, a bass synth, followed by a skeletal guitar hook, the song proper begins with a stark vamp between two notes in the bass with an ominous dub reggae rhythm in the guitar and drums above. Sting’s melody, deliberately simple, tells one of his most controversial lyrics, the story of a schoolteacher who has an affair with one of his young students. Sting has always described this as pure fiction, an exercise in imagination; one imagines that such stories were unfortunately commonplace in the school where he taught before beginning his life with the Police. There’s so much that changes in this song from the first two Police albums. Gone is the unfocused punk feel, all but the barest hint of the reggae influence, the group improvisation. In their place is impressively minimalist songwriting that gets into your memory circuits and a sense of true menace. There’s more power in the first 30 seconds of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” than in an entire side of Outlandos D’Amour.
“Driven to Tears” is the track where you most directly hear the impact of the Police, and Sting’s, new broader worldview. Opening with a driving beat in the bass and drums, he addresses the listener directly: “How can you say that you’re not responsible? What does it have to do with me? What is my reaction; what should it be/confronted by this latest atrocity?” The chorus is punctuated with open, ringing chords from Andy Summers and a relentless bass line that arpeggiates down a diminished minor chord. The impact of all the touring the Police had done is apparent in the performance; this is a tight ensemble, but when they let loose, as Andy Summers does on the bridge with a searing eight-bar solo, they really rip. The tune closes without bringing hope; the circling bass line remains grim throughout.
The hope, such as it is, arrives in the next track. “When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” shows that the Police were paying attention to the rules of good album construction, loading the first side of Zenyatta Mondatta with their three strongest songs of the album. It’s arguably the strongest start to an album they had done yet. And “When the World…” is a killer. Built on a simple ascending modal scale that Sting makes funky through the use of leading tones, Copeland’s relentless drumming and Summers’ textural guitar underpin Sting’s cheery song of post-apocalyptic survival, where he has an endless supply of canned food and only one VHS tape to keep him company. The break keeps the same funky beat and but adds double tapping on the bass and a slowly simmering single note on the guitar. Never let it be said the Police were too uptight to work a groove, the song seems to insist.
“Canary in a Coalmine” is a return to a more comic approach to songwriting, painting a wry portrait of a socialite who can’t survive outside the rarified air of her wealth. Featuring the immortal couplet “You say you want to spend the winter in Firenze / You’re so afraid to catch a dose of influenza,” the song catches the band at their most upbeat, with the guitar and bass trading licks throughout. A ringing set of piano notes, smeared out by an echo, add an almost Beatlesesque touch to the brief bridge. The light touch is brief; for the next song, “Voices Inside My Head,” we’re back with another bass driven groove as the band explores a pure funk jam. The solo instrument here is really Copeland’s drums, as he explores different fills under the relentless scratch and throb of the guitar and drums. In the outro, the groove remains but the guitar’s itchy texture is peeled back, leaving a barer dub heartbeat.
“Bombs Away” is the sole Copeland songwriting credit on the album, and his trademark sardonic wit is on full display with the story of an incompetent general and corrupt president who both dream of the charms of a “guerilla girl.” Andy Summers is taken off the leash for a blistering solo and multiple overdubbed descant lines over the last chorus.
The easiest song for a bus full of teenagers to sing along to! “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” opens the second side of the album with an instantly iconic guitar riff that falls back to a repeated rhythm on the supertonic, over a a walking bass line and some of Sting’s finest rhyming dictionary writing. The song, though slight, may be one of the best examples of their pop songwriting genius: a full intro sound, stripped back to minimal instrumentation over a repetitive verse, augmented with full harmony vocals on the pre-chorus, and an insanely catchy singalong chorus. Sting has claimed that this was his attempt to pay tribute to early rock and roll like “Da Doo Ron Ron”; then again, he’s also claimed the lyrics are about the use of simplistic words by politicians to manipulate and deceive. I say it’s about dancing, and the pure joy of three insanely skilled musicians playing together at the top of their craft.
The same can’t be said for “Behind My Camel”; indeed, both Sting and Stewart Copeland disliked Andy Summers’ debut solo compositional contribution that they refused to play on it. (Copeland believes the name of the song was both a tribute by Summers to the Middle Eastern inspired guitar riff and because, in his words, “You know what you find behind a camel, right? A monumental pile of sh*t.”) The best aspect of the song is its brevity; at just two minutes and 53 seconds, it seems to last far longer.
Fortunately, “Man in a Suitcase” proves a successful return to the pop-reggae blend of “Canary in a Coalmine,” with a tune that figured heavily in the tour for Zenyatta but was never played live since. It’s a slight lyric, but one that has taken a near-permanent residence in my mind as I’ve had to travel more often. The couplet “Whole world’s my oyster/the hotel room’s my prison cell” resonates way more than it should. The band sounds as though they could play the song in their sleep. It’s a fun, and ultimately disposable, listen.
“Shadows in the Rain” sounds unclear as to what it wants to be: another minor key funk jam? A song about slowly losing one’s mind in hallucinations? The band seems to play it both ways at once, with shambolic outcomes. But there are still pleasures to be had here. Summers’ guitar, though low in the mix, does some sick things around the edges of the tune. And Copeland’s metronome-precise drumming is a masterclass in subtlety, as he drops a beat here, adds an extra splash of cymbal there. The only weak part of the jam might be Sting’s improvised vocals over the outro, which are half-baked and distracting. But that bass line! A heartbeat, a footfall, a rhythmic rock.
The band closes with a tightly knit Copeland instrumental, “The Other Way of Stopping,” that is a portrait of the group at their collective best. All the colors of Copeland’s drum kit are on display here in service of a simple melody that Sting and Summers play, first in unison and then diverging, with Sting’s bass climbing and diving on the chorus. When Summers’ guitar begins to overdub more and more lines into a guitar chorus at the end, it’s like a manifold path unfolding, and he gets the last word here as the band exercises the other way of stopping, which I think was meant by Copeland as a joke about running off a cliff but here plays more as a transformation.
The band seems to have enjoyed the material on the album but has voiced regret regarding the hurried recording sessions, and went as far as to re-record both “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” years later; the former was included on the band’s first greatest hits compilation, Every Breath You Take: The Singles but the latter was cut for running time and didn’t receive a release until 2000. But, a few weaker songs aside, Zenyatta remains a high point in the band’s discography and one of the last times that they would be a true triumvirate. When they returned to a studio five months later to begin recording their next album, the power dynamics had shifted. We’ll talk about that one next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: The video of “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” has to be seen to believed. The band cheerily plays the song in the snow as Copeland films them with his ever-present Super8 video camera. The thin pretense of syncing the action with the song is quickly abandoned, as Copeland yanks the neck of Sting’s bass down to unblock his face, then pushes it up to block Sting’s; at one point all three of them are playing the guitar at once. At their best, this was a band that knew how to leverage goofiness in support of their music, for which there’s a lot to be said.
In the 1980s, before streaming services and the Internet, if you were a fan of an artist you often traded cassettes of that artist’s rarities—b-sides, bootleg recordings from live concerts, and maybe obscure appearances the artist made on other peoples’ albums. Today’s album falls solidly in the last category. I first heard the seriously off-kilter songs on today’s album thanks to a compilation tape made by my friend Catherine, and I was thrilled some years ago (10? 15?) when I found a copy of some of the works on vinyl.
Eberhard Schoener, born in 1938 in Stuttgart, Germany, began his career as a classical violinist and conductor, but turned to new ways of making music in the 1970s. He was one of the early adopters of the Moog synthesizer, and also incorporated Indonesian elements in his music. But the oddest career development came when he invited his friend Andy Summers, who he knew from progressive rock circles, to join the recording of his new album, Flashback. Andy’s group, The Police, was still hungry for gigs and they all went along, appearing on several songs on the album. Later that year Sting and Summers participated in another Schoener recording, Video-Magic.
Manager Miles Copeland, however, thought the work didn’t fit the Police’s image, and it was quietly suppressed. Schoener, however, knew he had gold, and a series of reissues kept the material alive, most combining tracks from Video-Magic with songs from Flashback and the prior album Trance-Formation to make a sort of “greatest hits” compilation, which was issued with various covers and titles. Confusingly, one of the titles it was issued under in 1981 was Video-Magic; it’s this compilation that we’re looking at today.
“Trans-Am” was the lead off track on Flashback and also plays that role here. An oceanic swell of what at first seems to be pure noise and is then revealed to be a passing airplane is underpinned by a brass fanfare with heavy reverb. The lead is played on a high synthesizer line, and Sting scats his way through the vocal introduction as Stewart Copeland builds a huge drum cascade below him. The lyrics aren’t exactly Police quality: “here am I/so high/in the sky…” and the tune quickly segues into “Why Don’t You Answer” with the sound of a dialing rotary phone. This second track may be the musical standout: with no progressive rock pretensions, the backing track plays as pure “Neue Deutsche Welle” (and wouldn’t have been out of place on my radio show about that New Wave variant). Sting sings a harmony-tracked chorus pleading “why don’t you answer” that wouldn’t have been out of place ona later Police album. Unfortunately the song is more of an idea than a fully developed composition; the lyrics peter out and we’re left with a mood piece.
“Natural High” is our first Video-Magic tune proper, and it’s really something. Some Andy Summers guitar work at the beginning, playing against an organ line, a high synthesizer line, some in the pocket drumming of a kind we rarely get to hear in the Police (possibly because it’s not Stewart; he didn’t participate in the Video-Magic sessions), and then Sting’s vocal. When Sting’s vocal enters you are reminded of two things: his younger tenor voice was really high, and it had limits. Schoener’s melody pushes that voice up to the limit from the very first phrase: “Who needs the sky / just watch me fly / I’m on a natural high.” I haven’t ever heard Schoener speak, but for me the text setting here is a reminder that he is not a native speaker; why else would the word “the” be set as the high point of a phrase, on a high E flat an octave above middle C? Something I spent time learning as I began figuring out how to apply my own singing voice was that Sting’s rock’n’roll tenor was applied differently than a classical voice, and you can really hear it here, in the pinched high vocals of the upper end. But a lot of the rest of the vocal line is quite high too, and there the vocal production is unstrained, open and well supported. The middle section develops a really nice groove against a more innovative drum pattern. But it’s that chorus that keeps coming back as if to say, “yes, you weren’t imagining it, this is ridiculous.”
“Signs of Emotion” is the sole track from Trance-Formation here, and features Andy Summers on guitar in a bluesy, lovely opening statement over a string-like synthesizer; for a second it’s almost in Mark Knopfler territory. Then Schoener’s synths take over for a short bridge, giving a purely electronic swell of sound in response to the opening statement. When Summers returns, his accompaniment is augmented by pipe organ with distant choral voices behind.
The title song from Flashback opens with a trumpet fanfare on the synth and a wordless melody from Sting that’s once again in the high upper range of his voice. Schoener appears to have really enjoyed pushing Sting to the upper limits and this track is no exception. Here Schoener has deployed a Beatlesesque array of sounds beneath Sting: strings, horns, celeste-like keys, and then a squelchy bass lead, all with Stewart Copeland’s relentless drumming and some textural guitar work. The lyrics that enter in the second verse are a reprise (flashback?) to “Flashback.” The track ends with an actual brass fanfare.
“Octagon” is a different sound world with a slightly funky edge. Sting (playing with an orchestral percussion section) gives us the funk and duets with Summers who brings some of the rock and roll. Sting gets an extended bass duet with Schoener on the Hammond B3 next, and you get to hear some of his chops but he seems content to just push the work forward. Which is a good move. “Octagon” is the longest work on the album and, while Schoener keeps it varied, it’s a bit much as it gets into the sixth minute.
The next two works are more like chamber music than orchestral works. “San Francisco Waitress,” scored for Fender Rhodes electric piano, alto saxophone, and tenor vocalist, sets to music a short story in the form of a newspaper article. This is Sting, actually having fun for a change, to the extent of ending a song with a dad joke. The track itself is easily my favorite on the album. Not too overdone — the only part that is in dubious taste is when Sting and saxophonist Olaf Kübler both reach for the same high note at the same time, with slightly different conclusions about its exact location, and most everything else is sensitively set. Even the antagonist of the piece, the aggrieved Tom Horsley who takes a waitress to small claims court for breaking a date, is presented sympathetically. It’s genuinely fun. And the wonderful thing is it is all true! The original newspaper article appeared in the New York Times in 1978 under the headline “Vain Hopes Remain Thus for Admirer Who Sued,” and the quotes from Byron and Quintilian were both courtesy of Judge Richard P. Figoni, the judge cited by name in the song.
“Code-Word Elvis,” the story of a sad sack twenty-year-old in the Lonely Hearts column with a rich imaginative life, is set initially to a string quartet with guitar, spare drums, and occasional saxophone. The very best thing about it may be the word painting of the correspondence address “Postbox Elvis, 57938,” which improbably becomes a statement of private triumph for the narrator. As Sting sings the fantasia on the address, a flute joins in to underscore the untethered joy of the narrator’s anticipation: surely his love of racing sport, action movies, and the King will bring him the correspondence he craves. It’s a tightly composed little poem; I’d love to hear more like it.
That’s not what we get with “Powerslide,” a brief instrumental from Flashback in progressive rock mode that closes the compilation. It’s a brisk little bit of synths where the best thing is the bass solo in the bridge and Stewart Copeland’s drumming, and it brings the Police’s tour through the German progressive rock world to a fascinating end.
Not that the Police were done touring; not by a long shot. Following the success of Reggatta de Blanc, they hit the road for a long stretch that strained the connections between the band, but also started to build their songwriting muscles in new and unexpected ways. We’ll check in on the record they made following that journey next time.
Gordon Sumner was born in 1951 in Northumberland, England, the eldest child of a hairdresser and a milkman who used to be a fitter at an engineering works, in the shadow of Wallsend Shipyards. He attended University of Warwick at Coventry but found he preferred playing and writing music, so left after a term. He worked a series of odd jobs, eventually getting certified as a teacher, and taught at a prep school for two years. During this period he played jazz in the evenings and weekends with a series of bands including the Phoenix Jazzmen, where a yellow and black striped sweater earned him the nickname “Sting,” and Last Exit, a jazz fusion band.
He was a bassist, singer and songwriter during this period and was actively writing songs, many of which would be recycled for material in his later projects. Last Exit moved to London in 1977 to try to make it big, but ended up breaking up, with half the band heading back to Newcastle. Sting’s co-founder in Last Exit, keyboardist Gerry Richardson, became music director for the band of a Trinidadian-born singer/songwriter named Billy Ocean. And Sting joined a new project with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Henry (or Henri) Padovani; they called the band The Police, inspired by the American Copeland, whose father was an intelligence operative for the CIA. Copeland had been playing in a progressive rock band called Curved Air; he had met Padovani after a Curved Air gig and invited him to join the band.
The new trio recorded a single, “Fall Out,” that got some press (Mick Jagger wrote the review in Sounds magazine). About the same time, musician Mike Howlett invited Sting to join a project called Strontium 90, and Sting brought Copeland along. In the band they met guitarist Andy Summers, ten years older than Sting and Copeland, who had played with Eric Burdon and the Animals and psychedelic artist Kevin Ayers. Sting was growing dissatisfied with Padovani’s limited playing, and invited Summers to join the Police as their fourth member; ultimately Summers issued an ultimatum that if he was to stay, Padovani had to go, and the Police were a trio again. Desperate for cash, the trio bleached their hair blond for a Wrigley’s gum commercial.
They got signed to A&M Records and recorded an album, taking advantage of Sting’s hot songwriting streak that produced songs like “Can’t Stand Losing You,” “So Lonely,” and “Roxanne.” Outlandos D’Amour hit the upper reaches of both the US and UK charts, and after an exhausting tour the band headed back to the studio, with lots of time but fewer songs prepared. The result was Reggatta de Blanc, which I always translated as a kid as “the white boat race” but which apparently actually meant “white people reggae.”
(This is what it’s like to write about The Police. There’s so much backstory that you end up writing five or six paragraphs before you even get to the music.)
Fortunately for the longevity of the band, the very first song on the album was an all time classic. Sting says he came up with “Message in a Bottle” on tour, and that Andy Summers added the hook, that incredible arpeggio that underpins the song. The actual recording, while it sounds simple, is built of overdubs, with both Summers and Copeland layering their parts. Over it Sting sings one of the great melodies of his career. There’s not much reggae in this song, except in Sting’s voice, which at this phase of his career is notable for the altitude his tenor could reach and the slight echo of a Jamaican patois around the edges. Sting had acknowledged listening to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” in writing “So Lonely,” but he must have been listening to more to pick up that depth of an accent in his singing voice. (Elvis Costello notoriously once said, “Somebody should clip Sting round the head and tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent.”)
But even with all these factors going on, the fundamental genius of the song is built into it from the start. Those swirling arpeggios at the outset are echoed in Sting’s vocal line, which drops from the fifth of the minor scale down to the third and back, with variations on the fourth and second of the scale. But Sting stays floating above the tonic until the chorus, where he hammers it three times before popping back up to the third and back down (“I’ll send an SOS to the world”). And he repeats the next phrase three times, all on the tonic (“I hope that someone gets my…”), while the chords change underneath. And then we realize that we’ve actually been suspending above the fifth of the scale for the chorus, and when he drops to “message in a bottle” it’s only a half step down but it feels as though the bottom of the world has dropped out from under you. The arrangement on the record reinforces this, with the guitar ceasing its arpeggiation and only Sting’s bass reinforcing the pounding loneliness. Stewart Copeland adds to the feeling of drift here; playing a driving beat through the majority of the song, he gives a syncopated fill on the high hat on the chorus that reinforces the feeling of loneliness and alienation. Finally, there’s the coda, the “sending out an SOS” on repeat, over Andy Summers’ weeping guitar line. There are relatively few perfect pop songs, and the Police led off side 1 with one of them. It was their first song to go to Number One on the UK chart.
How do you follow a masterpiece? If you’re the Police, often with an instrumental. “Reggatta de Blanc” shows a couple of key Police traits: the virtuosity of all three players, the degree to which Jamaican music was occupying their collective imaginations, and the joy that they apparently found in playing music with each other. With a sustained note on the guitar and Copeland beating double time on the hi-hat, Sting counts the band off and Copeland immediately lets loose with one of his virtuosic drum fills, this time crackling on the rim of the snare. Sting plays a bouncy arpeggio that rocks back and forth between the two opening chords and Andy Summers plays fills until the trio locks into a rock beat, playing a series of chords over an insistent eight-note ground on the tonic in the bass. This is where the vocals come in, and they’re pure filler, a set of “cha!”s and what can only be described as a vocal exercise: “Eeyo, eeyo, eeyo-yo.” It’s fun, almost cinematic in the moods it delivers, and utterly inconsequential. Setlist.fm says that the band played it live 42 times between 1979 and 1982, but almost twice as many times in the years before they broke up in medley with “Can’t Stand Losing You.” That version was in the setlists when they did their 2007-2008 reunion tour, and both Sting and Stewart Copeland played the medley on their solo tours in the past year.
If “Reggatta de Blanc” became an unlikely live staple, “It’s Alright for You” appears to have been the opposite, a filler track only played live once by the band. Written by Copeland with words by Sting, the song is aggressive and driving but the lyrics seem to be mostly throwaway, with some unfortunate period notes in the verses (the “limp wrist tight fist contract no twist” verse in particular makes this a challenging karaoke choice).
“Bring on the Night,” by contrast, has enjoyed a long life for a song not even written for the band. Like many of Sting’s songs, on paper it sounds hopelessly pretentious. Written while Sting was in Last Exit, the song was originally titled “Carrion Prince,” a reference to the Ted Hughes poem “King of Carrion” (though I didn’t know it when I was first listening, at the same time that I was falling down a Ted Hughes rabbit hole), and was apparently written with Pontius Pilate in mind. (Worse yet: Sting later read The Executioner’s Song, and, feeling that “Bring on the Night” was a fit to Gary Gilmore’s death wish, now says “I sing it with him in mind.”) You don’t have to know any of that to enjoy the song; in fact, you might be better off not knowing. In the version on the album it’s a reggae-inflected romp, with Summers and Sting exchanging phrases and ideas throughout on their respective instruments. We’ll hear this song again. The next song, “Deathwish” — not so much. This wisp of a song, credited to all three members of the band, hasn’t been played live by anyone since 1981. It’s got a striking intro, played with open fifths in a syncopated beat, but the lyrics are blah. It doesn’t have a real chorus, just an instrumental riff. It’s in and out so you can get on to the next song.
And the next song is worth it. “Walking on the Moon” was the band’s second Number One in the UK. It continues the subdued mood of the chorus from “Message in a Bottle” and stretches it out in an eerie, echoey track that is simple, subversively melodic, unexpectedly modal. The backbone of the track is the bass line, which is just six notes in syncopation: subtonic (x2), tonic, mediant, supertonic, subtonic. A ringing chord from Andy Summers punctuates the riff after the tonic is played. Stewart Copeland plays some of the finest work of his career, giving a weightless feeling with his snare work and, especially, the shift into a triple meter for a full sixteen measures after the last chorus. The track is in a minor key but feels somehow upbeat, as though one is traveling meters with each step. Sting has said he knew he had made it as a songwriter when he heard an intern in the hospital where his first child was born whistling “Walking on the Moon” as he walked by in the hallway. When I first heard dub, years later, I understood the musical point of departure for the song.
If Copeland was in the land of the sublime on the previous track, he swings to the ridiculous on this next song, opining “The other ones are complete bulls**t.” He has sole writing credit on “On Any Other Day,” and it sounds more like his later solo work than a Police track. I can’t find a mention of a single live performance on Setlist, which is a pity because the song is bratty fun with its story of a middle aged man who hits one minor obstacle after another on his birthday. Unfortunately, the obstacle Copeland picks for the last line of the chorus, “My fine young son has turned out gay,” hasn’t aged especially well.
“The Bed’s Too Big Without You” was the last single released from the album, getting a release as an extra 45 included in a collection, Six Pack, that also includes the Police’s first five singles (excluding “Fall Out”). It’s the most steretypically “reggae” of the tracks on the album and is deceptively simple, given its tragic history (Sting is said to have written it in memory of his first girlfriend, who supposedly committed suicide in the distraught aftermath of their breakup). The mono mix of the song, which is more like a full re-recording and which is only available on the Message in a Box compilation, is even more stripped down; the sixteen bars before the last chorus, just bass and drums, are as minimal as this band ever got.
“Contact” is another Stewart Copeland track that doesn’t appear to have ever been played live. It’s fine but nothing memorable. The same cannot be said for his last songwriting credit on the album, “Does Everyone Stare,” which opens with a piano figure that he supposedly wrote in college and has a moment of pure serendipity after the first chorus, a swelling operatic tenor moment that, according to Copeland, came from a radio broadcast that happened to be picked up by the poor wiring of his home recording studio when he was recording the demo. It also has some of the funniest writing on the album (“I never noticed the size of my feet/till I kicked you in the shins”) as well as some of the deepest self-pity (“Last of all I’m sorry ‘cause you never asked for this/I can see I’m not your type, and my shots will always miss”). It was a perfect song for a thirteen-year-old me.
The last song, “No Time This Time,” was written by Sting as a b-side for “So Lonely,” and was added to fill out the album’s running time. It sounds more like Outlandos D’Amour, with a rushed vocal performance and a strong punk flavor. The band performed it live a handful of times, but it probably deserved more; it has a huge energy and is eminently singable.
The Police were one of the rare bands where the second album was stronger than the first, and they would continue to build this trajectory with the follow-up. But at the time they were still doing various side projects, and next week we’ll listen to the most unusual of the projects from this period.
I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.
What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.
So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.
But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.
So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.
Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!
We’ve come across Duke Pearson twice before in this series, both times in Blue Note recordings by the great McCoy Tyner, where he was the producer on Tyner’s Extensions and Expansions. Pearson had been with Blue Note artists since the early 1960s, when he joined the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet. In 1963, Pearson made his mark in two important ways: first, he was the arranger for four of the five tracks on Byrd’s A New Perspective, including “Cristo Redentor,” which became a hit.
Second, he became the chief A&R (artists & repertoire) man for Blue Note following the death of Ike Quebec. In this role he is credited with shaping the sound of Blue Note during the bulk of the 1960s. He also recorded seven albums between 1964 and 1969 on Blue Note, beginning with the auspiciously titled Wahoo! and ending with Merry Ole Soul, which as is traditional for Christmas albums finished recording in August of 1969 (and as is traditional for 1960s Blue Note albums was recorded at Van Gelder Studios). He was joined for the sessions by Bob Cranshaw (from Sonny Rollins’ band) on bass, Mickey Roker on drums, and Airto Moreira on percussion.
We’ve heard the opening track “Sleigh Ride” in this blog before; it kicked off my 2022 Christmas jazz hour on my Exfiltration Radio series, “Riding in a Wonderland.” At the time, I wrote, “This uber-cool take on “Sleigh Ride” is viewed through the prism of spiritual jazz, with a drone in the bass and drums that’ll knock your socks off.” Well, that’s true, but there are some really spectacular fine details in the arrangement as well that are worth expanding upon. The open chords in Pearson’s introduction, the pervasive swing, and the genius switch from piano to celeste for that opening melody: all perfection. And listen to what the bass is doing in that opening! That syncopated drone on that fifth of the scale, in octaves, remains the steady pulse throughout the entire intro, first verse, first solo, all the way into the bridge where suddenly the arrangement snaps into a more conventional bebop pattern, but only for sixteen bars! And the stride-influenced piano rumble that Pearson adopts on the second bar (“there’s a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray…”)!
Pearson takes “The Little Drummer Boy” at breakneck speed, but still gives Mickey Roker plenty of time to make his mark in a way that the prior song didn’t really permit. Here the drummer gives a massive marching-band style introduction across the entire drum kit as the bass and the lower chords of the piano keep the drone going. When the full melody arrives, Cranshaw gets to cut loose a little, boogeying up and down the octave but still returning to that ground—and at the end of each verse, Roker returns to cut loose, here with a splashy cymbal, there with a roll.
Pearson plays Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” more straight, though there’s still more than a touch of the blues about his playing. Only the entrance of the celeste at the end signals Pearson’s imaginative rearrangements. The next track, “Jingle Bells,” is more freely adapted, with Airto’s Latin percussion (doubled by Roker on the wood blocks) signaling the brisk samba tempo. Cranshaw gets to join in the reindeer games with a wandering bass line throughout.
The duo of Roker and Airto get “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” going at something like a breakneck speed, as though a samba party were happening at 78 RPM instead of 45. Pearson follows suit, gleefully improvising atop Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s Christmas classic, and Cranshaw follows, briskly ripping through two choruses and a bridge. Santa has never samba’d so hard.
Pearson turns serious on one of the few non-secular songs on the album. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual that was first collected inReligious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, compiled by Thomas P. Fenner, the first director of music at what is now Hampton University. Pearson brings church to the performance, with inflections of gospel and blues in its depths.
We’re back with the martial marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” for “Wassail Song,” otherwise known as “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Pearson and Cranshaw have an extended improvisation on the theme in the lower octaves before the main tune returns and the procession moves away. But “Silent Night” is back in the sound world of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and gospel, as though Franz Gruber were a southern pastor.
“O Little Town of Bethlehem” is played as straight as it gets: a piano solo, with no blues around the edges. This might have been Pearson playing in church. It brings a quiet note to end a set that has gone in every other possible direction already.
Pearson’s collection was the only Christmas album released on Blue Note Records during the 1960s, and is lesser known compared to some of the great jazz Christmas classics like Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. But it’s a great collection that spans a variety of styles and is well worth adding to your Christmas playlist.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Here’s the playlist of Christmas jazz from 2022 that opens with Pearson’s rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” It might be time to make another one of these…
