The Police, Live on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert

When I was twelve, I was not seeking out live rock n' roll, on television or otherwise.  I much preferred a good episode of Magnum P.I.  I don't even know whether we got Don Kirshner's Rock Concert (or its cousin, The Midnight Special) here in Honolulu.  My only exposure to live rock  at the time was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, which more often than not I would use as the opportunity to go brush my teeth.

Pity then that I never saw this performance from February 1980 by the fledgling lads from the U.K. then diminutively known as the Police.  It would be a few more years before they were known world wide as The Police, and decades before they would triumphantly return in the new millennium as THE POLICE (without question, I could make the same grammatical point about the bass player, then curiously calling himself Sting).

But check this 34 minute concert out, 10 months before they release their third album, Zenyatta Mondata.  Here in America, they only really have Roxanne to hang their hat on, and maybe Message in a Bottle.  It is remarkable for how undeniably determined these three young musicians are to show to the world how brilliant their music is.  This is Sting before he became too big for the Police, too big for the world.  This is Andy Summers before his own unique guitar style became a cage he would eventually want to escape.  And this is Stewart Copeland demonstrating that he was beyond great well before anyone else ever realized it.

It's all there.  The "Ee yo yo, ee yay yo" and "jah! jah!" refrains.  The reverb triggers on the snare.  The Mickey Mouse scoop-neck t-shirt and green nut-huggers.  The glassy leads from that iconic tobacco Telecaster.  Whether for someone like me, who never watched Kirshner or much paid attention to the Police until after the hype disappeared, or for longtime fans, these are not the familiar arrangements of their hits.  Heck, the improvisational vamp alone in the middle of Can't Stand Losing You is memorable in that it's not what they did in their reunion tours in the 21st century, much less when they were doing it fresh in the Eighties the number of times I saw them live.

This is something entirely different than what Police fans are used to.  This is them before they took over the world.