I got this Super 8 movie camera…
1979-84
The Police took up only eight of my fifty-seven years,and those years went by fast. They were big years, andthey left a mark; but the really important thingshappened outside of band life.
Re-entry into the civilian world after band life took a long time. From the day I left college I had never lived in the real world that most people inhabit. Musicians live apart from society, maybe because of our vaguely shamanistic role in life. Office hours are our weekends, and we work while society plays. Saturdays and Sundays are a problem for us because on these days we have to share everything with the civilians, who, since they are crowding the parks and boulevards, are not at their stations making our world function. On Monday everything is ours. Thank God it’s Monday!
On Sundays we can’t bitch at our managers and there is no laundry service at the hotel. The populace is loose on the streets! The starving musician merely turns up his collar against the world and shuns the light, but the wealthy shaman can build a fortress.
I certainly needed one. When the first money hit, after buying an inexhaustible supply of jet black jeans, I claimed a nice little house on a quiet London street. The sidewalk in front of it immediately became a sacred grove for young fans who, when school got out, would congregate on the neighbor’s stoop singing Police songs. They would oooh and aaahh at the tiniest signs of life coming from my house. Inside I was a charging bull who was feeling intimidated by a bunch of girls. I wished I were still in our Ottoman fortress above Beirut. I’d snarl at the congregants ferociously as I came and went.
It may have been inconvenient, but this was what I had come for. Notoriety is an odd by-product of music but essential. The music transports the musician himself first of all but bewitching others is really what it’s about. Music is an amplifier of one’s self. If it doesn’t capture attention, then the magic is sterile. So being stared at is part of the deal, and at first it was just fine to create a stir just by existing.
There would be a rustle of recognition and the “S” sound.
“Isss it him?…PoliCe…SSting…SSStewart…” I’d be wondering if I was just hearing things, then there would be someone praying at me for a photo or an autograph, or a blessing.
One reason to be cheerful was that I got pissing rights over pretty much everybody. At least in the music universe. The combination of chart success and validated musical prowess (other musicians respected us) meant that I had a rank that was right alongside the graven images that I myself worshipped.
That’s how I felt the night I took my dad down to the West End in London to see the Buddy Rich Big Band at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. My daddy raised me on Buddy Rich, and it was a thrill, not just to get to see his show and experience the most spectacular manifestation of my craft on the planet, but also for my father and me to be treated like royalty in Buddy world. Backstage after the show I was saved from gushing over the master by his band surrounding me for autographs. His players were all the hottest young cats straight out of Juilliard, and they grooved to The Police. It was a pretty perfect Christmas moment in my heart as Dad and Buddy reminisced about bygone bandstands, notorious bandleaders, and legendary big band players from back in the day. They were contemporaries and had inhabited the same world before my father was swept away by the Second World War into a life of international skulduggery. Every now and then after the war was over, he would pull his trumpet out of its battered case and blow some soul over Lebanon from the terrace of our house in the hills. It was a big glow to see him now, backstage at the swank jazz club, getting respect in the world of his unrealized dreams from my most exulted music deity.
But living with idolatry is strange, even for those who seek and expect it. You notice that people act oddly in your presence. There is heightened tension. Veins throb in people’s foreheads. People laugh nervously, particularly at any gag from the Known One. The tiniest acts of kindness, wisdom, or wit are rewarded with undue enthusiasm. The palest sigh or frown can be an excruciating laceration on the soul of the faithful.
People apologize for all manner of imperfections, as if it is their duty to maintain the pristine quality of my environment. People offer their seat, their place in line, their daughter, wife, or mother. Folks seem to assume that I deserve a better shake than they get. Somehow I’m special, although there is not anything remotely sacred about me. In Los Angeles, where many really luminous stars live, civilians are actually discomfited when they see stars unpampered, even if they snicker about it and exaggerate the anecdote later. It’s hard sometimes to know how nice or not people really are. Everybody is on best behavior.
Although most people really don’t know or don’t care about the cult-head, there are some who strenuously pretend not to. They are usually the people who are most drawn by the strange social magnetism and overcompensate as they resist it. You can see the struggle to tamp down the butterflies. It looks like a kind of hysterical nonchalance. At the other end of the scale are the folks who are so bewitched that they think they are in the presence of an apparition. Two of them will stand in front of me and talk about me as if I’m a painting on a museum wall.
“Gosh he’s tall!”
If I move or speak directly to them they will still conduct their dialogue about me as they interact with the avatar.
“Tell him he’s tall…”
As I was starting to experience this I was pretty sure it wasn’t normal, but for the moment it was the role I had chosen. It didn’t occur to me until years later that I’m just some guy.
It was getting claustrophobic. Privacy deprivation is something like sleep deprivation. The love that surrounds you becomes vexatious.
I often wished that I could merely turn my collar up and shun the light.
A wall went up. Suddenly I could afford a country estate, so off I went to green Valhalla in darkest Buckinghamshire. The ivory tower grew like a beanstalk. Old friends gave up trying to get through. When they did, I had to put them at ease by downplaying everything. And so there was I, overcompensating.
Fame has its comforts but is intermittent in its use as a tool or key. Sometimes it deserts you. You can’t plan ahead on the basis that it will work for you. Sometimes the maître d’ at the most critical restaurant will light up and throw rose petals as he escorts you to the best table, sometimes not. When confronted by nonrecognition it is perilous to pull rank—because it’s not real rank anyway. How the mighty crash and burn to be overheard saying:
“But don’t you realize that I’m—?”
On the whole, things turn out better when the mojo is working than when not. When the eminence is recognized, doors open to the rarefied zones and the blessings of this world are more freely offered. It’s like being extremely lucky in an inordinate number of instances. When the mojo is lit you just get dealt better cards and any roll of the dice is a winner.
It does lose its fizz, however. If you are an alligator, then the dankest swamp is just plain white bread. If you are an eagle, you’re probably over having the world right there on the end of your talons. It’s just another day in the boring old sky. And so it was that I tried to remember my most yearning youthful fantasies about the ultimate Olympian state of grace that should be rock star life. When I looked around, all I could see was the same old everyday world. Of course, my life was blessed, but why did I have to keep on reminding myself?
One day, on my way to the airport, my limousine takes a detour through a leafy neighborhood with children playing on the lawns and guys playing baseball. I look out the window at the splendor of a glamorous life. I’ve seen this world in a thousand cereal commercials and am enthralled by its simple, easy, wholesome charm. I’m sick of Valhalla. I wish I could live on this street. I wish everyone could live on this street.
It took getting off the jet to start being able