Municipal waste founder Ryan Waste (left) and Nick Poulos brandish their RIP Custom and Ibanez rock machines.
Municipal Waste guitarist Ryan Waste is passionate about old-school metal. “I’m as much a fan as a player,” he attests, “so I try to keep as true to the roots as possible.” His allegiance to metal’s early days is loud and clear on Electrified Brain—the band’s most recent record—a 14-track, 34-minute explosion of vintage, full-throttle thrash at its finest. Leaning heavily into the sonic template forged by albums like Metallica’s Ride the Lightningand Slayer’s Reign in Blood, Electrified Brain easily qualifies as a contemporary torchbearer for the genre and effectively associates Municipal Waste with the New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal scene. By embracing the tried-and-true ’80s-era sonic stew of Marshall amps and standard-tuned guitars, and by avoiding modern production aesthetics that rely on click tracks and drop-tunings, the band has crafted an album that captures the incendiary spark of pure, unadulterated OG thrash.
Since forming in 2001 in Richmond, Virginia, Municipal Waste has released seven studio albums, three EPs, and four splits, with founding members Waste and lead vocalist Tony Foresta solidly guiding their musical amalgamation of ’80s thrash and hardcore punk. The current lineup also includes Philip “Landphil” Hall on bass, Dave Witte on drums, and their latest addition, Nick Poulos, on lead guitar. Long-running metal label Nuclear Blast released Electrified Brain, the follow-up to 2017’s widely praised Slime and Punishment, which was the first to feature Poulos on guitar—though the band also released the EP The Last Rager in 2019. Prior to that, Municipal Waste was a four-piece, with Waste handling all guitar duties.
MUNICIPAL WASTE - High Speed Steel (OFFICIAL LYRIC VIDEO)
Over the course of the last two decades, albums like The Art of Partying (2007) and The Fatal Feast (2012) have burnished Municipal Waste’s reputation as the world’s foremost purveyors of “party thrash.” Electrified Brain continues that trend across a set of short, insistent songs with tongue-in-cheek titles like “Last Crawl,” “Ten Cent Beer Night,” “Crank the Heat,” and “Paranormal Janitor.” A good example of putting the “party” into “party thrash” is the “Rock You Like a Hurricane” riff that concludes the propulsive “Ten Cent Beer Night.” These dudes have a sense of humor, and it’s one of Municipal Waste’s coolest attributes.
Poulos confirms that the initial intent for Electrified Brain was to be a bit more “traditional,” and cites elements of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in the song “High Speed Steel.” “There’s a little lead that I do at the end that is pretty ‘Kirk-y,’” he says.
Beyond these towering musical influences, the pandemic also had a profound impact on the creation of Electrified Brain. “We had more time than we’ve ever had for an album,” recalls Waste. “Instead of rushing through—write, hit the studio, hit the road—this one was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to write, let the songs marinate a little bit, revisit them, and then collectively go in the studio.’” During the height of the pandemic, they holed up in Redwoods Recording Studio with engineer Arthur Rizk in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for two weeks and got down to business.
“Now that we have the power to pull off double guitars live, we’re going to really let it shine.” —Ryan Waste
“We were all masked up—five of us—in an Airbnb and just taking Lyft to South Street every day and working 11, sometimes 12, hours,” recalls Poulos. “We were so ready to do just about anything as a band. Obviously, we couldn’t play shows at that time, but the studio was a real cool escape from the world and everything that was happening.”
Poulos says both he and Waste recorded two guitar tracks each per song, so when you listen to Electrified Brain, you’re hearing four rhythm guitar tracks. “We would finish a pass of the song, punch-in, fix whatever mistakes, and then go ahead and do a whole other take,” he recalls.
Poulos cut his rhythm tracks with his late father’s vintage Gibson Explorer, calling on a pair of Marshalls for his amplification needs: his own ’88 JCM800 for his primary rhythm tracks, and one of Rizk’s studio Marshalls for his second tracks. Poulos also “messed around with” a Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive. “I play out of my JCM800 with the reverb cranked at about two-and-a-half, three o’clock, with a Tube Screamer and Overdrive. I just run them both and have it dialed in so it’s not completely noisy. It’s pretty primitive, honestly. There’s really not much to it, but when you put a microphone up to it the way Arthur did, it sounds awesome—very Slayer, Trouble, even early ’Tallica. You just can’t go wrong.”
Ryan Waste’s Gear
Back in the early days of the band, Ryan Waste, here with singer Tony Foresta, designed the Municipal Waste logo. Since 2008, he’s worked with a series of builders to bring that logo to life, culminating in his crushing signature model, the RIP MW-AX.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
Guitars
- RIP Custom Guitars MW-AX with Kahler 2300 Tremolo and Seymour Duncan JB Trembucker pickup
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Tortex Standard .73 mm
Amps
- 1986 Marshall JCM800
Effects
- Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer
- Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner
Waste followed the same tracking protocol, using his own JCM800 amp from ’86 with a V2 mod that boosts the gain and the low end. “It’s definitely loud as shit, but a little less gain-y than mine,” says Poulos. The guitarist runs just a single Ibanez Tube Screamer in front.
Waste tracked Electrified Brain using his RIP Custom Guitars MW-AX, built by Rob Gray. It’s a custom model in the shape of the band’s logo. “I’m a left-handed player. Not being able to find a Flying V or find guitars at a guitar shop, I had a custom guitar made in the shape of our logo as far back as 2008,” explains Waste. In the time since, he’s turned to various builders to make the guitar, from luthier Andy Strangio, who made the initial model, to Fernandes, and to local Richmond builder John Gonzales. “I’ve had five incarnations,” explains Waste. “And now, I teamed up with Rob Gray at RIP Custom Guitars, which is Radical Instrument Products. He’s made the final MW-AX that I’ve actually marketed and made a signature model out of that kids can buy.”
To capture the most brutal sounds around, the band headed up I-95 to Philadelphia and engineer Arthur Rizk. In the City of Brotherly Love, they spent two weeks carefully crafting their riffage—though they recorded their guitar leads at the home of bassist Philip “Landphil” Hall.
Both guitarists credit Rizk with helping them get the desired results. “He’s a great guitar player himself and understands that we want a crunchy, natural tone,” says Waste. “He got my favorite sounds, drums-and guitar-wise, on this album, so I was psyched.”
Even though Electrified Brain is the third Municipal Waste record to include Poulos, it’s their first release to prominently feature a lot of lead guitar playing. “On this one, we’re really letting him shine with more leads,” says Waste. The guitarists decided to take a different approach to tracking their solos than they did to their rhythm parts, cutting them at bassist Philip Hall’s house and shipping them to Rizk fox mixing.
Rig Rundown: Municipal Waste
We filmed a Rig Rundown with the thrash twins back in August — see their live setups up close.
Poulos says he went into each solo with a rough blueprint of what he was going to play before they hit record. “For most of the stuff, I had an idea of how I was going to execute it, but I definitely came up with a couple of cool things on the fly that I’m really stoked on.” He differentiated his tone by using his Ibanez RG550 for solos, and adds, “I just used a couple of different pedals. For the leads, I used a Waza Craft Metal Zone. It’s not like most Metal Zones. I know a lot of people hear the term Metal Zone and think basement metal and Battle of the Bands, but the mod definitely helped make it less noisy. You can really just tone back and dial it in to be great for leads.”
Poulos also admits that in the past he’s been terrified when it came to tracking leads in the studio. “But now, especially working with Phil, we have this rapport,” he explains. “It’s calm, it’s easy. And my abilities have improved over the past couple of years. I really try to do some extracurricular activities, as far as thinking outside of my go-to tricks and my normal toolbox of moves. I’m level-headed, I’m ready to do it, and it feels good. Once you hit something really sick, it’s like, ‘Wow, that sounds really cool.’”
Nick Poulos’ Gear
Electrified Brain is Nick Poulos’ third album with the band, but this time, Waste says, “We’re really letting him shine.”
Photo by Adam Malik
Guitars
- Ibanez RG550 Genesis Collection
- Gibson Explorer
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Nylon Max Grip 1 mm
Amps
- 1988 Marshall JCM800
Effects
- Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer
- Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive
- Boss MT-2W Waza Craft Metal Zone
- Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner
The band also embraced more of the creative possibilities of their two-guitar lineup. “Now that we have the power to pull off double guitars live, we’re going to really let it shine,” promises Waste. On “Last Crawl,” they took the opportunity to trade leads. “The trade-off stuff is cool,” he says. “I think maybe we’ll do more of that.” But it’s also refreshing for Waste to be able to focus on his rhythm work. “It was just such a relief, like, ‘Okay, you’re the lead guitar player now.’ I have no ego about it whatsoever, man.”
Perhaps their generous guitar partnership stems from the guitarists’ collaborations outside of the band, which have been ongoing for some years. They both play together in two more traditional heavy metal bands, Bat and Vulture. Waste plays bass in both, which may account for his willingness to play a more supportive role. It also perhaps highlights his seemingly innate ability to conjure great, single-note, air-guitar-worthy riffs. “I was a bass player long before I was a guitar player, so, honestly, I’m more comfortable playing bass,” he confesses. “I even feel more proficient at bass. I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 18. Back then it was funny. I played bass since I was 13, and everyone told me I played bass like a guitar player, because I’d be up high on the neck doing stuff. So, I was like, ‘I might as well get a guitar.’ And now I feel like I play guitar like a bass player, so I can’t win, man.” [laughter]
“The studio was a real cool escape from the world and everything that was happening at the time.” —Nick Poulos
Waste points to Geezer Butler and Lemmy as huge influences, and says he loves “bass that stands out and you can hear it. I’m a champion of the bass. I want to be able to hear it in recordings. I love a nice distorted, loud bass tone. I love Mob Rules, the Dio Sabbath— ‘Country Girl.’ There are some bass lines on that one.” Ultimately, Waste says his playing style likely evolved from his sense that “riffs are more important—you can shred all day, but can you write a song?”
Poulos cites a slew of influences, starting with “a lot of the British guys, like Jeff Beck. These cool, nonchalant, guitar slingers—they just made it look so easy.” He says he got really into Carcass when he was young and is a fan of guitarists Bill Steer and Michael Amott. “I love Glenn Tipton’s playing on a lot of those post-’70s -era [Judas] Priest records too, like the early-’80 stuff, where he really honed his ability and got a little flashier.” He goes on to gush about Whitesnake’s Adrian Vandenberg, Vinnie Moore, and Thin Lizzy—singling out Gary Moore. “Also, my dad was a blues guy,” he adds. “He always instilled this sense of how to work around a pentatonic and make it sound more bluesy, and that’s driven into my skull. I’m definitely trying to open my mind to stuff like Freddie King.”
After discussing a wide range of players, Poulos circles back to the conversation about the band’s intent to make a more traditional-sounding record, and ultimately concludes that labeling Municipal Waste could be a futile endeavor. “The ‘New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal’ label is a little ridiculous,” he chuckles. “Heavy metal is timeless.”
Municipal Waste - Live @ Hellfest 2019 (Full Live HiRes)
Thrash riffs, gang vocals, guitarmony, crushing riffs … Municipal Waste has it all. Check out lefty Ryan Waste’s custom guitar in action as the band wreaks havoc at Hellfest in Clisson, France, in 2019.
- Rig Rundown: Municipal Waste ›
- Rig Rundown: Megadeth [2022] ›
- How to Play Advanced Heavy Metal Rhythms - Premier Guitar ›
One of Summers’ still-ongoing projects is a multimedia show entitled “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” which he started touring before the pandemic.
Summers, who rose to fame in the late 1970s as one third of the new-wave phenomenon the Police, told many stories and landed many punchlines. There was the episode in which he and John Belushi partook of psychedelics in Bali, and the time he got kind of hustled by a striking, guitar-playing Long Neck Karen villager in Thailand. He recounted a gut-busting tale of taking a few too many sleeping pills on a trip to South America. With perfectly British dryness and timing, he improvised an aside about living near Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles, and how he just had to kick the Terminator’s ass.
Out of the Shadows
“I think it’s turning into a standup routine, basically,” Summers said recently over Zoom. He was being self-effacing. Mostly, this one-man multimedia show, entitled “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” allows Summers to reflect on enduring passions with sincerity, by “integrating these two media I’ve been working on for so long”: music, of course, and art photography, where his work combines painterly composition with street-level intimacy and the global-citizen mission of Nat Geo.
Behind projections of his photos, and between the storytelling and odd video clip, he gave a two-hour recital of solo guitar music. Summers played a new yellow Powers Electric A-Type guitar, and began his show by telling his audience how thrilled he was with it. (Summers has accrued around 200 guitars, many of them given to him, and maintains that he’s “definitely a player,” not a collector.)
Summers spent a significant part of his 20s studying classical music, originally inspired by Julian Bream. Now, onstage in his one-man show, it's clearly time to reflect on his past.
Summers began touring “The Cracked Lens” before the pandemic—the final show prior to shutdown took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in 2019—and picked it up last year. It’s evolved, he says, through improvisation and trial and error, following a process much like one he’d put into motion for any band or project.
In D.C., the setlist was both surprising and deeply satisfying. Newer solo music like “Metal Dog” came off as delightfully arch and abstract, a reminder that Summers hit the Billboard albums chart with Robert Fripp, with 1982’s I Advance Masked. A sterling chord-melody arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” spoke to the lifelong impact American jazz has had on the guitarist. A winsome mini-set of bossa nova, including “Manhã de Carnaval,” Luiz Bonfá’s theme to the film Black Orpheus, illustrated Summers’ devotion to both the cinema and the music of Brazil.
And yes, there was Police material, too, which Summers reharmonized and rearranged and used as vessels for longform improvisation. Atop programmed backing tracks, he treated songs like “Tea in the Sahara,” “Roxanne,” “Spirits in the Material World,” and “Message in a Bottle” as if they were his beloved jazz standards, drawing agile lines in and around the harmony, using pop hits as a launch pad for wending single-note narratives. In a small theater, it felt as if you were eavesdropping on Summers, whiling away an afternoon in his home studio. An excitable woman behind me couldn’t help but try and banter with him as he stalked the stage; the guy to my right played air drums. This was thrilling—especially if you were a Police fan whose context for these songs was sold-out arenas.
A New Installment
To combine music and imagery was also the impetus for Vertiginous Canyons, Summers’ recent solo EP. Commissioned as an accent to the guitarist’s fifth photo book, A Series of Glances, the project features eight spontaneously composed instrumental pieces of pop-song length. Its sparkling, layered, and looped soundscapes serve as Zen-like mood music for viewing the photographs. By design, Summers improvised Vertiginous Canyons in a single afternoon without too much fuss, using mostly his early ’60s Strat. “This was drone-like, ambient, atmosphere stuff that I thought was enough,” Summers explains. “Because I suppose you could get into a place, let’s say, where the photography and the music are fighting each other.
“One of the cardinal rules of scoring films, which I’ve done many,” he adds, “is don’t get in the way of the movie.”
On Vertiginous Canyons, listeners will hear influences from Eno to Hendrix to Bill Frisell.
As with Summers’ solo show, the music can stand alone. In many ways, Vertiginous Canyons also comes off like Eno or classical minimalism or the edgiest strain of what can be called “new age”—an engaging yet accessible entryway to experimental music. And as with any effective musical abstraction, what you’ve heard in your life is what you’ll hear in Vertiginous Canyons. The twinkling, fluttering phrases of “Blossom” bring to mind Bill Frisell. “Translucent” and “Village” summon up Glenn Branca’s guitar armies in their quietest moments, ramping up toward euphoria. “Blur” is a far-out exercise in Hendrix-style backwards soloing; “Into the Blue” is Pink Floyd meets Popol Vuh.
Greatly moved by Julian Bream as a young man, Summers spent a sizable chunk of his 20s immersed in classical guitar in California, as hard rock and the singer-songwriters ascended. When I ask him if those studies informed Vertiginous Canyons, his response is rapid-fire. “Definitely. I mean, I spent years doing nothing but classical music, classical guitar,” he says. “It’s very important information that I took in … and it stayed with me the rest of my life.
“So my ears are wide open.... I’m a sophisticated harmonic player, and it’s also informed by classical music. I’m sort of all-’round educated in the ways you can do music.”
Summer Reflections
To let an artist’s age guide your judgment of them is unfair. But in Summers’ case, it’s essential to understanding how and why he became such a fascinating guitarist, one whose whip-smart, cross-cultural approach overhauled the prevailing notion of what rock-guitar heroics could be in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
He was born on the last day of 1942, “a kid from the English countryside,” he says. His father was in the Royal Air Force; his mother supported the war effort working in a bomb factory. Alongside Django Reinhardt, he’s on the short list of guitar idols who spent their earliest days in a Romani caravan, which his father bought in the face of a housing shortage. In terms of rock generations, think about it: Jimi Hendrix was born in November of ’42, Keith Richards in ’43, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in ’44, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton in ’45. Summers debuted the cinematic, reggae-soaked sound that made him famous on the Police’s Outlandos d’Amour, in 1978, as the punk explosion gave way to post-punk and new wave. But his contemporaries are the British bluesmen who were architects of the psychedelic era and won over the baby boomers.
Andy Summers' Gear
When Summers, pictured here performing with the Police in 1982, began developing his blues chops, he blended in complex chords and jazz phrasing.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
For touring:
- Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster
- Powers Electric A-Type
Amps
- Fender Twin with Fender Special Design Speakers
- Fractal Axe-Fx III
- Bob Bradshaw 100-watt head
- Roland JC-120
- Various Mesa/Boogie heads, cabinets and power amps
Effects
Current Pedaltrain pedalboard includes these effects, among many others:
- TC Electronic SCF Gold
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- DigiTech Whammy
- Klon Centaur
- TC Electronic Brainwaves
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Electro-Harmonix Freeze
- Paul Trombetta Design Rotobone
- TC Electronic Dark Matter
- Mad Professor Golden Cello
Picks & Strings
- Dunlop Andy Summers Custom 2.0 mm Picks
- D’Addario Strings, mostly .010–.046
The electric-blues revivalism that his peers favored was a scene with which Summers engaged mostly by circumstance. In some capacity he was immersed in it, gigging and recording with hot R&B acts of Swinging Sixties London. But as a developing guitarist, he also transcended its stylistic boundaries, and he ultimately missed out on the wildly lucrative parts of it, after it’d evolved from nightclub entertainment to chart-topping, festival-headlining pop.
“[We’re talking about] real modern electric-guitar history,” Summers says, “because I was really pretty close with Clapton. We all knew each other. There were about five or six of us, and we all played at one club [the Flamingo, in London].
“I watched Eric develop, and he had this mission to play the blues … and he ripped off some great blues solos,” Summers adds, with a mischievous chuckle. “I had grown up with different kinds of music in those formative [teenage] years, when you’re taking it all in and trying to be able to do it.”
So much has been written about how the ’60s British-guitar titans tapped into early rock ’n’ roll influences and Chicago blues, rescuing the latter from obscurity in its country of origin. But it’s important to remember the profound impact that midcentury modern jazz had on culturally curious young Brits; in fact, the moniker “mods”—that clothes-obsessed cult that gave us the Who—began as “modernists,” as in devotees of modern jazz, R&B, soul, and ska.
Before meeting Sting (left) and forming the Police, Andy Summers (right) was close friends with Eric Clapton and once jammed with Jimi Hendrix.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
Summers was hooked. Guitarists Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Raney, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green ranked among his favorites, alongside Sonny Rollins. Rather than sticking to 12-bar patterns, Summers shedded on complex chord sequences and jazz phrasing, logging “thousands of hours of listening, trying to get it. But that’s where the feel of the time comes from, which is the most important element.”
“Eric and I talked about it,” he continues, “and I was in a different place. I don’t think we really had arguments about it, but he was absolutely a disciple of the blues, where I was more into other things.” Summers loved the fleet, chromatic lines of bop, and classical guitar, and African and Indian music. He recalls transcribing Ravi Shankar.
“So I felt like I very much had my own path, and it wasn’t the Eric Clapton path. I was aware of all that, but Eric was deeply into B.B. King — gave me his B.B. King record, actually—Live at the Regal, told me to check it out. So I did listen to it, and yeah, okay, I get it. But my head was elsewhere.” (During that period, Summers also sold Clapton a ’58 Les Paul, after Slowhand’s 1960 model was stolen. “It was guitar craziness,” Summers says. “I really anguished over selling my Les Paul, but I just wasn’t into it. I think there was something wrong with the pickup—at least I thought there was, in my sort of naivety at that time.”)
Nor was Summers’ path the Hendrix path. Because of his friendship with the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, Summers once jammed in the late ’60s with Jimi. “A quiet guy with a very loud guitar. And he could play the shit out of the guitar,” Summers laughs. “He was definitely sort of a force of nature. You’d feel it.” At an L.A. studio where the Jimi Hendrix Experience was in session, Summers began playing with Mitchell on a break. But “Jimi just couldn’t stay away from the music,” Summers recalls. So Hendrix picked up a bass to anchor Summers’ guitar, until Jimi asked to trade.
“I think of it almost as a sort of a comic moment,” Summers reflects today. “Jimi had come into the scene and … didn’t really play like anyone else. I mean, he played Jimi Hendrix … incredible, but I didn’t really want to play like that. I’ve got to find my own thing. It was very imperative to me not to be yet another Hendrix copier. And I think it’s what he would have appreciated, too.”
Although the first album by the Police was released in late 1978, Summers already had an extensive catalog of recordings with Eric Burdon, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, and Joan Armatrading before “Roxanne” alerted the world that a new kind of pop group was arriving.
To hear Summers on pre-Police recordings is intriguing; even on straightforward forms, his good taste and sense of harmony present a shrewd, knowing alternative to his peers. Seek out the 1965 LP It Should’ve Been Me, by Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band: On a take of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” Summers applies the single-note harmonic finesse of Grant Green to barroom British R&B. (It was Green’s Gibson ES-330, a surprising instrument for a jazz picker at the time, that inspired Summers to pick up an ES-335 after his ES-175 was stolen.) A few years later, as part of Eric Burdon’s New Animals, Summers covered Traffic’s “Coloured Rain,” going long on a fuzztone solo that fits the psychedelic bill while also telling a story with precision and patience.
Summers’ ship came in nearly a decade later, after he’d returned to England from California and met drummer Stewart Copeland and a singer and bass player, Gordon Sumner, who went by “Sting.” They were bright, dexterous, and culturally well-versed, with backgrounds in prog and jazz. “I think we had a credo,” Summers says, “and it was spoken out loud: We don’t want to sound like anybody else.
“I found I could talk to Sting and say, ‘I want to play this kind of altered chord here. What do you think?’ He could sing right through anything. He had the ears to be able to sing it like a jazz singer. Not that we were trying to lay ‘We’re really jazzers’ on the public. We were trying to present ourselves as a rock band with songs. But the information that we were putting into those rock-song arrangements was different.”
Summers in a late ’80s promo photo, near the start of his solo-recording career.
For Summers, that meant matching the musicianship he’d started earning as a teenager on jazz bandstands with the au courant sounds of post-punk and reggae, filtered through emergent sonic technology. With his heavily modded 1961 Tele and custom Pete Cornish pedalboard, he offered chord sequences and lines that have challenged and educated generations of practicing guitarists brought up on blues-rock technique. Alongside his deft use of open space, he was that rarest rock guitarist who paid serious mind to chord voicings. “My job was to turn the chords into something more unusual,” Summers says, “to have more unusual guitar parts. For instance, something like ‘Walking on the Moon,’ I put in a Dm11 chord, with reverb and a beautiful chorus sound. So it’s got the 11th on top, and immediately it grasps your ear. It’s like the signature of the song was that chord.”
“So my ears are wide open.... I’m a sophisticated harmonic player, and it’s also informed by classical music. I’m sort of all-’round educated in the ways you can do music.”
Of course, no other Summers guitar part or Police song made bigger waves than 1983’s “Every Breath You Take.” Influenced by Bartók’s “44 Duos for Two Violins,” Summers crafted a repeating figure that underlined Sting’s standard pop-song structure while avoiding conventional triadic harmony. (Losing the third from tired rock chords was Summers’ not-so-secret weapon.) “It gave it that haunting quality that made the whole track come to life,” Summers says, “because otherwise, I think we would have dumped the song. It wasn’t one of our favorites at all.”
The Police last performed on their historic reunion tour of 2007 to ’08, and their relationship today is mostly business. “We’re not hanging out with each other,” Summers says. “We’re all in touch through headquarters.” One thing they’ve had to agree on this year is a Super Deluxe reissue, toasting the 40th anniversary of the Synchronicity album, which provides new context that might safely be called revelatory. Among the new box set’s many previously unreleased goodies is Sting’s original demo for “Every Breath You Take,” weighed down with synth keyboards that pile on the sentimentality and pin the track squarely to the 1980s. (Unlike so much ’80s pop-rock, the Police’s music has aged well.) “You can see the transformation,” says Summers.
“Every Breath You Take” became a global smash that ranks among pop’s most successful songs, a feather in the cap of the band that owned the late ’70s and ’80s. Consider this: At a time when his psych-era peers were considered middle-aged Flower Power relics, Summers was leaping around onstage like a bleached-blond atom and representing pop rock’s bleeding edge on MTV. Now, at 81, he’s found a way to forge ahead and, in some fashion, improve on the past.
Call The Police (Andy Summers / João Barone / Rodrigo Santos) - Synchronicity II (ensaio/rehearsal)
With bandmates João Barone and Rodrigo Santos, of Police tribute band Call the Police, Summers displays the adept riffage that brought him to the big stages and helped solidify his rock legacy.
Leveling Up
When we connect on a followup call in mid July, Summers is in Brazil, about to embark on a South American tour with his trio, Call the Police. This tribute project of a sort features two celebrated Brazilian rockers, bassist-vocalist Rodrigo Santos and drummer João Barone, and plays hits-filled live sets to packed houses. “It’s sort of enhanced, because it gets looser. It’s a bit uptight with those other guys I play with,” says Summers.
With regard to those other guys, that uptightness had much to do with the punk and new-wave era that bore the Police. The relationship between punk and the band was complicated. Somehow, they managed to use the movement’s greatest lessons—in energy, creative bravery, and concise songcraft—without pandering to its musical primitivism. Summers’ reputation amongst guitarists rested in the minimalist intelligence of his decision-making; you kind of understood he could play anything, but he was mature enough not to. “I didn’t feel the need to crush everybody with every guitar part,” he says.
“It was more like a guitar solo is supposed to be a mark of the old guard. You weren’t supposed to be able to play; it was really that dumb.”
Nevertheless, he believes that punk’s principle of non-musicianship kept him from exploring the songs to their fullest. “I think I should have played more solos than I was given the space to do,” he says. “It pisses me off actually, because this came more from Stewart. When we started the band in the thick of the hardcore-punk scene, it was more like a guitar solo is supposed to be a mark of the old guard. You weren’t supposed to be able to play; it was really that dumb.”
“I was a virtuoso player,” he adds, “so it was very frustrating for me. Later, when we did sort of open it up, it really got more exciting. The fact that I could play as well as I did, I found it was a bit threatening. Because the highlight in a performance of a song … would be the guitar solo.”
As in “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” Summers can stretch out in Call the Police to his heart’s content. At long last. “It’s very improvised,” he says, “and they’re up to the level where they can do that. They go with me. It’s how it should always have been.”
