Every Little Thing She Does: The Police Saga and Tribute

While the rage in Britain had turned from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, then to Led Zeppelin and ultimately, The Sex Pistols, a trio of older musically competent man-boys set out rule the Material World.

They called themselves The Police.

On drums, Steward Copeland drew on classically-trained licks, infused them with Reggae (and a driving snap-time personal metronome), and thus, designed a better beat with a cosmopolitan ethos setting off a vigorous pace. He is considered by Rolling Stone to be in the top 10 amongst the greatest drummers of all time (7th). (I'd say top 5...)

Essentially, The Police just played better than the average bloats thrashing about in the West End of London. To further the mix, Stewart's family connections (Miles Copeland III, I.R.S. Records founder) and band experiences with Curved Air, a once popular band, meant the rock beat was set; now, for a singer, songwriter, and a guitarist, to match the musical and business chops of Copeland.

Not to be outplayed, ever really (superego-id-ego stuff), was Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. Sting. He is underrated as a bassist, but likely, just as overrated as a songwriter, meaning: he did both equally well - and gave The Police the material it needed to grow from a faux-punk band to a record-setting popular rock band. (Below is a basic demonstration Sting's dual talents (songs and bass) in his classic brooding obsession song: Every Breath You Take, played more than any other in July and August of 1983 on MTV. As a youth, it was the theme song for a local radio station, Q101 out of Chicago.)



Guitarist Andy Summers gets overlooked as the combustible pairing of Sting and Stewart meant the eldest of the bunch, Andy, played a very flexible and transparent membrane between the two. He was like a dad influence without much fathering, instead, mostly rocking. Andy's chops on guitar were under-appreciated, as he could play subtle and a wide variety of licks flawlessly, never really showing off - as the solo was not much desired (Sting v. Stewart) in his playing. That said, Summers could do that, too - So Lonely, a classic Police show closer - was his time to shine.

The Police had only a handful of albums (and a bunch of greatest hits, reissues, box sets, that created a much larger discography), but they had a sound, and a range, that shone brightly in each record.

• Outlandos d'Amour (1978)
• Reggatta de Blanc (1979)
• Zenyattà Mondatta (1980)
• Ghost in the Machine (1981)
• Synchronicity (1983)

The best songs, frankly, were these:

1. Roxanne, So Lonely, Can't Stand Losing You off Outlandos
2. Message in a Bottle, Walking on the Moon off Reggatta
3. Driven to Tears, Canary in a Coalmine, Man in a Suitcase, When the World Is Running Down... off Zenyatta
4. Spirits in the Material World, Invisible Sun, Hungry for You, Too Much Information, Omegaman on Ghost in the Machine
5. Synchronicity I and II, Every Breath, Tea in the Sahara, Murder by Numbers off their final studio release Synchronicity

In all, about 25 tracks (some not listed, obviously) are first-rate for anyone's listening pleasure. No argument really to be had. Others, had their quirkiness, off-putting sounds, or did not jive up. Every band has them - that's the process of music, and stretching.

From 1978, after barely knowing each other six months, they were to be on world tour by 1980, getting huge publicity that would make the current music idols and gods envious. It was a different time for the Police, for music, for the world, really.

Murder by Numbers (9/10/83)


Murder by Numbers' partial lyrics:

Now if you have a taste for this experience
And you're flushed with your very first success
Then you must try a twosome or a threesome
And you'll find your conscience bothers you much less

Because murder is like anything you take to
It's a habit-forming need for more and more
You can bump off every member of your family
And anybody else you find a bore

Because it's murder by numbers, one, two, three
It's as easy to learn as your ABC
Murder by numbers, one, two, three
It's as easy to learn as your ABC

Now you can join the ranks of the illustrious
In history's great dark hall of fame
All our greatest killers were industrious
At least the ones that we all know by name

But you can reach the top of your profession
If you become the leader of the land
For murder is the sport of the elected
And you don't need to lift a finger of your hand

By 1983, they put their final album together during fist fights, and childish and jealous rants. It would be hard to know - as no one directly connected wants to say what exactly caused it - but they outgrew the basic concept of the band. And stardom, travel, and musical directions resulted in their breakup at the height of their commercial success. (Their last album, Synchronicity, spent 17 weeks at the top of the American Billboard top 100 charts, interrupting Thriller's run.)

The album's title (Synchronicity) was inspired by Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, which mentions Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity. Sting was an avid reader of Koestler, and also named Ghost in the Machine after one of his works. (Wikipedia)

But in synch, The Police were not. By 1984, the band was abolished but for a one-off attempt in 1986 that went nowhere. It took 21 years, aside from a few drink-inspired get togethers, before they would only see the light in 2007, or rather, the dollar signs. (To be cynical like Murder by Numbers.)

The things I remember most are haunting lyrics intertwined with a tight playing drummer and a ethereal guitar player. She wore a red dress; drove you to tears; when the world is running down; while every breath you take was inspired. We sent a message in a bottle and our SOS could be heard. And we all are Spirits in the Material World...Boom crash!!!

The saga is done, but the memory of their works are not forgotten.

The 2012 New Year: Advice for the Young at Heart

Chapter 16 of My Life and Times at Purdue University

A friend on Google+ posted this as a call to action, or resolution, or escape from that worn path:

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I'd like to change about my life, and what steps I can take to implement those changes. I generally do this anyway, whenever I start feeling like I'm unhappy a little too much. One thing that I do not do is wait until January 1st to implement these changes. I just don't get that mentality--this is my last cigarette ever! I'm gonna eat another pig in a blanket, and tomorrow we diet!--and I think that if you genuinely crave change, your excitement will keep you from procrastinating.

But of course, excitement is a fleet-footed creature. It's one thing to say "I'm going to get a new job" and another to subject yourself to the indignities of the process--online applications that make you manually type in all the information from the resume you just uploaded; leadership personality tests that ask you the same question six different ways; receiving a phone call, as you iron the blouse you agonized over choosing, that the position has been filled and your interview has been canceled--but why do I give up so easily? A new job would probably make me happier than anything else right now, so why do I allow myself to shrug my shoulders and continue clockwatching?

Perhaps I should set a resolution after all. I clearly need to kick through this wall.

If you need me, I'll either be thinking about why I procrastinate, or trying to decide whether I'm Very Somewhat or Somewhat Very on yet another personality test.

My uneducated response:

I can understand it all too well. I've work at about 20-25 different places in my 25 years of punching a clock, or showing up to do projects for people I know do not want to be there either. I've taken personality tests offered by the US Navy (scholarship app), Lear Corporation (cool printout), and two other places.

Since I scarcely know you, or what is the bothersome feature in your work (besides work), I suspect you'll change careers another 4.7 times during the next 20.2 years. You might conceive 2.1 kids, or forego that route, and put $151,578 more dollars in your pocket over that same time span.

The resolution is just another dream. But dreams have payment options. You must pay plenty into them, sacrifice some other route, and know that your sunk costs may infuriate someone you tend to say you love/like, but obviously they don't get what you are after and don't love/like you quite the way you want them to back.

At a younger adult age, with an IE degree, I had four goals: nice car, nice home/condo, good job that met the lifestyle, and a well, a smoking hot wife was what I wanted, but would have settle for a B- looker with DD boobs. (Hey, I'm a guy.) That said, I have no real estate, no car now (head gasket on one, repoed my moms), a freelance writing gig with FREE being the op word, and absolutely, not even the slightest tickle of a woman wanting me for a steady eddy, or a fuck buddy to soothe either her woe-beggotten trek, or the damn-good-n-rich living large existence.

So, zero for four. I should be miserable.

But, not really. Of those, only the woman would be a plus factor to the current course setting I have. Sure, I will work soon enough. But if I get so desperate...I'll find a way again to do something menial and relatively worthless to survive. Since any a-hole can entertain with words, a song, or a cool new app put up for the world at $5.99 per download, my current skill sets probably won't make a dent into my dream of being a writer that gets to do projects around the world. Why I came back for college, part deux.

So, no losses are insurmountable. The fucking existence we lead generally does not end with or begin with a job, a car, a big screen hi-def, or a semi-steady sexual encounter that you do taxes with yearly and claim kids, if you want, separately. I yearn for when I could play baseball all day, eat spaghetti dinner with my mom, and watch the Wonder Years hoping shit would be better for me in my then dream pursuit of a cheerleader I fell for in high school. Alas, the damnest thing: I wasn't popular, or a stud enough athlete, too short, also, and I talked funny too (as a hillbilly from Tennessee tends to do).

The moral is: do you. Whatever the fuck that is to you - be it. Write, build cabinets, play music, fix cars, entrepreneur something, watch Captain Kangaroo and make it a game too, I don't care. The time we got is short. You got plenty more on me because you are smart, know the story, and don't have a pecker that leads you astray like I have been led to the cliff, and fallen to a presumed death by ejaculation/masturbation. I keep on climbing back up, but I don't have a killer plan either. 

 

I write - editorialize, I'd say - my whole life. Shakespeare at least (if we believe he wrote EVERY thing) was productive. Sonnets, plays, fucking crap no one seriously could duplicate, even now. We just steal his ideas over and over and over until generation get-over-yourself forgets whomever came up with it in the first place. As you've noted, in your posting Andrew's take of The Police song When The World Keeps Running Down, that's a talent too - pirate and innovate. Do that if it doesn't land you in the fucked-in-the-ass prison. (Oh yeah, did a tour of duty in the pokey too. Didn't have Notorious B.I.G.'s legal team to get a "not guilty." I was stupid, not criminally minded. A much much longer story, if you can believe me so far.)

2012 Resolution: try for that dream and build it one day at a time. Might take 5-10 years but you will be better off, you will have really learned how you do you, and likely, will not know fuckers like me exist. The truest test of your payments to your dreams...someone else will really notice, support it, and that dream becomes a fucking reality I hear about on CNBC with Jim Cramer screaming, "Buy! Buy! Buy!" And your now-snobby ass can give me the advice.

Happy New Year! 

 

And Keep At It!

 

 

That's my advice to all of you out there between 1 and 92.

Again, Happy New Year to all of you.

Futurism: Avoid Becoming Egregiously Electronically Eggheadish or Face Catastrophic Loss of Control

Chapter 5 of Back to My Future: My Life and Times at Purdue University

Two four six eight time to differentiate. D to the x, dx/dy d to the y/dy. Three point one four one five nine. Cosine, tangent, inverse sine add an asymptotic line that’s the egghead battle cry. (Modified Northwestern chant from the 1980s.)

Yes, the number crunchers of the world – the software/app creators who simulate, model, and devilishly devise cool-until-they’re-not financial derivatives, along with the World of Warcraft – do rule the world. We now love them – “hey, I can socialize with this cool plastic holding LED box in my palm” – whereas, just thirty years prior, we made John Hughes-like films that poked fun, then hugged them for being, “our strange, little, geeky friend.”

Coming back to a campus loaded with technocratic guys and gals-in-training (given my old major as an engineer), to be a liberal artsy fartsy is a lesson in humility. (Another lesson – yep, get those too much.) The cool people used to be easily defined via the American ideal sold Eskimo-style via modern mass media: the leggy blonde that just needs a rubber band for the hair, and she’s good; the V-shaped guy with abs of steel created with iron, calisthenics, and huge scoops of Creatine. I get that. Or, I got that, as is the case.

Nerds, now, not so much.

Now, in my mid-life, all these Java-scripting, data mining, Flash-and-beyond gurus are awfully full of themselves. The world works to their skills, and suddenly, I’m redundant in actions and conversations. (An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) would put things back to a more manageable level…like 1600.) There is this tendency to come at you (the nerds’ approach to friendship): hey, do you know this programming language or how to hack (or reengineer) this application? You don’t, well you are not worthy of my nanoseconds. Because I don’t build apps or do apps, or buy every type of hand-held, my- world-is-complete tool, I must be uncool, oddly ancient, and seen as an artifact of a bygone time.

Figures.

Just when I finally get to the point of an odd, trial-by-fire assuredness in self, I am now considered solely a sinusoidal function of my technological knowledge and consumerism acquisition – which, if you knew my life recently – one would understand mere survival was a 1,000 terabytes more important that iPoding, iPhoning, and iPading my way back to the lower-middle rung of the American social ladder. Such is the globalized nature of these ones and zeroes – they control every transaction, interaction, transportation, and social act humanity seems to engage in daily.

And here I come back to university for history, political science, economics, and management (yes, some tech stuff in there) and I’ll-be-damned if the world has not gone and got itself into a harried and frenetic rush to be more Neo, Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves-like. Not exactly the category I’d take for 1,000, Alex. The majority may deem this the primrose path; I deem it the course to devolving into very wooden, two-dimensional, on/off, as-the-circuit-board- decides-based-on-the-program people. You are not ‘the one’, people.

Tell me: what happens when this machine awakens? Or if not that, what if electricity/electronics goes awry? How about making all that power for 9 or 12 billion inhabitants, or more? Do you like being able to do things for yourself – consider it a right – then look out, that will be changing in the apps-for-all-tasks future. Facebook and Google are stepping stones. Likely as not, we are two to two-to-the-nth power generations away from an Alpha-to-Epsilon Brave New World. I do not know when, but 2540 is not as far from now as it seems. (Just as Huxley wrote in 1932…about a future that is closer to today than it was in his generation. Exponential growth of the ghost in the machine, I deduce.)

By now, my poking-fun-at-nerds to digressing-satirical-rant may seem at odds in the halls of ‘higher learning’, but it reflects the purposes we are fueling are not as wondrous as those that make them daily come together think. They are flawed. Nerds take note. While all the cool stuff does amused, it is the financial models, the personality testing/modifications, the medicines that contort behaviors from age six, the genetically-modified food, the technology-dependent structure of society that will shudder one day to a halt, as we have invested too much faith in the machines, the codes, the flickering of tubes, the diodes, and the 10,000-page equation someone (or a team of brilliance) worked really hard on, but forgot the necessary backdoor, thus the butterfly cum epic tsunami.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, I regret to inform.

But nothing happens quite in the time frame one projects.

Avoid becoming too tied to these new systems. Somehow, the Earth got along pretty well for 99.999999999% of its existence without a diode, transistor, or machine code to tap into for instructions. The instructions we petty humans were given (and not followed) worked well when man played with poo, worshiped all manners of beast and bright star, to a conclusion that was never deterministic. Not even realistic – given their faith-based technology.

What I am saying is: I wish for my good ol’ simplistic days, too.

Just that line does not suit the technocrats, computer scientists, and doctors of electrical mayhem very well.

They always need more data…

Baby Steps: The Maneuvers of The Day

Chapter 3 of Back to My Future: The Life and Times at Purdue University

How does one define whether they are making progress? I suppose it starts with actually doing something to improve the direction you are going towards. Like, today, I bought business cards for DCF Press. 20 bones for 500 cards and a t-shirt with my logo on it. Seems pretty mundane to the average big shot that reads my blog ("Hello, I need some VC, or better yet, angel investment, got money?") Yet, for someone like myself, whose last decade was a lost decade - a tired metaphor for describing Japan, and now, maybe the United States - doing anything like this is a start of motion out of crib, or the Chrysalis stage of a butterfly, the time when we know going forward is an action.

This stage is necessary to get the ball rolling - to make investments though, as is stands, I have no income right now. (I suspect I'll be funding this venture though with money acquired through the dead-end jobs I want to escape and some student loans I plan to sign the dotted line to get.) But be that as it may, one thing I have avoided: editing. For some reason, though I know I've gone through countless revisions of one title - and put out a few other ideas - this fetters on.

Reading a book on screenplay writing -Syd Field's Foundations - this paraphrased tidbit helped:
"the last bit of work in a screenplay may not go smooth. You may write and rewrite and procrastinate. It is your love of the work, like reading the final chapters of a book, where you have grown to love the characters, the dilemmas, the heartbreaks, the story...too much to let it go, so you save the last few pages. And that is ok. So, don't worry."

I did that lately with my baseball title. I am afraid to revisit it. Because, I know it will be done. (That and a pesky desire to prove some things can have a better end...)

So, it is baby steps. And the 1000 words, and focus. The planning out of a different course. Ending something I started way back when no one but me gave a damn. Oh, that hasn't changed...yet.

Time to walk taller, and with a greater purpose...maybe to the moon!

Police Songs: For a blogger that voted for me

Just because I am a big Police fan, I will post a few songs by The Police and Sting. I can remember getting Message in a Box, the entire catalog of Police songs, and thinking, "I'll never sell this." Well, I fell on hard times, and sold about 400 CDs and over 400 tapes. I needed money. However, before I did, I did save them on my laptop, that which I could. (Now, the laptop crashed...haven't listen those 1,200 plus songs in over a year.)

Well here are the Videos/Songs I like:
Too Much Information


Englishman in New York


Demolition Man (In Chile, 1982)

The Soul Cages


Invisible Sun (with Bono, live at Giants Stadium)


Tea in the Sahara (live)


If you Love Somebody, Set Them Free (Dream of The Blue Turtles)

Of course I could put Every Breath, Message, Roxanne, Spirits, Fields of Gold, and plenty of others on the list, but I just gave my oddball favorites.

Thanks Cooper! Easiest Post I've Done!

Precious Natural Resources: Songs & Bands Style

A few songs or bands that have a natural resource or environmental theme....all are pretty good songs without the connection.

'Black Diamond' by KISS



'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' by Pink Floyd...excerpt that is 7:50 long



'Gold Dust Woman' by Stevie Nicks, with Fleetwood Mac



'Silver and Gold' by U2UK (cover band) but a good version of it



'Tea in the Sahara' by The Police (live)

Just some live music: You Tubing it style!!!

The groups: 311's "Amber", The Police's "Message in a Bottle" , The Dave Matthews Band's "Warehouse" Rachael Yamagata's ALIAS TV SERIES PROMO "Worn Me Down", The Pet Shop Boys "West End Girls" and Oingo Boingo (of Danny Elfman creation) "Dead Man's Party".

The Police performance is the 1st one they ever did of Message in a Bottle.

The last one, Oingo Boingo led by Danny Elfman, is a creative genius. Composer of numerous soundtracks such as Batman, Dick Tracy, Nightmare Before Christmas, Mission Impossible, Men in Black, Sleepy Hollow, Spiderman and plenty of others...

I wanted to do more with less today, but I wound up just being like a million others...doing less with the same.