At the turn of the century there were few bands that seemed less likely than The Police to ever reunite. Bands with deceased members, maybe. So it was rather a surprise that the three men who made up the '80s punk/reggae/rock pioneer reassembled last year and hit the road. Given their fabled mutual animosity back in the '80s, more than a few eyebrows were raised. How long, skeptics asked, would this tour last?
Long enough to get them to Portland, at least, and really, isn't that all that matters?
Friday night the band played the Clark County Amphitheater in a set that showed both why the group was so great and why its breakup kept it great.
In the late '70s and into the '80s, the band was taut, lean. There was something tense, an underlying skittering sensation from which it derived much of its power. They were all three superb musicians: Andy Summers, bringing a density of sound on the guitar; Stewart Copeland, with a sophisticated sense of rhythm; and Sting, who could write a three-minute pop song, simultaneously intelligent and radio-friendly, like few others. They mixed mythology and culture and layers of meaning in their music. "Every Breath You Take" might sound romantic, but listen to the lyrics: It's a total stalker song (please, people, stop playing it at weddings; it's just creepy).
But that was then, and this is now (well, two days ago by the time you read this).
The band members have gone on to separate, varying degrees of fame and fortune. Whatever they are now, they're not the same people they were. How could they be? More than 20 years have passed. While they remain musically adept, they're not young and hungry. They have nothing left to prove as The Police, nothing left to reach for. So that essential tautness that makes the best of their work so edgy and nervy and intense felt a little ... flabby, Sting's ripped biceps notwithstanding.
Yes, they can still command a show. Sting's stage presence, Copeland's seemingly effortless drumming and Summers' precise guitar all showed that, far from atrophying, the three have remained musical forces to be reckoned with. The audience was theirs from the first notes of "Message in a Bottle," the opener, all through "Next to You," their second encore, which Summers mock-convinced the other two to return to the stage to play.
But the band had a basic problem that it never seemed to solve: Play its excellent catalog the same way it played it 20 years ago and risk a nostalgia trip, or come up with some new arrangements that might bring in some new ideas, but wouldn't be quite the same. It did a little of both, and neither was quite the right fit. On "Don't Stand So Close to Me," for example, Sting's predilection for drawing out his vocals stripped the song of its essential menace. And his stretch into the upper registers of the song gave him some problems, robbing him of the high keen that gave so many of the band's songs their previous edge.
To their credit, the three seemed more like old friends and less like the at-their-throats enemies they were sometimes portrayed as around their breakup in the '80s. Sting consciously moved far to the side of the stage during Summers' longer or more intricate solos, perhaps aware that his charisma would have drawn attention away from Summers. (Most of the camera close-ups of Sting for the giant screen behind the band were of his famous face; most of the close-ups of Summers were of his talented hands running over his guitar.) Sting -- the most famous of the trio, who's maintained the highest profile in the past two decades -- made a point of repeatedly introducing his bandmates.
Far from sullying the memory of who they were, this show made it clear that they deserved the fame and the accolades they once won.
But the show also made clear that coming to an end is part of what keeps good things good. They were conquering heroes on Friday night in large part because of their long absence, and after they play their finger-pinkie-swear last show later this year, everyone in the crowd can say they saw The Police's last tour ever. Much less romantic to say you've seen The Police's third from last tour.
The reliably good Elvis Costello opened the night with his band, the Imposters. But while Costello has his own considerable body of work, boasting that rare trinity of indie cred, critical fawning and commercial success, he never entirely won over the crowd, who was clearly there for The Police. When Sting came out to sing on "Alison," for example, the crowd came to life in a way it previously hadn't, despite Costello's best efforts.
The past and the present, nostalgia and the collision of old memories and new ideas -- reunions are hard to do right, and even when they come off well, much of the excitement isn't about the moment we're in, but the moments that we've left behind.
And that's the thing: Those moments are gone. Time is the stream Thoreau goes a-fishin' in, and so do we all. When we try to reach down a hand and grab it, it runs through our fingers, and we can never find the same bit of it again.