The Other Side of Summer

I would like to write a song about how I could fulfill an adolescent dream by seeing the Police and Elvis Costello play the Hollywood Bowl this Spring (yes, together), but that the performers and the dream are not what they once were, and the $600 tag was not in the dream. True, I could pay $54 to sit in section X2, but I know from experience that not even binoculars help much in that situation. I suppose if I really believed, I would have gotten up early on Sunday morning and stood in some line somewhere, simultaneously redialing the box office. I did not do that. I think I am afraid that I would get there and discover that the audience looks like me, rather than all the cool kids we were when there was a Police, and Andy Summers looks like my principal.

But, I can’t write a song about it right now, because I am mostly grown up and don’t have time for it this afternoon. I will just have to rely on your lyrical imagination, and, in the latter matter, my likelihood to win a radio contest.

Oh, Roxanne. Oh, Alison. I’m not angry. Truth hits everybody.

The Police: Message in a Bottle

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Does Everyone Stare the Way I Do?

(Editors note: With apologies, this post is not about the writer’s wife, with whom he is actually, rather than just metaphorically, in love, and who is quite the looker).

A good love story often starts with the first time he really noticed her. It’s a while before they actually connect, but he’s never forgotten that feeling before he even knew her name. The first time I really noticed rock music was a serendipitous tuning to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” on my clock radio. It felt weird and jumpy and brittle, but I couldn’t tune away. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to like it or not.

I’d like to say that I was there from the beginning, but the truth is, I was only four when Outlandos D’Amour hit. By the time I was curling my whole body around a jambox at a 9th grade party to keep anyone from changing the music from “Message in a Bottle,” the Police were a few years disbanded. But they were my first love. Regatta de Blanc is still one of the greatest records I ever hear, I can still pick Stewart Copeland’s distant high hat out of a soundtrack, and it still gives me goosebumps to read something like this.

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