The Police

The Police
Concert Review

Walking On
The Moon
By Shelli Carlisle

I haven’t been to a concert in years, but when I heard one of my all time favorite bands, The Police, would be performing at the Hollywood Bowl, I jumped on it. The evening would be a birthday present to myself, a one time experience and it was exciting. The feeling was the same as when I was a teenager going to my first Led Zeppelin concert.

Playing Hookey

On May 28th, my husband Dan and I ditched work and headed down from the High Desert to Pasadena, Calif. to The Hollywood Bowl. It isn’t in Pasadena, it actually is in Hollywood, but you can’t park there. Instead, you have to pick a location in a designated nearby city, park your car, and take a shuttle bus to “The Bowl.”

Dan and I had a lovely dinner in Pasadena and when it was time, we headed to the city parking structure, parked our car, then waited in line with the rest of the concert goers for the bus.

Entering…The Twilight Zone

The buses arrived on schedule, we boarded and settled in for a 30 minute ride through downtown L.A. to The Bowl. As I looked around at my fellow passengers, the theme from the Twilight Zone began swimming around in my head, along with the voice of Rod Serling.

“Picture this (pause), a crowded bus (pause), full of middle class 40 and 50 something boomers (pause), all wearing reading glasses (pause), and all (pause), waiting (pause), anxiously to arrive at their destination. Where are they going? And will they get there on time?” Serling’s voice said in my mind.

Best Seats at the Bowl

We arrived on time, which was a good thing. My husband is a dockworker and I am an Instructional Assistant. Our income is modest, so when I purchased our tickets, I purchased the only ones I could afford; the very last row in the very last section. This meant a lot of walking and stair climbing.

After the trek, we found our seats (wooden benches with numbers on the back) and sat down to wait for the concert to begin. The Hollywood Bowl is an outdoor venue. Behind the stage and off to the right you get a view of the Hollywood Hills and The Hollywood sign. The whole thing was very…um, Hollywood.
Elvis Costello was the opening act for The Police. The magic began as he came on stage. When his band hit their first note, they ricocheted from one song to the next for an hour, with no breaks in between numbers, getting in as many tunes as they could. Their endurance was impressive, and their sound equaled their endurance – impressive, too. When Costello’s performance was over, he invited everyone there to join him at a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, free of charge, to hang out and listen to some more music. I wonder how many people showed up and how thrilled the owner must have been to have hosted all these people.

Sexy, Pot and Rock n Roll

The sun finally set and the lights came up as The Police took the stage. Sitting in the back row has it’s advantages. I got to stand through the whole concert and shake my booty with no one behind me to yell sit down.

The Police were amazing. They did all the old stuff with the hard edge rock/reggae drive. I knew the words to every song and belted them out along with everyone else. The smell of pot permeated through the crowd as just under 18,000 boomers came together to celebrate their musical roots.

Sting, Andy Sumners and Stweart Copeland were the gods of the evening. They delivered everything and more than I dreamed possible. They rocked it up it for a couple of hours and then brought the house down with not one, not two, but three encores. Each encore had three, or four more songs–including the hypnotizing Roxanne. The performance was amazing and the evening unforgettable. No one could have been disappointed, The Police put it all out there, every bit of it for the ultimate concert.
The Perfect Evening

As we followed the crowd out of The Bowl to our bus, I grabbed my husband’s hand. It had been the perfect evening, I felt alive and excited to be alive.

We boarded the bus, melted into our seats, and relaxed on the ride back. Everyone was quietly sharing their evening intimately with their comrades.

The kick of the evening came when a young woman, in her twenties, who was sitting next to us received a call. Someone was calling to ask her how the concert was.

I giggled to myself at her reply, “Yah, it was good, but there was nothing but old people there.”

What did she expect?

Tagged music, the Police