Performer: The Police
Songwriter: Sting
Original Release: Synchronicity
Year: 1983
Definitive Version: Live!, 1995
Shortly before I went to
Northwestern, Scott made a bootleg tape of The Police concert shown on MTV from
the Synchronicity tour in 1983. When I learned that The Police’s live album in
1995 was going have this show on one disc, I had to have it, because I had worn
out the tape.
On the first drive to school
at the end of September 1986, as soon as I got near enough to Chicago that I
could pick up the radio stations, I turned off my tapes and went with the
radio. I went straight to the Loop, which was the well-known rock station in
town, like Q-FM in Columbus, and that brought me into town.
Right when the Lake Shore
was ending before I turned onto Sheridan to complete the drive, the music
stopped and the next DJs came on, and they were unlike anything I’d ever heard
before. I couldn’t tell what they were doing—they weren’t playing any music—and
I turned them off and went back to my music, but I remembered their names for
later: Steve and Garry.
I got to Engelhart Hall, the
grad-school residency dorm, just before the monitor left for the day, so I could
get the keys to my room. This was going to be something of a new experience
after the past few years at Wabash. Since my freshman year, I had lived in a
house with two other guys, an apartment with two other guys and an apartment
with one other guy.
Now I was going to be in a
shared suite in a high-rise building that had 250 units. I had lived in the
dorms at Wabash for a year, of course, but even Wolcott Hall had only about 40
individual units. Culture shock.
My room was on the second
floor, and I saw right away that the window to my dorm room—and therefore
bed—was going to be no more than 175 feet from the L. Having typically needed
quiet while sleeping, this was going to be a problem, and the words of Jake and
Elwood Blues flashed through my head: “How often does the train come by?” “So
often you won’t even notice it.” I hoped that that would be true.
The dorm was a suite, as
I’ve described, and the first order of business after I had moved everything up
to my room and parked my car in the lot between the building and the L tracks,
was to rearrange the room the way I liked it.
OK, the real first order of
business was to get out the boombox that Jin let me take, plug it in and pop in
a tape. The first tape I listened to at Northwestern was the Synchronicity
concert bootleg.
The tape—and therefore the
MTV concert that Scott bootlegged—differs slightly from the CD version. This is
the third song on the CD but the second on the tape. I seem to recall that I
popped in this tape as I unloaded my car, so that by the time this song came
around, I was ready to get serious about moving furniture before I unpacked my
boxes and suitcases.
The room was arranged so the
bed was along the long part of the wall in a way that if you pushed your pillow
hard at night, it could fall off the end. That would never do, so I put it in
the corner, which also kept the bed out of direct sunlight. I had an
East-facing, aka early-sunlight, window, so this was an added benefit. I moved
the desk next to it where the bed had been, not unlike the arrangement I had
had at the condo at home, and then put the dresser on the wall opposite the
window and the tall bookshelf against the wall between the door and closet. It
all fit perfectly.
That was some comfort when I
finally bedded down only to be awakened moments later by the rumble of the L
building speed as it departed the nearby Foster Avenue stop. It went by often,
and I noticed every time. This was going to take some getting used to.
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