"My father made sure that I had every kind of proper musical training and technique, but no one was ever able to teach me when to shut up."
If you've ever watched interviews of Stewart Copeland, the voluble, quotable drummer of the famous 80s band The Police, you see immediately he's a humble, earnest and often hilarious dude. He's an obvious and profound talent on an interesting artistic journey: he seeks variation, change, he dislikes safety. It's fascinating to watch the wide-ranging things he does over the course of his musical career, with little need for popularity and even less fear of failure. A genuinely free artist who never became a prisoner of his success.
The book has ADHD in the same way Copeland seems to: it is all over the place, bouncing from era to era and from scene to scene in short chapters that nevertheless keep the reader reading. And holy cow what an interesting life he has! His father was a CIA agent, Copeland grew up in Lebanon among other places, and grew into a young American who hardly lived in or knew his own country. He gets involved in all sorts of projects in all sorts of media. He teaches himself how to do film and TV soundtracks and gets really good at it. Heck, the guy even has a Youtube channel now, and it's pretty good!
The book hardly talks about The Police's peak era in the 1980s: there's a couple of short chapters that indirectly deal with grappling with the fame, but Copeland treats it as if everything's already been said about that era and it's not worth much of a revisit. On to the next thing, and don't rest on your laurels: forget your laurels, find new laurels. He spends many more pages discussing the group's 2007 reunion, their struggles to work together, and the quality (or lack thereof at times) of those gigs.
These guys were extremely fortunate: they found fame and wealth at a young age, they let go of their band at its peak, and they used their economic freedom to do what they wanted creatively for decades afterwards. And they quit the game young enough to still do a reunion tour before they were too old. In 2007 Copeland and the other band members were still in their fifties, an age that lets you do most of the things you did when you were young--and a few things even better. You just need a little more rest and recovery in between.
Notes:
* Copeland does his first film score after Francis Ford Coppola's kids recommend him to their father; he has no idea how to do a film score at all and does it in a way no one's done it before. "I don't even realize yet how rare it is to have a director who will give anyone this much rope."
* He writes different letters (using different handwriting) to various music magazines about one of his early bands, Curved Air. In each letter he asks things like "who is the exceptional new drummer?" "What's the drummer's name?" etc. Hilarious.
* Works as a roadie, a disc jockey, even manages Joan Armatrading back in the day. See below on how his brothers are involved throughout various levels of the music industry stack too: managing, producing, etc.
* Note Copeland's experience on the British show "Top of the Pops" and his more or less prank launch of his "band" Klark Kent is an excellent example of how fake everything is in the media--and how it has been for decades. This section of the book reminds me of Ryan Holiday's appalling exposes in Trust Me, I'm Lying.
* On being famous: "But living with idolatry is strange, even for those who seek and expect it. You notice the people act oddly in your presence. There is heightened tension. Veins throb in people's foreheads. People laugh nervously, particularly at any gag from the Known One. The tiniest acts of kindness, wisdom, or wit are rewarded with undue enthusiasm..."
* His experience in the polo world is fascinating: he describes this class of people as "feared and despised" by the British middle class, yet to him as an American they seem completely harmless: everybody is extremely vague about their jobs, their money etc. The reader gets the feeling that his experience winning a (somewhat) major polo tournament was more important to him than anything that happened to him as the drummer for The Police. It's pretty interesting to see this: the things you think should matter don't, and the things you think don't matter do.
* He gets a commission to write an opera...about the Crusades of all subjects. "Opera generates no income but burns up hours, days, years of creative energy."
* Copeland's description of the fundraising events for the Fort Worth Opera are hilarious: observations of the various constructed preferences that exist for the ultra-wealthy.
* He gets out of practice with drumming and has "Eric Clapton syndrome" where he fears his instrument. He then gets back into it thanks to a jam session with musicians from the band Phish, then starts training for real: biking for physical fitness, and practicing his drums seriously again.
* Neat how Copeland's brothers are in the business, managing different artists (one brother managed Sting for many years); they also seem to get along well as brothers.
* "I like getting calls out of the blue from Sting. We have discovered that we can be good friends--as long as no one mentions music."
* He mocks the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, calling at a concert in front of fatcats, the people who handle the business of music: "alpha insect people"; "we go and genuflect for the lawyers."
* The music he romanticizes the most is his work with an Italian folk music band where they electrify both the audience and themselves in a performance in Milan. The reader comes away from this chapter with the impression that nothing The Police ever did came close to doing this. Instead, this is the kind of art/music moment you really live for, the kind of performance that fills you with joy and makes you grateful to be alive.
* Some funny generational commentary too: Copeland jokes about all the tattoos that bands like Incubus and their roadies have and he considers getting a SpongeBob tattoo over his jugular.
* "Porco dio!" I'll have to file this expression away and figure out how to use it in Italy one day. Copeland sure loves to say it.
* Copeland does a reality TV talent show in England, and we get a good look at all of the phoniness that goes into these shows: the contrived story lines, the "Frankenbiting" of video clips to create drama where there is none, the total artificiality of it all.
* He has a debate about Old Testament theology with Gene Simmons (??) while they're both fathers to kids in a select private school.
* He does a movie about his days with The Police, it gets a showing at Sundance, and Sting and Andy Summers show up for the premiere: this becomes the seed of The Police's reunion tour in 2007.
* After forty years of arranging rock bands, Sting is now an expert on everything about drumming and Copeland can't stand it. "Sting and I got along much better when he didn't have any idea of what I should be doing."
* Copeland really blows it with the media in South America, where he makes the famous "after four beers" comment about Chile's President Bachelet. Yikes.
* The musical conflicts and personality conflicts are interesting and difficult to articulate, although Copeland does his best: Sting is like this baroque artist, he wants it just precisely so, while Copeland is a spaz who loves musical disorder. And yet Copeland still seeks Sting's approval! "Whatever music he [Sting] wants to make, I will definitely buy the record, but I'm the wrong guy to be playing it."
To Read:
Copeland, Miles: The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative