Sting is still the hell of a great-looking guy. His voice is still fabulous, as is his yoga-modeled body, effectively shown off in tight black pants and a white sleeveless T-shirt so ragged it looked like an actual leftover from the eighties. And “The Police” reunited still is a band that may not have revolutionized rock music, but plays songs you tend to replay in your head, songs you want to hear over and over again.
“The first boy group in history”, mocked my husband (who came with me anyway). But now the boys are way into their 50s - Sting and Stewart Copeland -, or even 60s - Andy Summers. The idols of my late teenage years, featuring grey hair (Stewart), a paunch (Andy), and a heavily receding hairline (Sting). Matching my own wrinkles and growing demand of hair color products.
This is how I spent at least the first half of the concert in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall Arena. Looking at and marveling at how old we all have become. The huge video screens displaying close-ups of the musicians from different angles, were constant pitiless reminders of that fact. Of course I had known before. But now it was shown. Live on stage.
Was that mixture of nostalgia and self-pity distracting me from the music? Was this the reason why this vibrating, exciting live-concert-feeling simply wouldn’t kick in - although the show was pretty good, the band in high spirits, the songs often jazzed up or otherwise reinterpreted? It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the event and the music; I sang along, still knowing many of the lyrics by heart. But “rocking” in my chair already felt a little awkward. Was it the folding chair that prevented me from jumping up and dancing?
Before the concert, we had met Robert in a Japanese noodle place at the Trump Taj Mahal’s bombastic casino floor. A bald, jolly little guy in his fifties, eagerly digging in his memory for some traces of the German he had learned in high school. We small talked. He had come to see “The Police”, too, combining the concert with a visit at the casino before he’d have to go “back to business” on Monday. There was a shuttle service, he told us, for the Taj Mahal’s hotel guests to the concert hall and back. Very convenient.
Maybe that’s what is most irritating about going to a rock concert when you are forty- or even fifty-something.
As a teen or twen, one got there in an old VW Beetle with at least six people crammed inside, sleeping bags in the trunk. The event was huge, feelings were intense, anything could happen - or so you hoped. And the music almost made you fly. Until one woke up freezing in a soaking wet sleeping bag the morning after one of those open air concerts.
Two decades later, chances are that a rock concert is something well organized, to be fit into a tight schedule. Somewhere between picking the children up from soccer training on Saturday afternoon and getting back home not too late on Saturday night for the babysitter. No drugs. Furtively glancing at the cell phone display in the middle of “Message In A Bottle”, in case the babysitter is sending out an SOS at this very moment about a toddler who had suddenly fallen sick…
No, neither the boys nor the concert were anything like 15 years ago. What a pity. And what a relief.
