Matt and I had a plan. Fed up with the director of our high school fall play, we decided to play a practical joke on her. We were seniors; we thought we ruled the school. Even though we still had to worry about grades and the prospect of getting into college, we carried with us an air of invincibility. We thought we were kings.
October, 1987. The air was cooler; the days were shorter and the leaves dangled for life in shades of red and gold. When we weren’t studying for AP English, running cross country or out on the practice field with the marching band, we were rehearsing in the junior high auditorium on its sturdy old stage and hundreds of empty seats in front of us. Matt and I would typically carpool to rehearsals, generally in the Whomobile. To psyche ourselves up we’d blast the car stereo and sing at the top of our lungs. We’d listen to U2’s The Joshua Tree and Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun. The latter album, with its chilly demeanor, intricate music and thoughtful lyrics, felt better suited for the autumn. My favorite song was “Straight to My Heart”; Matt liked Sting’s collaboration with Gil Evans, the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.” We both loved “Englishman in New York.” Sting’s tribute to his friend, writer Quentin Crisp, has a whimsical tone, tinged with Sting’s typical melancholy and Branford Marsalis’s weeping saxophone. It will always remind me of my friendship with Matt and the evening we rewrote Agatha Christie. (more…)
Two years ago, when I was working on this column’s debut, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen’s 
It was a strange Sunday evening in the wilds of Holmdel, New Jersey. The PNC Arts Center usually allows patrons onto the property two hours before show time at 6:00 PM, and so I found myself on the Garden State Parkway with Elvis Costello’s Brutal Youth CD on the stereo and thoughts of scoring a sensible parking space bouncing in my brain. Little did I know that, as a courtesy to the weekenders, the venue let people in at 4:00. They dumped me out into the adjacent woods to park! This did not bode well.
Now, had the evening ended there, I wouldn’t have walked away from this performance completely baffled. It would have been my shortest concert experience, but we all would have felt like we wanted to be in the same room with each other, band included. We’re all aware of the behind-the-scenes tensions purportedly happening in Camp Police. We’re also aware that even back in the early days, Sting commanded the majority of the attention, a position that could quickly irritate, and while hearsay shouldn’t color one’s impressions so early in the game, it was evident when Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland took the stage that they were plainly irritated.
