The Police

On the night after we saw "The Blue Man Group", my friend, Jeff, invited me to see "The Police" at Philips Arena. We had some time before the concert and walked around Centennial Park near the Aquarium and The World of Coke. The park was all decked out for Christmas and there were lots of people out walking. The area felt very vibrant. We have not been down there in a long time, but now that I've seen how nice it is we'll definitely have to take the kids down there. After some sightseeing we went to Ruth's Chris for dinner. We had to wait a while since we didn't have reservations and there was not a lot of turnover at the bar as people were engrossed in the football games.

Jeff and I went to the same high school and were roommates as freshman at Georgia Tech when The Police came to Atlanta. Jeff went to the show then, but for some reason I didn't. He said that he remembered it being a great show and really wanted to see this concert.

I like The Police and have a few of their dvd's, but I wasn't sure they would be that great in concert. I don't want to see a band just play their songs just like they're done on the album. I want to see them break it down and jam. There's nothing in my Police music that made me think that they would "jam", but...I was very pleasantly surprised. The amount of sound created by the 3 musicians was incredible and they did plenty of "jamming". There were a number of blended songs where they went right from one song into another and there were a number of their hits like, "Don't Stand So Close To Me" and "Message In a Bottle", that they re-arranged very nicely for the show.

I liked "Synchronicity", but my favorite Police dvd is "Outlandous D'Amour", which has a very raw minimally produced sound. I thought the band did a great job playing their raw heavy hitting stuff as well as their pop hits. We knew the concert was over as soon as they played "Every Breath You Take".

It was definitely a "world class" show and I really enjoyed it. The band seemed to be into it, rather than just going through the motions. Sting tried and he almost got the audience into that magical "transcendent" state, but it didn't quite make it. I think maybe there were just too many people there because the concert was an event, not quite as bad as the crowd at Chastain, but not truly into it. In fact, I've never seen so many people walking up and down the aisles in the middle of a show. They didn't even have the courtesy to wait for a break between songs. If my knees weren't so stiff and I didn't need to stand up to stretch them, I would have refused to let people pass on my aisle while a song was playing.