Interviews

"That's pretty odious," Andy Summers says to me. "An odious comparison." His blueish eyes darken. roughly an hour into our 90-minute face-to-face interview, I'd asked if it bothers him that in terms of reach and staying power, his solo oeuvre will never match his work with The Police.

To me, the observation seemed factual and uncontroversial, like saying that the sun rises in the east. The Police sold more than 75 million records and played some of the largest venues in the world. The night before our interview, I'd watched Summers perform a show in a 400-seat theater in rural Waldoboro, Maine.

But my conversation partner feels I've belittled him and impugned his post-Police career. He looks irascibly out the plate-glass window into the rain-splashed courtyard of his hotel in Portland. No slight was intended, I tell him, and I apologize if my Dutch directness came across as a lack of manners. He softens. "Yeah, you do look Dutch, actually," he says, sizing me up before launching into a brief ode to Amsterdam.

Summers tells me he thinks of himself as a nice guy. He knows that fame and money, both of which he has in spades—his net worth is estimated at $100 million (footnote 1)—amount to power, and "with power comes responsibility. So, you're triple-bound to be nice to everybody. I think all three of us in the Police were like that. We didn't pull any nasty stuff, no matter the demands of the job"—the fans, the press, the sponsors, the endless parade of people who wanted something from him and his erstwhile bandmates. "You just go through it and be a good person."

Affability and politeness helped set the Police apart in the late 1970s in London, where the trio emerged as a proto-punk outfit. The genre was not a good fit for the band: "Gobbing" (spitting on the performers; footnote 2) was in fashion for a while. Infamously, the Sex Pistols were promptly fired from A&M Records after its members visited the office and allegedly threatened to kill a record executive's friend, had sex with fans in a bathroom, and urinated on the plants. The Police were a lot more like the Beatles 15 years earlier: gifted songsmiths who also happened to be clean-cut, good-looking, and relatable. Before a gig, in the dressing room, it wasn't unusual to find Sting reading a novel while Summers played a classical guitar piece to limber up his fingers.

"Punk wasn't about music," Summers tells me. "It was purely about attitude. I'm all for fresh approaches, but a lot of punk was just dreadful, nothing more than pain-in-the-ass antimusic—and we were real musicians."

A curtain of space
It's a fair distinction, and a vital one. Punk's overconfident idea was that you could buy a guitar on Monday and play your first gig on Friday. By contrast, Sting had honed his chops in the jazz fusion band Last Exit; drummer Stewart Copeland had cut his teeth in the progressive-rock and folk group Curved Air; and Summers, who'd studied the classical guitar extensively, played with everyone from the Animals to Kevin Ayers, from Joan Armatrading to Soft Machine. It was painful to him that the Police could only survive in late-'70s London by being, as he puts it, "fake punks." Not that the cosplaying fooled anyone. Even the band's own manager, Miles Copeland, despaired that Summers was an ersatz punk after he'd gone on stage "wearing trousers that were maybe half an inch wider than what punk fashion dictated," the guitarist recounts with a laugh.

Sartorial choices mattered, but in the end the music mattered more, and the Police got tighter and more polished by the week. In the months leading up to their first album, the band began to slyly incor- porate jazz and reggae while holding on to a punkish energy. A key characteristic of those genres is that there's often a good deal of space between the notes. The Police reminded themselves that what you don't play is as important as what you do play. Sting had learned that sparseness from listening to Miles Davis; Summers, also a Miles Davis fan, was especially influenced by Thelonious Monk. (He would later record 13 Monk compositions for his album Green Chimneys.)

"It was like a mantra we had up on the wall—less is more," Summers recalls. "We were very conscious of the fact that when you've only got three instruments, you can make them all sound bigger. The minute you start overloading the songs with overdubs and all that—you know, 19 fucking guitars—it gets to be too much. What worked for us was that clear, clean sound."

The band finally began making magic when Stewart Copeland turned the rhythms inside out, finding infectious backbeats that groove-locked with the syncopations of Sting's 1954 Fender Precision bass. Summers, for his part, shunned barre chords and solos. While his peers in other bands were riffing hard and rolling out the same old pentatonic scales, he played arpeggiated chords most rock guitarists could barely name—added 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, suspended 2nds, and more. By also avoiding root-position triads and incorporating open-string drones, Summers often gave his parts a shimmering quality. Quartal chords (built on fourths instead of thirds), polychords (footnote 3), and wide-interval voicings became his trademarks. Sometimes he used inversions that placed the fifth or seventh of a chord in the bass, creating tension and unexpected harmonic movement.

For the finishing touch, Summers employed guitar effects in unique ways. Around the time he joined the Police, he found an old Echoplex and was immediately smitten. "I used it all the time," he says. "It has a quarter-inch tape that spools around a couple of tape heads. You can vary the number of repeats with a slider. It gave my guitar parts this rich harmonic wash, a spatial quality that helped define our sound."

Chet Atkins, Miles Davis, and Brian May had all used Echoplexes before Summers did, but not with the same fondness for manipulating the device's rhythmic powers. "I found that I could play a rhythm and eighth notes against the drums and create 16th-note patterns," Summers says. In One Train Later, his engaging autobiography, he explains that he then often colored his playing with "dissonant harmonies and accented syncopation, [resulting] in a guitar sound that becomes huge and prismatic, like a rainbow arcing over the band." The use of the device, he says, was "seminal in changing and pushing the group into a unique direction, creating a curtain of space."

Summers also pioneered a particular chorused guitar signature (via a Roland Jazz Chorus guitar amplifier and, later, a Boss CE-1 chorus pedal) that gave his parts a wide, swirly quality—the six-string equivalent of a Hammond organ played through a Leslie cabinet. Other guitarists of the era usually leaned on distortion, which tends to project aggression. Instead, Summers put together a sonic style that was precise and clear, even diaphanous.

His influence is far-reaching. U2's the Edge owes much to his Police compadre, and you can hear echoes of Summers's sound in the guitar parts of bands like Sigur Rós, My Bloody Valentine, and Radiohead.

Emission of light
He's still enthused by the possibilities of electronic enhancements, as evidenced by the fresh sounds on solo albums like 2015's Metal Dog and 2017's Triboluminescence (a word the dictionary defines as "the emission of light caused by rubbing, scratching, or similar frictional contact"—not a bad de- scription of some of Summers's music). His latest album, Vertiginous Canyons, is based in large part on sounds he discovered while playing around with studio effects. "When you're not doing pop songs with vocals, you're released from traditional song structures," Summers says. "You can then build other types of songs, and I often do. Purely sonic stuff, you know? It doesn't have to make any effort toward song structure." When he's playing with effects, he may hit upon strange, ambient guitar sounds and intriguing textures. "It's an adventure.

I think to myself, let's try plugging this device into that device over there, and that thing into that other thing. Next, maybe I'll change the order of the chain and see what happens. Vertiginous Canyons has tracks that I created for a new book of my photography [A Series of Glances]. I projected my photos on a wall in the recording space and fired up the gear, and somehow found my way into the material." He recorded all eight tracks in a single afternoon. "They're all just based on sounds, on exploring. It's very free."

Footnote 2: See punk77.co.uk/spitting-and-gobbing.

Footnote 3: Watch this fascinating analysis of Summers's guitar part on "Message in a Bottle": tinyurl.com/y7vvzym2.