It's sort of paradoxical. The last time I saw Sting in concert before Saturday was nine years ago, when I was a freshman at Berkeley. Coincidentally, I saw his show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre and had lawn seats, the same as last night. I remember how incredible the experience was (I didn't go to concerts very often at all) and was riding a high until Monday when my Calc TA asked if anyone else went to the show, and then lambasted it on technical merits (Sting was having some voice problems from being too long on tour).

Well, the irony here is it's nine years later, and I went to a show that, being technically great, she probably would have loved, yet left me feeling empty.

Granted, my group didn't show up early enough to get good lawn seats, so we were pretty far to the back, but the energy in the crowd was amazingly low. I probably spent more time thinking about this than I did enjoying the concert.

My first assumption was that the whole crowd just lacked energy, but I started thinking about what it would take to make that happen. The theory of large numbers would say that such a significant shift in an entire population would require a large imputus. Could it have been the hour it took to get from the freeway offramp to a parking space? there was a lot of inexplicable traffic all over the Bay Area all day, could that have put people in a foul mood? The declining NASDAQ market? (This was in Mountain View, after all. Probably half the cars in the lot were paid for with dot-com-dollars.)

Musing on this, during Roxanne, I did notice that there was a lot more arm waving and rocking going on in the sections close to the stage, throught back to the lawn seats, and tapering off about halfway up the lawn, to where people were just a diarama of standing and sitting statues. Maybe the energy just wasn't reaching this far back? The music wasn't particularly loud. In fact, where we were, it wasn't much louder than what I'd consider 'loud' in my living room. It really was like watching it on TV, seperated from the volume, the stage itself, watching the action on projection screens delayed a half-second to account for the time it takes sound to travel from the stage all the way back to our seats.

Mystery solved, until it was audience-participation time. What audience participation? It's pretty much par for the course for the stage presence to cajole the audience with a "I can't hear you!" and "I thought I was in " but it's a sad thing when the person actually means it. So much for the theory that it was just a back-lawn phenomenon. He couldn't have heard us back there anyhow.

So what then? Was it just a bad performance? Like I said before, it was technically great. Sting's voice was at its best, the band was great, stage design was beautiful. the song choice had a lot to be desired. It was an odd mix of his older music (15 years or older) and a few things from the latest album. Aside from Fields of Gold, I didn't pick up on anything from between 2 and 10 years ago. No Soul Cages tracks, nothing from Ten Sumners Tales, and strangely, he seemed to shy away from the political songs (Russians, They Dance Alone, etc) that got him where he is. the second song was a medly of three of his older songs which seemed (to me anyway) to say "retrospective" more than "concert." Not that I mind the old songs, I love them, but not when they're treated like vignettes or "Earlier, on 'Sting'..."

Talking to the audience was nonexistant until halfway through the concert, when he twice yelled out "Hello San Francisco!" or "It's great to be back in San Francisco!" which would have been cliche if he had been in San Francisco, but this was Mountain View, with an audience from all over the Bay Area, most of whom probably don't view themselves as San Franciscans. I wonder what he yelled out the previous night when he played at the Concord Pavilion? If anyone knows, please let me know.

Anyhow, to make a long story a slightly shorter story, I took away two things from the concert:

First, that Sting is inches away from the big five-oh, but he's trying hard to maintain the same 1980's image, well muscled in a tank top and short haircut, pushing the 'retrospecitve' angle, as though he doesn't seem comfortable evolving into a mature musical presence.

Second, back to the audience that was really dead before anything Sting could have done to them, I'm left with a curiosity of the mechanics of chaos theory on social systems. What could have affected such a large group? Or was it the absence of something?

By amazing coincidence, while reading the news this morning, I came across a review of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The book seems to be all about strange attractors and chaos theory in social settings. This is definitely getting pushed near the head of my to-read list.