Okay. Mea Culpa. I thought I'd move this review from the Suggest Products to the Music section, which I did once they opened up the category for this item. But after I did that, I realized it's not got enough in it about music to be a true music review. I came back in as fast as I could to move it to the DVD section, where I think it better belongs. GreatPilgrim had already left a comment which confirmed my concerns. My respectful apologies for scooting this thing all over the website and traipsing in the wrong backyard. So here it is, and here it stays:
It's as if his parents have died again.
He stares at the guitar slung around his shoulders as though it were a foreign object, his left hand poised on the frets, his right floating to and away from the strings, unwilling or perhaps unable to recover its familiar valence with the left.
He can feel the intense attention of the few hundred people filling his courtyard. He's surprised that so many could tear themselves from the television. He himself could barely leave it. Then he realizes that they're here because he's here, because he decided to play. "I was there when Sting went ahead with it," they'd be able to say. "And he was all broken up, and we were all broken up, and it was a terrible day, but for a while he made it beautiful. It was the beginning of the healing process," and blah blah blah. He'd like that to be true. This could turn out to be something helpful and real for others. But he realizes - and his youth is a testament to this - selfishness is not an easily submersible body. It must be weighed down with deep change. His adulthood is a testament to that.
A few hundred pairs of eyes should feel like nothing. He's felt eyes by the tens of thousands, heard his self-appointed moniker come screaming out of the throats of half-deranged fans who might pass for rational human beings were they anywhere but in his presence. But this crowd is silent, expectant - it's not an intimate concert anymore, but an historic event in his career. He's not sure how he feels about that. He's benefited from many happy accidents in his life. Never from a tragedy. This is different - though not necessarily alien to his experience. He thinks again of his parents, and tries to push the thought away - he's chosen to give a concert, after all.
As a somewhat feeble attempt at a preamble he's just choked out a few words of dedication - words he probably couldn't remember now if he tried; later he may think of them as muttered, inadequate, and useless. They won't make it onto the album. His face is a swollen river dam, a gray surface decorated in a multilayered graffiti of confusion, guilt, sorrow, and helplessness. Questions play on his mind as he stares at his frozen hands; his neural pathways are momentarily gridlocked. The questions are clear even to the least sensitive of the audience: How can I play? Once begun, will I be able to finish? How can I not play? How could they do this? How could they do this?
He finds himself thinking of other gray surfaces, falling concrete slabs pitted with broken squares where windows used to be, disgorging desperate gray bodies as the slabs blacken and collapse into volcanic gray clouds. The images repeat themselves again and again in his mind, the two planes, the two towers, the two collapses, the single ragged hole in the Pentagon, the thousands dead, as the images repeat themselves in the minds of the band members behind them, as they repeat themselves in the minds of the audience in the courtyard, as they repeat themselves in the minds of every living human on the Earth. An unprecedented world-mind of instant replay and silence. Instant replay. And silence. There are no words.
Well. Maybe there are a few. If he can get them out.
The music is rising behind him. The band has begun to play, as he realizes that part of him didn't expect them to. But really, how could he not expect it? He brought them here. He's the bandleader. As the impossibly sunny Kipper might sagely point out, this was his bloody idea, his concert, his live album. Even dour Dominic realized - and said as much - that once they had taken the stage, they would not be able to leave until they had played the entire set.
He'd invited Kipper, Dominic, and his other favorite musicians from the four corners to his villa here in Tuscany for a jam session on his back porch. He even had the porch built specifically for this purpose, loving as he does to work at home. He'd had the Steerpike Portable system flown in (airplanes!) for the master recording of the concert at Il Palagio so he could work with his friends in the most intimate setting possible. No need to go to the studio anymore. No longer a teacher-cum-superstar with something to prove or a race to win, but a boy at play with his toys and his friends in his room. No pressure to meet any standards but his own. His wife and his kids have quietly withdrawn not to another room, as other families might, but to a distant location, knowing him as they do. Families may be the substrates of other men; Sting has always found his in music.
And he is seeking it again now as the band threatens to arrive at the first lyric of the song, seeking a familiar ground on which to stand. It isn't easy. The ground's been torn away by nineteen madmen with box-cutters (Jesus, box-cutters!). All the ground, everywhere, gone. The world in free-fall.
The audience applauds in support as they recognize the melody. And it is time to sing. What else can he do?
If blood will flow and flesh and steel are one
It's a hard, hard thing to sing an apropos lyric. To strike the correct balance between the emotions in your voice and the emotions of the audience. You must not overstate, or you will be found insincere. This was a day to be sincere. And there would not be a more apropos set of lyrics sung this day, anywhere (was anyone else actually singing anywhere? His could not be the only ululations. Was he a capitalistic opportunist for going ahead with the concert? What did that audience think they were doing here, and why aren't they home watching CNN? Why wasn't he?). The bit@h of it when you're Sting is you're aware of things like that. But you can't stop for insights; you have to sing. Put it in the voice.
drying in the color of the evening sun
Sting's said it himself; he's got a voice for melancholia. And this is a melancholy song, a simple mournful ditty from fifteen years ago, in that period of amazing creativity, enormous world tours, big-budget films, saving the rainforest, working with Amnesty International, still having both parents.
Still having both.
tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away but something in our minds will always stay
"Fragile" is remarkable in that it's not at all preachy. It's almost a haiku in its spareness of lyrics. The delicacy of the melody carries the words carefully, as though the message itself is tenuous as a soap bubble.It's an old song, yes, but with a new arrangement, the sort of latin smooth-jazz beat that Sting's helped to repopularize. The sorrow of the song is newly replete with immediacy; some of the audience members recall the days Before, when they used to play the Nothing Like The Sun cassette. "Fragile" was the last song on the A side. It was one of Sting's specialties - the secular humanist song, something you listened to just before the flip to the rollicking and upbeat "We'll Be Together". The flip itself was another of his specialties.
perhaps this final act was meant
to clinch a lifetime's argument
that nothing comes from violence
and nothing ever could
for all those born beneath an angry star
lest we forget how fragile we are
on and on the rain will fall
like tears from a star
like tears from a star
on and on the rain will say
how fragile we are
how fragile we are
He ends it then in a wash of gentle sustain, and the crowd is silent. He hasn't called for this moment of silence. It arrived on its own. No one who hears the song from now on will be able to separate it from the tragedy, not because Sting played it on the day of, but because its relevance to 9/11 is by nature intrinsic and immutable. A human response to inhuman acts. It speaks for all.
**********
Sting lost both his parents within a six-month period while on tour in support of Nothing Like The Sun. He didn't stop touring, didn't allow himself a grieving period. He thought he could handle anything in those days. He threw himself into his tours, his charity support, his films, and when he emerged on the other side of these self-imposed demands and sat down to work on the next album, he found he couldn't write.
Not one line for two years.
When he found his voice, it came in the form of the autobiographical - and utterly uncommercial - The Soul Cages, an ethereal voyage through the dreamlike world of a fisherman lost at sea and his distant son's too-little-too-late attempts to save him. This was the turning point for what had already been a brilliant career; this loss and his response would thereafter inform all his work. He was never the same, nor was his music.
This is another turning point. But as before, Sting hasn't stopped the music. Why not?
Maybe the answer is in the initial idea. This was to be a joyous occasion, one in which he would revisit his past work with his good friends in his own home. But this was not any ordinary jam session. He would rework selected songs from the past to meet his current standards.
This is a curious obsession with Sting, this need to revisit and "fix" what's gone before. By Sting's own admission, a tense reunion with Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland for a greatest hits album was broken by his relentless insistence on reworking the songs. Only one reworking - Don't Stand So Close To Me - made it onto the album. Stewart Copeland quit - again - in disgust and protest. Not surprisingly, this failed collaboration fell within the same tumultuous period of Sting's life following Nothing Like The Sun. Perhaps serendipitously, Sting and the 9/11 band perform the song again - in yet another reworked version - for his Tuscany audience. He can't let it go.
But maybe he shouldn't. The Tuscany live album may contain the best and most heartfelt version of Roxanne ever recorded or performed. Purists like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity hate this kind of thing, calling them latter-day sins of a formerly great artist. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? Depends on how you define fading. If it were me, and everywhere I went everyone still clamored to hear this one song I've been playing live for almost twenty years, I'd shift that sucker around until it became interesting to me- and to them- again. Besides, you will note he doesn't play or rework "Miss Gradenko". He plays and reworks the Police hits he wrote. These are Sting's songs. All his. So perhaps the question isn't, "should he be doing this?", but "do you want to listen?"
There are plenty who want to listen. And watch, for that matter. Sting ordered up a documentary crew to film the preparations of he and his band for this concert, which was planned for 9/11 from the beginning. The documentary, a three-hour version of which aired on A&E and will be released on DVD this month, starts with the band members arriving from the airport. They have two weeks in which to prepare for the concert, an extraordinarily short space of time considering the scope of Sting's catalog and the changes that always emerge whenever they work with this man.
They're the cream of their profession, at the top of their game, and they've come in search of a challenge. They're interviewed separately for their opinions on Sting and his music. Comic moments emerge like the one with Dominic Miller (former lead guitar of the Pretenders), when he expresses how baffled he is by Sting's interest in country music. Christian McBride, the bass player, gushes about watching Sting on television play the acoustic bass in the now-classic Every Breath You Take video, and goes on to recount how while wandering Sting's house he encountered the very same instrument. Just sitting around the house.
We get to witness the dress rehearsals, and songs that ultimately won't be performed at the actual concert. One stirring performance is Desert Rose, an explosive song of joy that became a surprise club hit in a remix. The band members laugh, they jibe at each other, they sing with alacrity.
It is interesting to watch these people work together in the days leading up to 9/11, knowing what we now know. These are the nouveau-riche of the studio session, the ones who spent their youth struggling on tours, in bars, clubs, and concert halls, and now they get to pick and choose assignments that will not only challenge them, but allow for more downtime. They are flush with century's-end success.
It's difficult for the average joe or jane to connect with them on a professional level, unless he or she is similarly accomplished. But we might find in their laughing, blissful ignorance our own reflection. Life as it was Before. Watching them, knowing what's coming, you feel something akin to encountering, say, an old Travel Channel segment in which the World Trade Center still stands, strong and whole, a memento mori trapped and held in the datastream for all humans to contemplate. It's painful - and good - to remember the days Before. Three months ago now? Only months?
Too soon they find themselves on the eve of their concert, music stars - and one superstar - sitting on the couch and gathered 'round their own television, just as we all were; some angry, some crying, some dumbfounded, and some all three. The cameras keep rolling. I have no doubt they were stopped for some incidents; some things remain personal. But Sting spares neither his band nor himself from the camera during a round-table discussion of what's to be done.
"If anyone wants to say, 'Sting, I don't want to play', then that's fine," he begins, opening the floor. Some don't want to play. Some do. Christian McBride, who has worn clothing emblazoned with New York logos almost every day throughout the rehearsals, remarks that they should play a reduced set and get off the stage. When the reworked, bluesy version of All This Time is mentioned - the one they've worked particularly hard on - Sting strongly objects, his eyes reddening. "I can't do that one," he says. It is the hit single from The Soul Cages, the one during which he "feels his father beside him" as he sings. It would be too much.
Of course he plays it. We must assume, from the flawless performance of the newly-arranged standard, that his father is in attendance - and approves.
Was Sting contractually obligated to play? Nothing he couldn't have got out of under the circumstances, I'm sure. Did he do it thinking it would be regarded as a significant performance owing to the date? Did he think this would cause the album to sell better? Certainly these things occurred to him before he went onstage. He had to know they'd be meaty questions for music critics to chew on. Commercialism winning out over humanism makes for one helluva quibble.
But the truth is probably more human. As I said before, music is Sting's substrate, his earth, his home. And on September 11th, after he learned of the attacks, he simply did what we all did that day.
He went home.
****************
The music world has yet to find its footing in the wake of the attacks. I have no doubt the more prolific artists ran to the studio, propelled by rage. Equally as many sensitives must be paralyzed with despair. But aside from a few memorable performances on the George Clooney fundraiser, nothing really affecting has yet emerged. The reworking of "What's Going On", which popped up on the radio only days after the attacks, got an A for effort and intentions, but musically and vocally is a cacophonous and emotive mess - because of the despair and rage. All the new albums out this Christmas were for the most part mastered before the tragedy, and as such can only be echoes of Just Before.
When news radio relaxed its hold over commercial radio somewhat, we found the top 40 stations had already dusted off the old sixties wartime songs, the Top Gun soundtrack, Pink Floyd, etcetera, etcetera. But a lyric like, "There's somethin' happenin here/ what it is ain't exactly clear" has no real relevance to our world as it is now. The deejays worked with what they had until the tribute songs could be recorded, or until the inevitable novelty songs ("come, mista Tal-ee-bahn, turn ov-ah Bin-Lah-den") came out. Now, with this album, they may finally have material that responds. Sting's need to reinvent his own songs has, combined with the events of 9/11, had an unforeseen effect on the album: everything old is new again. You can hear in their performances - and especially in Sting's voice - a timely intensity and a fervent conviction. They aren't trying to heal the world. They're trying to heal themselves. Hence, it becomes deeply personal. And today, the deeply personal is the most relevant.
It's just in time for Christmas, this one. I encourage you to go to the store - brick-and-mortar or virtual - and listen to some of the tracks, which are:
Fragile
A Thousand Years
Perfect Love...Gone Wrong
All This Time
The Hounds of Winter
Don't Stand So Close To Me
When We Dance
Dienda
Roxanne
If You Love Somebody Set Them Free
Brand New Day
Fields of Gold
Moon Over Bourbon Street
If I Ever Lose My Faith In You
Every Breath You Take
By the time you read this the DVD of the making of the album and the subsequent concert may be in stores. If you missed it on A&E, I encourage you to buy or rent the film. The album cost us about fourteen dollars American. I don't know if the DVD's been priced yet. I think this would be an excellent item to stuff in someone's stocking this year, and appropriate background music to your holiday activities.
*************
NOTE: All material in this epinion regarding Sting's inner thought processes are based upon impressions I got from watching the documentary on A&E.
Information on Sting and his family was culled from back issues of Rolling Stone magazine, a separate documentary program on Ovation, and most particularly an article titled, "King of Pain", the publishing of which coincided with the release of "The Soul Cages".
This epinion was initially published in the Suggest Products section.
Recommended:
Yes
Viewing Format: DVD Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older
Originally filmed for the cable television channel A & E, this program is a 3 hour special concert event featuring pop star Sting. Shot live in the un...More at HotMovieSale.com
This DVD contains a behind-the-scenes documentary film and an intimate concert performance by Sting. The documentary is a candid look at the genesis, ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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