(the Police)
I’m one of those people that finds Sting funny on general principle, so it was a total delight to hear Copeland yell expletives into the phone, describing one of the many battles he waged with the Tantric God.
We were total straight arrows when it came to playing shows. I discovered at an early age that playing drunk or on drugs just didn’t work, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The worst thing that can happen to a drummer happened to me at Madison Square Garden. It was our first arena show, and it was a huge deal for us. We had worked our way up from small clubs to big clubs, from theaters to big theaters. The jump from the biggest theater—around three or four thousand—to the smallest arena of eighteen thousand is a very big jump. Shit, I was nervous. Along with worrying about selling enough tickets, it’s a whole different audio environment.
A few songs into our set, we were thinking, “This is really cold. The audience is so far away.” The Madison Square Garden stage is very high compared to a theater or club. It was lonely up there—just three guys in a very big room. Then the worst thing I could have imagined happened: The skin of my bass drum cracked. If you lose a snare drum, you pull it and put in another without missing a beat. Same thing with a tom-tom or really anything else in a drum kit. If something goes wrong with a guitar, it’s no problem. There’s always one waiting to switch out. With a kick drum, you have to stop the show, pull out all the mic stands and the cymbals and drums. Getting to the very bottom of the drum set is hell on earth.
So the show stopped, and our whole crew swarmed the stage. They were tearing apart this jungle, trying to get to the bottom of that damn kick drum. I’m sweating, just waiting out the whole thing. Fortunately, our singer, front man, and star, had a couple tricks up his sleeve. Sting started doing running commentary: “Hey! Here comes Dave, and he’s got the cymbal! Oh, he dropped it!” He sounded like a carnival barker, that Sting-O. He had learned patter and how to bullshit an audience from our early club days. He’s cracking jokes, singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and whatever he could think of to keep the show going. “They got the skin! They’ve got the drum back on the stand! They’ve got the mic and the cymbals back! OK, are you ready to rock!” All of Madison Square Garden, in fact, all of Manhattan, belonged to us after that. When you make a mistake and there’s an epic car crash onstage, that’s what the audience remembers. That’s my advice to all young musicians.
I don’t think most audiences were aware, but we had temper tantrums onstage all the time. We were playing an ancient stadium in Turin, Italy, that had since been turned into a football stadium. The stage was down at one end of the stadium, and the dressing rooms for the players and us were in the middle, at the center line. To get from the dressing rooms to behind the stage, we had to take these little mini-buses. There were 80,000 people in the crumbling stadium, waiting to see us. It was Sting’s birthday, and I gave him a tuba. Three happy, blond heads got into the minibus, ready to play a show. The bus started taking all these weird turns, and the next thing we knew, we found ourselves merging onto a freeway outside the stadium. I yelled, “What the fuck?”
The giant stadium, which blocked out the sky, was suddenly in our rearview mirror. We had a police entourage with blasting sirens, escorting us away from our gig, heading God knows where. After some yelling, we took the next off-ramp and got back on track, but now it was rush hour. We must have looked ridiculous in that minibus. We had our headsets on—I had my headband going—with nowhere to go. We circled the entrance a couple times because the drivers didn’t know the proper entrance. We were essentially lost in the parking lot. We got on stage about thirty minutes late, but that was all preamble for the meltdown that was to come.
For some reason, halfway through the first song, our illustrious, esteemed lead singer was not happy. I knew what it was. It was because I sped up that second verse going into the chorus. I just loved that chorus, but we were playing it twice the normal speed. Our singer was not happy, to say the least. He was looking back at me, hurling daggers and trying to show me where the backbeat was. Generally, that’s not something that cheers me up. I don’t like having the guy at the front of the stage, indicating the timing with his left hand, which should have been thumping his fucking bass. “You miserable, cocksucking, motherfucking, piece of shit, bitch, goddammit I’ll fucking kill you!” In front of 80,000 people.
I had white-hot popping balloons for eyes I was so pissed. I was smacking those cymbals so fucking hard they were standing vertically. You can only hit a drum so hard before it clacks instead of thumps, so that was an exciting evening. Once again, the audience loves that shit! We would take that anger backstage too. So many nights we’d be screaming at each other unintelligibly. Since both of us lack emotional stamina, we’d desperately be trying to sustain this towering, glorious rage, but it would dissipate. It would end up being, “Aww fuck. You prick…c’mere!” Much to Andy Summers’s [guitarist] confusion and disappointment, we’d be back to hugging and kissing each other.
It never came to blows between Sting and I, but there were a couple tussles. But during those tussles, we’d be laughing hysterically, so I don’t think that counts. There was an accidental broken rib at Shea Stadium though. All the British press and tabloids were there, signifying that another British band had conquered America. We were there, the three blonde heads, goofing around like The Monkees for the cameras. Sting grabbed my copy of The New York Times I was reading, by way of frolic, but I reacted with, “Hey, fuck you!” Immediately, these two young twenty-somethings were fighting it out over a newspaper, with all the cameras on us. During the course of this, I had an elbow, he had a rib, and the two reached unity.
I had an uncomfortable sensation elbowing him, and the next thing I knew, Sting had a fractured rib. I mumbled, “Ahh shit. Sorry dude.” We still played the show that night, and Sting killed it! It turned out to be a little hairline fracture, but I know he was still in pain. That’s the true story, and don’t believe the legend that I broke his rib in some crazy brawl.