While sitting at Fenway Park last night, I had a grand vision that I’d log on once I got home and pound out a post-midnight blog about my night at the Police concert.  I was dreaming of bringing that “hot off the press” auro to The Diatribe.  Sadly, that didn’t happen.  Oh well, what’s a 12-hour difference, right?  Say what you will about aging rock stars reuniting strictly for money.  Say what you will about how said rock stars are just going through the motions.  Say what you will about seeing rock stars in concert “when it matters” and not some decades later.  I can hear those arguments ad nauseum.  I will listen patiently and then when you’re done, I’ll give you a giant raspberry.  The Police were phenomenal.  I waited over 20 years for this tour and these three guys delivered.  And then some.

Stewart, Andy, and Sting played for well over 2 hours and had the crowd of 35,000 whipped into a frenzy.  Several times during the show, I looked around in awe at the crowd.  It was a level of excitement so different from that of a Red Sox game at Fenway.  The lights were turned off, which was a huge asset to setting the right ambiance.  The only lights came from the stage in center field, and a few hundred arm-high cigarette lighters. 

Nothing could get me down last night.  Not the pre-show downpours, which luckily subsided before the concert.  Not the dew point of 70 and the air so thick with humidity that you couldn’t cut it with a chainsaw.  Although, one thing that did come close to driving me to distraction was the constantly dripping pipe directly over my head.  Condensation from this pipe, some 25 feet above me, kept me moist and and annoyed all night.  You just gotta love a 95-year-old ball park.  However, this was offset by the presence of a “celebrity” two rows ahead of me. 

Early in the show, the sweet smell of weed wafted through the air.  I was just waiting for a major bust, since there were seemingly hundreds of Boston cops at the park.  But the smell subsided and any arrests were put on hold.  But later on, I discovered the smoker.  It was a man two rows in front of me who was the spitting image of Comic Book Guy from ’The Simpsons.’  Tipping the scale at 300 pounds – check.  Tent-sized t-shirt – check.  Dark shorts – check.  Scraggly goatee - check.  Graying ponytail – check.  Glasses – check.  If only I could have heard his voice, like if he had declared, “Worst Police concert ever.”  To sum up, the guy smoked up a few times, got away with it, and his wife didn’t seem too pleased about his antics.

Anyway, I’m still jazzed about the show.  Looking forward to being back there tonight.  It may be corny, but a thought that ran through my head last night was that now I can die happy. 

Okay, I need vast amounts of audience interaction on this one.  Let’s make this the most trafficked, most commented post in Diatribe history.  This started out as an innocent, yet intriguing question to my man Petro this morning, then I asked my man Bubba, and now I bring the question to your table…

You have 3 fantasy tickets to see any 3 musical acts ever.  Who will they be?

My choices were easy to come up with, using my gut instincts.  But if I had given it some thought, my list would be in the hundreds by now.  Here’s my top 3 at the moment…

* The Doors – 1966, when they were playing their very early gigs at LA’s Whiskey A-Go-Go.

* The Beach Boys – any 1966-1972 gigs that Brian Wilson joined the band (rare occurrences).

* Ludwig van Beethoven – anytime, because that must have been freaking awesome even though I don’t even really like classical music much.

A few years ago, I was driving around and “I’d Love to Change the World” from classic rock band Ten Years After came on the radio. There’s a line that goes:

I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do
So I’ll leave it up to you

It’s a tremendous song, with poignant, societally relevant lyrics written during the “revolution” of the late 1960s [I put revolution in quotes because I once saw a contemporary interview with the Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick whereupon mentioning her band's hit song "Revolution," she admitted how foolish she now feels that the hippie counter-culture referred to what they were doing as a revolution. They tried, but not hard enough, and the right wing, Republican political-war machine won out.] At any rate, I was really into the song and I thought the lyric was:

I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to wear
So I’ll leave it up to you

Years later, I still like my mistaken lyric better. It might sound silly on the surface, but I took it (or what I thought was it) to be a droll, stinging barb aimed at the aesthetes, the poseurs who cared more about appearances than about making the world a better place; either that or maybe Ten Years After was borrowing a page from Paul McCartney’s book and leaving non-sensical words/phrases in a song because in the end it sounds better and flows better than perhaps a more serious insertion (a la “Hey Jude” where Paul left in “the movement you need is on your shoulder” because John told him it sounded better than anything else he could try to think up). As much as I dig the song, I have to say that my mistaken lyric is a bit more biting than a simple “I don’t know what to do.”