Ghost In The Machine: 1981/82

The Police hot enough to char the arena...

It's probably just as well the cold wave hit Ann Arbor before the Police did.

Otherwise, there would be nothing left of Crisler Arena today but a lump of charred and smoking concrete. They were that hot.

This is a band that has bite and strength without sinking into the meanness which seems to have consumed so many of their peers. This is a band whose effects are special because they are spare, and whose effects mirror its music. 

This is a band whose members no longer need to bleach their hair to get attention. They got plenty of that from the packed house at Crisler, and they merited every bit of it.

The crowd was on its feet before the lights went out before the band ever hit the stage - like a flock of birds fluttering simultaneously from a telephone wire and nobody knows how they know.

Of course, the Police are a pre-sold product, the hottest act in the business, a sell-out everywhere on their present tour. But pre-sold audiences don't necessarily stay sold, not when tickets are $10.50 and $11.50 and such sums are increasingly hard to come by.

And the Police pulled it off. They not only kept the audience sold, but they did it with a product that was not precisely what they were sold on in the first place.

Oh, sure, they played their hits - 'Message in a Bottle', 'Roxanne', 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic', 'Don't Stand So Close to Me', 'De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da', 'Can't Stand Losing You'. Drummer Stewart Copeland kept up that crisp, driving, deceptively simple beat. Andy Summers stolidly supplied his magical guitar. Bassist and lead singer Sting (born Gordon Sumner, and some day we will remember that he started his career with a band called the Police) was witty, deft and powerful.

And the three-piece wind and brass section of Dave Watson on tenor saxophone, Darryl Dixon on alto sax and trumpeter Marvin Daniels deserves special mention. They provided much of the depth and richness that separate 'Ghosts in the Machine', the band's latest album, from its three predecessors.

But The Police did more than run through their proven successes or jam self-indulgently. They actually put on a show, with limited but pointed comments be- tween songs from Sting ("All right, Ann Arbor. That's an intriguing name, Ann Arbor... Was it a woman?"), marvellous pacing (segueing 'Invisible Sun' into 'Roxanne', for example, and 'Don't Stand So Close to Me' into 'Can't Stand Losing You' for their encore) and a carefully orchestrated sampling of their repertoire.

They also seemed to care about their audience, a quality that can- not be overestimated. "What we have to do is make this big room a little room," Sting said early on, "and you can help us do it."

They also seem to care as much about what they have to say as they do about the money they make for saying it, which is as rare as it is welcome. There is little ostentation about them - no mountain of amps, no fireworks, no costumes.

Perhaps that is why they don't sound ostentatious (or pretentious or sophomoric or any of the other pejoratives used against rockers who aspire to profundity) when they do a song like "Spirits in the Material World" or "One World." Perhaps that's why the latter elicited the most enthusiastic response of all.

Certainly, no other band of recent memory merges spirituality and sensuality with such effort- less ease. Their music is suffused with the former as the middle Beatles were and with the latter as the early Elvis Presley was, and subversive on both counts.

But the spirituality and the sensuality are also equally joyous, and all the more subversive for that. The Police have the spirit of the '60s that the '80s long for without sacrificing the sleek toughness that the '80s have come to expect.

And that is another reason why Crisler Arena is still standing: the Police generate as much light as they do heat.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts opened with a set that looks paler in retrospect than it did at the time, when it looked merely uninspired. Jett has the country's top hit in 'I Love Rock 'n' Roll,' but she didn't seem to love it for more than about half of the 40 minutes she played. One of her stronger tunes is called 'Nag', a clone of Ernie K. Doe's classic 'Mother-in-Law', and her attempts to stimulate the audience showed that it takes one to know one.

(c) The Ann Arbor News by Jeff Mortimer