Fan, fan, fan, fan-freakin'-tastic!
I saw the Police last night in Hartford, CT: a feat that was carefully orchestrated by changing my final French exam date and prioritizing a 2-week New England family visit prior to my departure to Haiti! As I drove our little Miata convertible into the parking lot at Rentschler Field, this guy yelled out, "Did you really drive up here from DC?" "Damn straight!" (Okay, a little embellishment on my part, but I did start in DC on Friday...) "Hot damn! I knew this was gonna be a smokin' concert!" He and his family then spent the next hour sitting in their car with the air conditioning on reading books. A strange beginning to an odd night.
First, to begin, I am a fan. A big fan. Admittedly, I was introduced to The Police when I was a very young adolescent and developed IMMEDIATE and HUGE crushes on Andy Summers and Sting. Stewart, don't know what happened there, but I think it was the British accents. Americans are suckers for accents. As it was 1983/84, Every Breath You Take was on MTV all the time and MTV was what you watched, cool or not. (We didn't have MTV -- or cable -- so I would watch MTV while babysitting, sending the kids to bed at abnormally early hours so I could feast on videos. Ah, the American way!) I was obsessed, then became more obsessed with Sting until his career just became a little too soft-rock for my tastes, although I too have Tibetan monks chanting to a subtle pan-Asian beat on many CDs in my record collection.
Anyways, over the years I had a Police thing, a Sting thing, and then the epiphany: the Police songs are the songs I'm going to be humming for decades to come. I had to go to the concert, even though tickets had been sold out for Boston and New York for a couple of months. I checked the schedule and noted a stop in Hartford: who the hell lives in Hartford? Not as many people as in New York and Boston! I bought a relatively cheapish seat at the back of the floor seating and began to manipulate my schedule.
After a long weekend -- Shawn's wedding on Saturday, Grampie's 90th birthday on Sunday, NYC with Amanda Monday and Tuesday morning -- I drove up the Merritt Parkway in the bright late July sun, stopping at a cheap Greek diner off of I-91N for dinner. I drove up to the stadium with relative ease, parked, chatted with the aforementioned guy in the truck who was excited about the "smokin'" concert, went and bought my t-shirt, and then found out I had an hour to kill before they'd let us in the stadium. Hmm.
I walked back the mile -- for real -- to the car and tried to fix my hair, messed up from the convertible ride and the humidity. Meanwhile, a guy in a Ramones t-shirt came over and said, "I gotta ask, did you come up here from Maryland?" Folks, the license plate clearly said "Washington, DC: Taxation without Representation" but over the course of the next 45 minutes he kept getting excited about Maryland, not DC. Bewildering.
We had a couple of Budweisers (hee, hee!) and I chatted with the two Ramones guys, both workers at Yale Hospital, with the first Maryland-obsessed guy working with hazardous waste. They were both convinced that I was some groupie following the band, but I decided to let the real story come out since I sometimes think my reality is just as weird as something I could make up.
The concert. Entered with an hour to spare, sat in my tiny seat at the back of the field, and watched the crowd saunter in: baby boomers, Gen X-ers, children (this was a rich Mom, Dad and the kids kind of show) all wearing comfortable shoes, comfortable clothes, and baseball hats. Disorienting. Police fans, you're getting old! You are old! I was on the younger end of the spectrum at the tender age of 36... Sigh.
Fictionplane, headed by Sting's son Joe Sumner, opened the show to tepid applause. They were good, but it was hot and the sun was right in my face. I realized with some sadness that my idea of a floor seat was actually a very poor choice: Joe and band were very tiny, the equipment for the show was blocking part of the view, the people around me were a wee bit annoying in the sense that they seemed too comfortably middle-aged! (Agism reared its ugly head at this concert, I fear. Perhaps it was more my reaction against me being a part of this age bracket... Argh!)
Finally, people began to flood into the stadium. Minutes before the concert began, one of the burly security managers looked at me and said, "How many people in your party?" "Just me!" "Here, take this ticket and go up to Section 3. They don't want any empty seats." We exchanged tickets and I moved like the wind: up, up, up closer to the stage. I stopped at one guard and checked that I was moving in the right direction... Yes. A little more.
One minute before the concert began, I was in my new seat: dead center, front section, 22 rows away from the stage. Sting on my left, Andy Summers on my right, Stewart Copeland dead center. No squinting, no pushing to see better: I was right there. I screamed, I sang, I danced my sweaty ass off. I also realized that I am a bit of an insane fan: I sang every song so loudly I sounded like Marge Simpson the next day. And no one around me knew as much as I did! What a bunch of lame-Os! I was very proud of my freaky fan prowess, but then realized that everyone behind me must have thought I was totally insane. I've been on the other side before, particularly at a Peter Gabriel concert in the early 1990s. Peter inspires true fanaticism and there were certainly some fans in full flower in Osaka in 1994; I remember giggling wildly whilst observing one fan who looked like he was having a seizure. (It was a joy attack, friends, not a seizure.)
I became that man at the concert. Joy attack. Flailing limbs. Bellower of "The Bed's Too Big Without You" and other catchy tunes. Sweaty siren of Synchronicity. Snobbish enough not to sing "Every Breath You Take" because that was the only song everyone else sang. In fact, I think I drank some water during that one.
Anyways, it was fabulous. Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. Thank you o gods of stadium concerts for recognizing this mad wild fan astray in the back of the stadium... Next time I sacrifice a goat, I'll do it in your names.
Baaah!
I saw the Police last night in Hartford, CT: a feat that was carefully orchestrated by changing my final French exam date and prioritizing a 2-week New England family visit prior to my departure to Haiti! As I drove our little Miata convertible into the parking lot at Rentschler Field, this guy yelled out, "Did you really drive up here from DC?" "Damn straight!" (Okay, a little embellishment on my part, but I did start in DC on Friday...) "Hot damn! I knew this was gonna be a smokin' concert!" He and his family then spent the next hour sitting in their car with the air conditioning on reading books. A strange beginning to an odd night.
First, to begin, I am a fan. A big fan. Admittedly, I was introduced to The Police when I was a very young adolescent and developed IMMEDIATE and HUGE crushes on Andy Summers and Sting. Stewart, don't know what happened there, but I think it was the British accents. Americans are suckers for accents. As it was 1983/84, Every Breath You Take was on MTV all the time and MTV was what you watched, cool or not. (We didn't have MTV -- or cable -- so I would watch MTV while babysitting, sending the kids to bed at abnormally early hours so I could feast on videos. Ah, the American way!) I was obsessed, then became more obsessed with Sting until his career just became a little too soft-rock for my tastes, although I too have Tibetan monks chanting to a subtle pan-Asian beat on many CDs in my record collection.
Anyways, over the years I had a Police thing, a Sting thing, and then the epiphany: the Police songs are the songs I'm going to be humming for decades to come. I had to go to the concert, even though tickets had been sold out for Boston and New York for a couple of months. I checked the schedule and noted a stop in Hartford: who the hell lives in Hartford? Not as many people as in New York and Boston! I bought a relatively cheapish seat at the back of the floor seating and began to manipulate my schedule.
After a long weekend -- Shawn's wedding on Saturday, Grampie's 90th birthday on Sunday, NYC with Amanda Monday and Tuesday morning -- I drove up the Merritt Parkway in the bright late July sun, stopping at a cheap Greek diner off of I-91N for dinner. I drove up to the stadium with relative ease, parked, chatted with the aforementioned guy in the truck who was excited about the "smokin'" concert, went and bought my t-shirt, and then found out I had an hour to kill before they'd let us in the stadium. Hmm.
I walked back the mile -- for real -- to the car and tried to fix my hair, messed up from the convertible ride and the humidity. Meanwhile, a guy in a Ramones t-shirt came over and said, "I gotta ask, did you come up here from Maryland?" Folks, the license plate clearly said "Washington, DC: Taxation without Representation" but over the course of the next 45 minutes he kept getting excited about Maryland, not DC. Bewildering.
We had a couple of Budweisers (hee, hee!) and I chatted with the two Ramones guys, both workers at Yale Hospital, with the first Maryland-obsessed guy working with hazardous waste. They were both convinced that I was some groupie following the band, but I decided to let the real story come out since I sometimes think my reality is just as weird as something I could make up.
The concert. Entered with an hour to spare, sat in my tiny seat at the back of the field, and watched the crowd saunter in: baby boomers, Gen X-ers, children (this was a rich Mom, Dad and the kids kind of show) all wearing comfortable shoes, comfortable clothes, and baseball hats. Disorienting. Police fans, you're getting old! You are old! I was on the younger end of the spectrum at the tender age of 36... Sigh.
Fictionplane, headed by Sting's son Joe Sumner, opened the show to tepid applause. They were good, but it was hot and the sun was right in my face. I realized with some sadness that my idea of a floor seat was actually a very poor choice: Joe and band were very tiny, the equipment for the show was blocking part of the view, the people around me were a wee bit annoying in the sense that they seemed too comfortably middle-aged! (Agism reared its ugly head at this concert, I fear. Perhaps it was more my reaction against me being a part of this age bracket... Argh!)
Finally, people began to flood into the stadium. Minutes before the concert began, one of the burly security managers looked at me and said, "How many people in your party?" "Just me!" "Here, take this ticket and go up to Section 3. They don't want any empty seats." We exchanged tickets and I moved like the wind: up, up, up closer to the stage. I stopped at one guard and checked that I was moving in the right direction... Yes. A little more.
One minute before the concert began, I was in my new seat: dead center, front section, 22 rows away from the stage. Sting on my left, Andy Summers on my right, Stewart Copeland dead center. No squinting, no pushing to see better: I was right there. I screamed, I sang, I danced my sweaty ass off. I also realized that I am a bit of an insane fan: I sang every song so loudly I sounded like Marge Simpson the next day. And no one around me knew as much as I did! What a bunch of lame-Os! I was very proud of my freaky fan prowess, but then realized that everyone behind me must have thought I was totally insane. I've been on the other side before, particularly at a Peter Gabriel concert in the early 1990s. Peter inspires true fanaticism and there were certainly some fans in full flower in Osaka in 1994; I remember giggling wildly whilst observing one fan who looked like he was having a seizure. (It was a joy attack, friends, not a seizure.)
I became that man at the concert. Joy attack. Flailing limbs. Bellower of "The Bed's Too Big Without You" and other catchy tunes. Sweaty siren of Synchronicity. Snobbish enough not to sing "Every Breath You Take" because that was the only song everyone else sang. In fact, I think I drank some water during that one.
Anyways, it was fabulous. Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. Thank you o gods of stadium concerts for recognizing this mad wild fan astray in the back of the stadium... Next time I sacrifice a goat, I'll do it in your names.
Baaah!
2 comments:
Well, it just goes to show you I really was out of it in the eighties. I had no idea that what I thought of as the stalker song was the Police. It was all over the airwaves when I was merchandising in San Francisco, but I was driving minimally equipped company vehicles that had only AM radios. I heard a lot that I never identified (or identified much later) because in that market AM blasted the music out and didn't spend a lot of time telling you who you were listening. They clearly weren't going to waste any time on anything that distracted from getting you from the attention grabbing music straight to the commercials. That one is in my brain forever, even if I found it a little (or really!) disconcerting. The other big BIG voice of that year of driving around with AM radio was Annie Lennox. "Some of them want to amuse you---Some of them want to be amused---"
ConsulatLarge
Ah, my dear, but you are most certainly IN the 2000s! That's what's important... Dee doo doo doo, dee dah dah dah...
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