THE LISTENING EXPERIENCE: The Police “Ghost In The Machine (JB Deluxe Edition)”
My good friend Herc of the Herc’s Hideaway blog has been doing some good things with his posts, many of which feature his own Spotify lists, so I decided to borrow his idea and try it out for myself.
Last weekend, I started thinking about a few of my favorite Police songs, one thing lead to another and I started compiling my MP3′s and creating my versions of my favorite albums. The Police were and are one of my favorite bands, and I was lucky enough to see them in February 1984 at the Aloha Stadium on their Synchronicity tour. I always go back and forth on what I feel is my favorite album by The Police, a battle that I enjoy going through because in truth, I don’t have to battle, When I do end up listening to them in different combinations, I sometimes listen to it from a different perspective while other times I discover once again while I love it in the first place.
I decided to create my own Deluxe Edition of their fourth album, 1981′s Ghost In The Machine, which received a huge boost in promotion due to the newly-created MTV. The band’s first two albums was more college radio-friendly, and the songs from those albums we now know and love (a few of which are classic rock radio staples) didn’t get much attention until the release of their third album, 1980′s Zenyatta Mondatta. Radio did take kindly to “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” and “Don’t Stand So Close TO Me” as they were the album’s two singles, but back then, radio was much more open to playing album tracks, or at least I had radio stations in Honolulu that played each song on the album as if it was Led Zeppelin’s (untitled 4th album) because I certainly remember hearing “Bombs Away”, “Man In A Suitcase”, “Voices In My Head”, “Driven To Tears”, and “When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What’s Still Around” as if they were hits.
Before MTV, the only place I saw Police videos was on Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10. as both “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” went as high as #10 on the Billboard Singles chart. With Ghost In The Machine the group had made a documentary film with musician Jools Holland which featured the group talking about their recording sessions in Montserrat and in between, you would see staged “performances” of the band playing a few of the songs. Instead of the band going out of their way to offer live versions, it would be lip-synched videos but this was cool, since groups who were doing videos at the time were doing the same thing.
As a kid, I thought this was the coolest looking video, as you could see the band performing the song. I’d even make a dumb dance out of the way Sting moves, because I was a dumb ass 11 year old thinking that that type of music should be danced in that fashion. Back then, ska was considered “white man reggae”, and their album Regatta de Blanc even said so, so people initially thought ska was some white man creation. It would be awhile before people realized that ska came before reggae and both were rooted from the same island. Nonetheless, for years when I would hear this song, I would always the accent of the bass and drums completely different, and wondered why the group would switch the page when they started singing “we are spirits in the material world”. It wasn’t until long after the fact that I had heard the first verse of this song on the wrong accent, and that it was the same ska rhythm from the first note. Even now, when I remember to count the rhythm from the first bass note instead of the drums, I catch myself falling back into the song’s proper rhythm.
I liked this song the first time I heard it, but did not realize until a few days ago why I may enjoy it. I love the mood and feel of the song, and when I understood the lyrics and could relate to them from personal experiences, I felt them even more. More on that in a bit.
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