One Train Later: A Memoir (37 page)

Before we leave the bright sun and yet weirdly unpleasant atmosphere of Florida, we have one more show-at Disney World. This turns out to be strange even by our standards. We are doing it for the money, a mighty eight thousand dollars, which seems astronomical. We feel uneasy about it, as if we have let down our guard. It's not good for street credibility, but it sure will help with the expenses.

Like ghosts in the Floridian sunlight, we arrive at Magic Kingdom and are greeted by a tanned and smiling automaton who leads us through the labyrinth of underground corridors that stretch for miles in every direction. We Pass Disney personnel who walk with giant badges of Mickey or Pluto and wear fixed smiles like the Stepford wives. It's chilling. We realize that we have made a mistake, but the contract has been signed and we have to play or be exterminated. We are led to a small concrete bunker, where we are told to sit and wait for further instructions. Someone makes a remark about Eva Braun, and raising a plastic Donald Duck cup to my mouth, I cackle. At zero 1500 hours automaton 60001 70034 reappears at the door to lead us to our place of duty. We trudge back through the underground labyrinth, the Disbot says, "In there," and we see a room set up with our amps and drums. "But it's underground, no one wills see us," bleats one of us pitifully. "It goes up," says Disbot. "Play when I tell you." We take up our positions, and a few moments later a red light comes on. "Now," says Disbot with a final dazzling smile. "Roxanne," wails Sting, and we ascend upward to Disney World, feeling like Daniel in the lions' den.

Staring over the perimeter at us in wonderment are the good folk of the Midwest, who gaze down at us with a blank expression as we surface like a noisy German U-boat. For the next five or six minutes we play to mums, dads, grandmas, and sticky little kids all full of McDonald's. With the spinning rides of Disney World proving a greater attraction, they wander off, leaving us with a slender crowd of punky-looking kids who in the garish neon of D World appear like frail little aliens. We find out later that we have been playing on the Tomorrowland Terrace, but to us it felt like Sunday night at the London Palladium-with the final humiliation being our exit on the downward-spiraling stage, still playing, our voices and instruments growing smaller and smaller, like canaries in a coal mine.

As a reward for enduring the Disney experience, Miles decides that we should now go to prison (or rather, go to a prison and play for the inmates), as it will help keep up our gritty street image-POLICE PLAY IN PRISON, COPS BEHIND BARS, that sort of thing. In fact, we have a gig booked at the Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, Los Angeles County.

We drive at night to the prison from Hollywood, where we are staying at the Chateau Marmont. We are not sure what to expect: a riot, gunfire, searchlights, or mere indifference. Someone makes a joke about cutting out a couple of bars and tries to throw the stub of a joint out onto the road, but the confluence of speeding car and wind blow it back in and we spend five minutes leaping about like idiots, trying to extinguish the renegade sparks.

My mind races through various prison scenes: Riot in Cell Block 11, jailhouse Rock, White Heat, Cool Hand Luke, Caged Heat, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. This will be my second time in a California prison. The irony of my visiting as a Policeman this time is not lost on me.

We arrive in San Pedro, a small coastal town, and it's like something out of an old Bogart movie. Like monstrous shadows, the ships look as if they might have come from the Far East, might contain vast quantities of heroin or falcons from Malta. We find the prison and, after a complicated ritual at the gate, drive into the yard, ready to entertain the inmates as "the Police." The truth is that in this prison they have a music program but are very short of instruments, so as well as thrilling the detainees with our sounds, we are also donating five thousand dollars toward buying them some-music being the medium that soothes the savage beast. We are led into what appears to be a holding room; the gear has already been set up on the stage for us by the crew in the afternoon. We stare at the walls of bare concrete. A life inside is a chilling thought, and when I think that I almost ...

It's time to hit the stage, and we shuffle forward. "Take no prisoners," says Miles with a smirk. This is different: rather than arriving onstage to thrill the audience with our very presence, we troop out onto a stage that is at one end of a dingy room and it feels more like being on the gallows. There's no applause. Out beyond the stage, small groups of men stand huddled together as if in the middle of a drug deal. This is a situation in which it's difficult to be positive, get people smiling, or tell them to cheer up. These men are doing time, some of them for crimes of a violent nature; they aren't moved by three white guys, aren't going to have a sudden revelation and see where they have gone wrong on life's path. So, we do our set without saying an awful lot and try to at least play decently, but the pogo'ing and leaping about the small stage all feel painfully artificial when faced with the reality of a darker caste. In the end we slink off stage, mumbling platitudes like good luck, see you next time, etc.

We spend the rest of November crisscrossing the country like a game of snakes and ladders, tours always being planned to be as circuitous and physically demanding as possible so that the artiste only ever performs in a condition of shell shock.

Houston, Dallas, Tulsa, Lawrence, St. Paul, Chicago, Detroit, Milwau kee. Again it all turns into a kaleidoscopic journey of freeways, truck stops, invitations to parry, motel rooms, discarded paperbacks, high pressure fronts, altostratus, cirrocumulus, urban whiteout, dew, frost, low clouds, and solar flares-the central motif being the shows and the familiar backstage aroma of beer and marijuana and the taste of jack cheddar stuck on a wheat thin. We are winning, but it's inch by inch by inch.

Back in Europe we continue straight on by touring in Germany as if it's another U.S. state, and on the autobahn to Aachen someone remarks, "Surely that must be Detroit just ahead." As we travel up and down the Ruhr Valley, "Walking on the Moon" is released and enters the British charts at number one. It feels good to be back in Europe and we decide to cap the year off with a double gig in Hammersmith on December 18, the end of another U.K. tour.

Miles sets up both the Hammersmith Odeon and the Hammersmith Palais just half a mile down the road. We will start at the Odeon and then travel slowly by a heavy armored military vehicle in full public view to the Palais. It will be a brilliant publicity stunt-a night full of glitter-and the tickets will probably sell out in a few hours. This is one more crafty underlining of the word Police, which Miles never seems to tire of. As he was brought up in military circumstances, anything paramilitary seems to get him going, and for much of our existence we are presented in dominant male power terms, almost to the point of parody.

The night arrives and is a spectacular success, with all sorts of wellwishers and celebrities turning up backstage before the show, the Police gig now being the place to be. We play to an audience that just can't get enough. One of the regular features of our U.K. performances now is the attendance of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, as we have large numbers of girls passing out and getting removed on stretchers by the men in blue. It reaches almost absurd proportions, and there is a nonstop chain of stretchers going by the stage for the duration of the show. Some of the girls are faking their swooning just so they can get to the front of the stage, and they grin up at us as they pass below us. We get to know the faces of the men and eventually can just call down: "Evenin', Sid. Everything alright?" The St. John Ambulance men add a nice touch of normalcy to the proceedings, which is sometimes absent in other countries. They are usually at the sound check, scoping out the venue for possible mishaps, and we talk to them about their job, and our job, and over communal cups of tea agree that we are all in it together. "Nice lads, those p'lice," you hear them murmur.

After the show, with cameras flashing like a snowstorm, we pile out of the Odeon and climb into the half-track army vehicle to make the journey up the street to the second show of the night, at the Hammersmith Palais. As we cruise up the street with three or four thousand cheering fans surrounding the vehicle, it's like Moses parting the Red Sea and feels like a great joke that we and our fans are in on together. It is absurd but great rock-and-roll theater, a splash of surrealism in the drab English winter; as we grin out across the camouflage paint of the half-track, we see nothing but smiling, cheering faces giving us the hero's welcome home. They do love a parade in Blighty.

1979. Thatcher is in power, the Ayatollah is back in Iran, the Yorkshire Ripper has run riot, Saddain Hussein has become president of Iraq, the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan, and the British public has bought a band called "the Police." We are a pop success. With two number one records and a huge number of shows performed, we deserve a long rest. We get two weeks.

Eighteen

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I stare across the room to where my guitar leans against the wall with the light still glinting off the strings. It's worth a shot. I get out of bed and pull a Nikon FE from my camera bag and start photographing the collision of light and strings from several angles, being careful to expose for the detail in the shadows. The second time we arrived in New York I went to B&H Photo on Thirty-fourth Street with a rock photographer who offered to advise me and then took pictures while I made the purchase of a Nikon FE and a 24mm lens.

I begin photographing everything around me and quickly learn to hate the distortion of the wide-angle lens. Realizing I have been given bad advice, I move to a standard 50mm lens and began getting better results. I love the feel of a camera in my hand-it feels like a gun: I shoot the world. Inspired by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, and Ralph Gibson, I begin wandering around at night trying to photograph in the dark with fast film and no flash. Everything in America seems like a photograph, and as my head becomes crammed with black-and-white imagery, my hands are always around a camera. As the heat grows around the band it becomes a private world I can retreat to, one in which I am alone. Gradually the road, the hotels, the groups of fans, the long lines of a limo in the Arizona night, become constructs of seeing; my relationship to touring shifts, now not only playing music but dreaming through the camera.

Nineteen-eighty. The year begins with a quick visit to Hamburg for a TV show that we barely notice: we are about to set off for a world tour that will take in thirty-seven cities and nineteen countries, including Hong Kong, Japan, India, and Egypt. We have a film crew that will travel everywhere with us to capture our exploits, eventually to be released as a video called Police Around the World. But before we get to the more exotic countries, we have to take yet another pass through the U.S. just in case we could have possibly overlooked a hamlet or two. We arrive in Buffalo to play at Clark Gym. Outside, the ground is covered in deep snow and the temperature is below zero, and with the Niagara roaring in the background, we enter another round of the American Dream. Arriving back in the U.S. always feels like a comedown after the mayhem back in Europe, but Clark Gym is packed and we melt the snow surrounding the building.

Buffalo, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Madison, St. Louis, Memphis. Being rock historians, we know that Elvis was born just down the road from Memphis in Tupelo, Mississippi, and we have to pay homage. We rent a car and drive south to Tupelo. As you enter the small township, it is as if you have come to a weird religious site. Signs, pictures, and messages line the side of the road with the kind of devotion to El that normally is reserved for Jesus. Naturally, there are also more commercial messages that encourage a fine dining experience at the Elvis Inn or to get your Elvis T-shirt at Arnie's. There are arrows pointing to the birthplace of the King just down the road apiece, and in three minutes flat we are outside the miniscule shack where he was born. Surprisingly, you just walk up to it and knock on the door, which we do. The door is opened by a very, very old lady who might have been El's mother (except that she is dead, as we all know). It is a tiny shack not much more than ten feet square. It can truly be described as humble, but knowing that from this small patch arose greatness, we are reverent. Like visiting Magi, we stand in silence for a few minutes and feel the vibes-my mind drifts back to the shag rug of Carl Hollings's mum, the fake coal fire, and the King crooning "Teddy Bear"-there's a lot of love in the shack. Sighing, we leave and begin the drive back into Memphis without speaking, just pulling over once to get a burger or six in honor of the King.

New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Denver, Salt Lake. We arrive on an afternoon flight and after we have checked in I take a walk because I want to see how peculiar the city really is. I am always interested in photographing these places anyway. Dominated by its massive tabernacle, the city sits in a valley surrounded by mountains and salt flats. Salt is one of those things that people and cities get turned into when they raise the wrath of God, and like a warning sign, there is plenty of it around here. Here in underground vaults the Mormons keep the records of everyone who has ever lived (according to them). One of the richest organizations in the world, they sent preachers to Africa, where they were able to get plenty of practice in the missionary position. All this leads one to speculate on how the gig will go tonight. Will there be a protest at our profanity? An arrest by the sheriff's department, or what? But we come offstage a few hours later, having just played to one of the wildest, most out-of-control crowds of the tour, the local girls coming up to us with wads of gum in their mouth and blowing large pink bubbles in our faces, the message implicit.