Andy
Summers went from stadium tours as the lead guitarist of the Police to
headlining at the Baked Potato, an intimate jazz club in Los Angeles. He had
the chops for both and enough left over from the former style of gigs to enjoy
the latter. Jazz listeners always knew Summers was the coolest member of the
Police and that judgment is vindicated by Andy Grieve’s Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police (trailer here) which opens this
Friday in New York.
Although
Stand is based on Summers’ memoir One Train Later and features his
confessional narration, it never has time to touch on his jazz work. For
blindingly obvious reasons, Grieve’s film is mostly concerned with Summers’
tenure in the Police and his relationship with the other two band members,
particularly Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. Sting. However, Summers’ early scuffling
years will be surprisingly interesting to those who do not already kno them
chapter-and-verse. He nearly caught on with a number of bands in the late 1960s
and early 1970, even serving a stint in Eric Burdon’s The Animals, but he never
managed to break out big.
Summers
was about to chuck it in when he found himself playing a couple of one-offs
with Sumner and Stewart Copeland. The two were trying to make a go of it with a
pseudo-punk ensemble called the Police. Summers was not sure he had the right
feel for the new style of music, but when he and Copeland happened to arrive
for a meet-up on the same subway train, he took it as a sign (hence the title
of Summers’ book). You basically know the trajectory the band took from there,
but casual fans might have forgotten some of the details and diehards will
enjoy reliving them from Summers’ viewpoint.
To
his credit, Sting (as we must refer to him now) was reasonably cooperative with
the film, even though he does come across as a bit of a prima donna. Clearly,
he had no objections when the press focused in on him at an early stage. He
just as obviously had one foot out the door for quite a while, yet he still tried
to impose his my-way-or-the-highway will on the band. At least, that is how it
looks from the candid archival footage. Perhaps most damning, it is decidedly not
cool to see him act like a jerkweed to Martha Quinn in an MTV interview.
Yet,
Summers oral history is just as hard on himself as it is on Sting (so
apparently Copeland must have the patience of a saint). It would be fair to say
he let the rock star thing sabotage his personal life. However, his third act
was rather redemptive, in ways Grieve might have spent more time exploring. Instead,
he essentially concentrates on their 2007 reunion (thanks to tour footage
directed by Lauren Lazin) and a special exhibition of Summers’ photography,
mounted in conjunction with Taschen’s publication of I’ll Be Watching You: Inside the Police 1980-83.
