One Train Later: A Memoir (47 page)

We are scheduled to return to the United States in January but are now concentrating on Europe first, beginning with England. We have a show in Birmingham at the National Exhibition Centre, which holds about fourteen thousand people. On the day of the show each one of us is to be picked up in the early afternoon to be driven up to Birmingham in time for the sound check. About one o'clock in the afternoon I am engaged in an interview with Rolling Stone at my house. I don't feel well during the interview and think I must just be stressed-out, exhausted, or just plain ill. I have a pain in my side like a dull ache, and nothing is making it go away. I drink cups of tea, lie down, take an aspirin, but it still hurts. The car arrives to pick me up. I bundle into the car and slump into the backseat, but by the time we reach Hammersmith Bridge I am retching violently out the window and desperately ask the driver to get me to the hospital. A few minutes later we pull up at Hammersmith Hospital. Emergency-Ward 10 has already been alerted: pop star coming, possible OD, and they are there with a stretcher. I am rushed into the emergency ward; with the neon strips overhead blinking like white snakes and the stink of hospital crawling up my nose, I faintly hear the words kidney stone as a giant hypodermic full of black stuff is pushed into my left arm vein and I slip, slip beneath the surface of Loch Ness-bye-bye, An-

I come to about six hours later as if pulling up from a primeval swamp, but I feel better; the thing has passed through my system and exited the urethra with the brute force of a boulder passing through a human hair. Miles and Kim are both standing at the end of the table with a small army of nurses and doctors. I feel important but also as if I am waking up in a scene from a German expressionist film. "Wha?" I croak. "You alright, mate?" I hear their voices as if in a wind tunnel: "There's fourteen thousand people waiting for you in Birmingham." "'Gig ... show, yeah ... caan dooo," I croak, "lesgo." I am groggy but no longer in pain, and I roll off the table onto a stretcher and am carried out to the backseat of a Rolls-Royce, where I plummet back to black.

I blink my eyes open as we pull into the backstage area of the center. Everyone is staring in through the window; the beloved St. John boys are there, this time with anxious faces and kidney support machines; and it is all rather lovely and heroic. I would have full honors, but my glory is slightly dented by Sting having his arm in a sling. He has jumped through a window the day before while filming on the Brimstone & Treacle set and badly cut his hand, so he can't play, but Danny Quatrochi will come onstage with us and play the bass parts. About ten minutes later we shuffle out onto the stage like the walking wounded and begin the show, making a big song and dance about our plight, which only endears us to the audience. Danny does a stellar job on bass, I recover more during the show, and all in all we end up feeling quite pleased with ourselves and garner an unexpected slice of publicity.

With the success of Ghost in the Machine, we hit the road for a tour that will last from December 1981 until July 1982. To re-create the saxophone lines on the album, we employ three guys from New Jersey who collectively call themselves Chops. They play well and flesh out Sting's original lines, but to me it just feels like an intrusion and takes away from the interplay between Stewart, Sting, and me. But on the inside of this frenzied whirlwind, with my imminent divorce and a house without wife and child, I am in a free zone. In a weird surge of loneliness in which I am never alone, the only comfort is that of strangers. To sustain any kind of relationship other than the one you have with your band and your instrument seems just about impossible. My house becomes unfamiliar, my old friends become strangers, any kind of normal day-to-day living is unreal. The heady pace of this life floats us off into a place that increasingly seems out of touch with reality. After a few more shows in the U.K. we take off around Europe with a "mic in your face" blur of concerts, jet lag, screaming fans, carnal encounters, and the unending pressure to blow everyone away-an intense, overfueled schedule that is probably shortening our lives by a few years.

In January 1982 we return to the United States. The first show is at the Boston Garden, and here a strange thing happens. After the sound check we return to the dressing rooms below the stage. Adjacent to the area are some huge industrial-looking tanks that look like boilers. Sting and I put our instruments down, and I lean mine against the boiler thing. We go off for a couple of hours to eat and get ready. We return to the dressing room half an hour before the show. I pick up the Telecaster, plug it into a practice amp, and switch on the back pickup. No sound comes out. I tug the lead, fiddle with the switches, check the jack plug, but nothing works-the pickup remains silent. Apparently something-the boiler perhaps-has demagnetized it. It's dead, the life sucked out of it. It's a freak accident, but I am devastated. The unique sound that I was able to produce from this pickup is gone. The word goes out. My Telecaster is a guitar that everybody loves. The fact that in this high-profile group I still play this old guitar appeals to a lot of people, and it has become an icon. Eventually Seymour Duncan, a wellknown guitar electronics expert, comes to the rescue with an overwound pickup to replace it-but for me, it is never quite the same. As we continue forward to some distant goal, I feel with this second loss as if I am bleeding in public.

After Boston we travel along the East Coast and through the Midwest, with the payoff on the West Coast in early February for three nights in L.A.

In Birmingham, Alabama, I stay by myself in a hotel close to the gig, as I am going up to New York the next day to attend an exhibition of my photography. The fans who check every hotel in town already know where I am staying, and there is a huge crowd in the lobby by the time I arrive. Surrounded by a large pushing mass, I check in with stress and difficulty and, knowing that it will be a sleepless night, am not in a great mood. But they know which room I am in, and they take the adjacent rooms, bang on my door, call out my name, and play Police tracks at high volume until the sun breaks into the Alabama dawn. It is intense, torturous; finally I have to drag the blankets into the bathroom and sleep on the floor in an effort to drown out the riot next door.

Now we are surrounded by muscle, and in a perverse way it is pleasant, giving a false sense of importance, as if we are a precious treasure that must be guarded at all times. Large, beefy men are everywhere; they watch out for us and occasionally overdo their job, roughing up people who even dare look in our direction. This is distressing, and sometimes we get worked up about being in the hands of these monosyllabic bozos. We are spirits in the material world, but that would be hard to discern with the deeply macho atmosphere that now appears to surround us. It makes us feel stupid and Neanderthal: like a "rock group."

At every show there is a long line of people who want to meet the group. We sit in the dressing room, trying to put it off, but Kim comes in and out, asking if we are ready to meet the director of KBIG or KFAT: "They're really important," and they have the record in rotation. And then it's the local record-store owner or the chairman of the Elks Club and there's a kid in a wheelchair, the president of the local Police fan club. A line is formed and we press flesh with several overweight and badly dressed people who all tell us, "Youse guys 'r great, thanks fer comin' t'Po'dunk, Arkansas, ma dotter rilly lurves youse." It's tiresome but we are grateful-it is positive energy, and after all, we could be back at the Hope and Anchor, so we smile a lot and try to be gracious. Once they have penetrated the inner sanctum of the dressing room, some of them don't want to leave and we have to put in a request for a "swordfish sandwich." which is our ingenious code word for "get them out, please."

Everyone backstage is supposed to wear a backstage pass, an item that is coveted as the holy grail of fandom, as it allows ingress to the court of the kings, passage from the outer rings of concentric circles that mark us like the growth of a tree. Out there, conspiracy, machination, maneuvering, and collusion between the rabid ones as they importune, offer favors, drugs, physical contact to those who guard the cave. And if one of these three-hundredpound bruisers asks for a favor, it's hard to refuse-they are so big.

The Forum in Los Angeles is sold out for three nights. There is a delirious buzz around the event that is reaching new heights; Policemania is the word. We have arrived back here after an intense tour of the U.S., playing in arenas every night. On the scale of fame and celebrity, we are now playing the high notes, twanging the treble strings. We check into hotels under pseudonyms, go incognito, and speed away from the shows in three separate limos, our soaking stage clothes sticking to the black leather and our heat making condensation on the windows. Behind us the audience surrounds the building we have just left. It is either take off instantly or be trapped in the building for several hours, but it is a peculiar anticlimax to go within minutes from a burning stage and a crazed auditorium to the solitude and roaring silence of your pastel-papered hotel room.

As we hit the stage there is a roar and the whole audience stands up to spark the flames of their lighters, and with this gesture the auditorium becomes beautiful, an American namaste-I salute the spirit within you. We haven't seen this before, and for a second it stops me dead, my eyes tear up, my heart opens, and then Stewart's cracking snare sends me careening on down the path of the concert. Standing up front are Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas, and grooving in his own space, complete with Blues Brothers shades, John Belushi. "Driven to Tears," "Roxanne," "So Lonely," "Walking on the Moon," "Spirits in the Material World," "Demolition Man," and "Can't Stand Losing You"-we pile-drive from one song to another in a fury until we reach a writhing symbiosis and arrive an hour and half later at a place of exstasis.

A big party has been arranged for us by A&M at a beautiful art deco mansion in the Hollywood Hills. You fall out of the backstage area and into your limos with yells of "yeah, c'mon, man, come with me, yeah, bring her, her too-whatever." You tumble into the stretch with fizzing bottles of champagne, marijuana and perfume mixing like an elixir in a limo filled with sprawling limbs, flashing underwear, high laughing voices, and chemical madness. The limousine is the chariot, the vessel of tribal celebration, as you speed across L.A. on wings of bubbles and powder to the party that celebrates you, and out there the streets of L.A., the Hollywood Hills, the Capitol Building, the movie lots, Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, the 76 gas stations, the Hollywood sign, the Santa Monica Freeway, the open doors, Sunset Strip-you own it all, you are hot, the king, the world is watching as the dream unfolds, your dream, the ecstasy, the glory; and five minutes back, the food stamps, the fifty cents of gas, the terrors of shoplifting food from the supermarket, the scrape and grind of survival, and the music, always the music-Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Parker, Ellington, Robert Johnson, Son House, Elmore James, Ray Charles, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, ragas, blues standards, bebop-music, music, and more music fueling this crazy ride, the song that never leaves your head-you are a starbody, and you bend over with another rolled dollar bill, thinking, I'll be back, boys-I'll be back.

The central hall of the mansion is packed; you cruise from one group to another as they come at you in dream waves-you pose with Jack Nicholson for photographs and he turns to you with that satanic grin and says, "Doesn't this just give you the shits?" High five and hugs with Belushi; smoke a joint with gentle, cool Michael Douglas, buddy boy himself; and spin off into the kaleidoscope of night.

I meet with Belushi the next night at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. In John's room we slug back some Glenfiddich, smoke a joint, do a couple of lines, and float out into the neon radiance of the Strip. John has a big black limo and a big black driver, and we cruise the Strip, going in and out of bars. Everywhere we go people cheer; everybody knows Belushi, and by now many know ine. They like seeing us together, we do a double act, laugh, crack jokes, stagger about, and don't disappoint them. Up and down the Strip we go like yo-yos in a storm of fluttering dollar bills, chicks, perfume, leather, dark corners, loud voices, the stink of booze, TVs suspended over bars with the Lakers game in full flight.

We pull up at the Comedy Store, and John leaps up onto the stage and does twenty minutes of fantastic improv. He is great, very fast, very funny, and stoned to the max. The audience loves him. We hit more joints, more scenes, more buildings, more lobbies, until Hollywood becomes a skid mark across our speeding brains. We fall into the Formosa Cafe at 4:30 A.M. with some vaguely formed idea that we need sustenance. Speech has become difficult, and as the sky breaks into yellow streaks over Laurel Canyon we part company in a slurred embrace. "Later, man." "Yeah, tonight." I find the rented car and in a stupor aim it back at Le Parc. I arrive there and pull up at the top of the slope that leads down to the garage, which has a huge iron gate. Climbing out of the car, I press the button to open the gate, and watch like a zombie as the car with a mind of its own gently drives itself down the slope and into the steel gate, which crashes down out of its track and smashes the hood to a pulp. I shuffle the remains of the Mercedes into the garage and stagger off to my room to pass out. I open the door and struggle through dozens of party balloons on strings and sink, fully clothed, into blackness like an undersea diver. I wake about six r,.na.; the balloons are slightly deflated; and a bill for four thousand dollars has been discreetly pushed under the door.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I get out of bed and cross the room to pull a nylon string guitar out of its case. As we are in this place for three weeks, I brought an acoustic to practice on because it helps keep up the strength in the hands. G# minor 7 with an open E and B strings. The first chord of the "One Note Samba." Johim wrote this famous song on the guitar in the key of E major, where it falls so easily under the left hand. This was pointed out to me by a great Brazilian guitarist who said that this is the real version. Brazilian music is another style that Sting and I also both love, and our signature song, "Roxanne," was first written as a bossy nova. I start playing down the sequence and remember arriving in Rio for the first time.