This article has a nice glimpse of humor in a 1983 show in Mass. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Police lineup In 1979 they played the Rat and the Paradise. Four years later they packed a stadium in Foxborough. On the eve of the band's reunion at Fenway this weekend, Steve Morse remembers the trio's live magic By Steve Morse, Globe Correspondent | July 27, 2007 When the Police played for 61,000 fans at Foxborough's Sullivan Stadium in 1983, they arrived by helicopter. Lead singer Sting described seeing that big a crowd from the air: "I was almost sick with fear." It was the last hint of fear he would exhibit, since he and bandmates Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland went on to perform a stadium show to rival anything that U2 and the Rolling Stones would later muster. The Police were godlike at the time. Their album "Synchronicity" was No. 1 on the charts and they were so huge that nervous Foxborough selectmen only approved the show in a split vote. Said Police guitarist Summers: "We're very lucky to get the Foxborough date. It was touch and go for a while." As a compromise gesture, the band had to go on early, at 7 p.m., and wasn't able to use its full lighting rig. The Police had stoked fans' passions with earlier gigs at the Rat in Kenmore Square, the Paradise, Orpheum Theatre, and Boston Garden. If half that excitement can be generated by the Police reunion tour at Fenway Park tomorrow and Sunday, then you'll have a sense of what it was like. (A limited number of tickets are still available for both 7 p.m. shows) The band was electric onstage -- three peroxide blonds who were musical maniacs (with Sting on fretless bass!) and who drove women into complete hysteria. Not every show was great -- they had a penchant for jamming that could be inconsistent and earned them the nickname of "the Grateful Dead of new-wave rock." But they were never less than magnetic; witness that Foxborough show where they mauled the crowd with the rock-reggae brilliance for which they were known, then surprised with a burst of comedy. That moment came when the Police left the stage and were followed by a video cameraman into the dressing room, where they took an English tea break beamed onto the stadium's Diamond Vision screen. The threesome donned stovepipe dunce caps, made faces at the camera, and sipped tea until the impish Sting grabbed the white tablecloth and upset all the cups as the crowd convulsed with laughter. It might be the single craziest move that I've seen at a stadium event. Then they returned to finish the show. My first taste of the Police live came when the band hit the Paradise in 1979. I had missed their Boston debut a few months before at the Rat, when Sting had throat trouble and did a sound check without singing. "They just did some jamming at the sound check, but it was intimidating. We had never seen anything like it," recalls Richie Parsons, whose Boston band Unnatural Axe opened up. Parsons also has a classic anecdote about being in the dressing room when Sting passed wind and tried to put the blame on him. Hard to believe this is the same Sting who is now viewed as a yoga-obsessed English gentleman and owner of a 20-room, 600-acre estate in Italy where the Police rehearsed for the new tour. At the Paradise, the Police were still so new that they didn't have enough material. In just a 50-minute set, they repeated the song "Can't Stand Losing You." After the show, Summers admitted they needed to rehearse more numbers. When I later told this to Sting's son, Joe Sumner, whose band Fiction Plane opens the Fenway shows, he laughed and said, "Gosh, Dad didn't tell me about that!" The Paradise gig left me a little unconvinced. Sting's vocals owed a lot to Burning Spear and Bob Marley -- and it was annoying to hear him periodically toss in the verse "daylight come and we want to go home" from Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song." But I was fully on board when they shot up to the Boston Garden in 1982. The songs were tighter, a horn section had been added, and Summers and Copeland played with an almost metallic fury. It was a big night for new-wave rock, as the all-female Go-Go's opened up. It was a far different Garden experience from the norm in those days, with Styx, Jethro Tull, and Ted Nugent. I also appreciated an interview that Summers did with me before the Garden gig. He talked about being on a recent vacation in Nepal where he was walking up to a remote Buddhist temple when he heard a Police tape being played by a soft-drink vendor. "Hey, that's me on the tape!" Summers said. "No, no," the vendor replied. "Not you! Not you!" I guess MTV hadn't made its way to Nepal yet, so Summers wasn't known by sight. The last time I saw the Police was at the Providence Civic Center in 1984, six months after their sensational Foxborough triumph. Fatigue had overcome them and the show was often a mess, with Sting even botching lines on the hit "Every Breath You Take." By then it was no surprise that they had decided to take a year off. Then that year stretched to more than two decades, other than infrequent one-offs. When Sting headlined a bill with Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics in 2004, he still dismissed a Police reunion, noting, "I think there's more chance of me joining Eurythmics than the Police, to be honest." The Police haven't talked to the press much on this tour -- no doubt they don't want to become tabloid fodder -- but I'll be out there at Fenway, regardless. I'm not happy to see that top tickets cost $225 (and I bought mine), which is a long way from the few dollars they charged at the Rat. But the Police were always a command performance. They earned my loyalty and I want to enjoy every bit of magic they might have left. Steve Morse can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com. _________________________________________________________________ http://newlivehotmail.com