{"id":2448157,"date":"2019-08-29T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=311980"},"modified":"2019-08-29T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-29T22:00:00","slug":"jazz-aspen-labor-day-experience-stings-early-years-through-the-lens-of-lynn-goldsmith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/jazz-aspen-labor-day-experience-stings-early-years-through-the-lens-of-lynn-goldsmith\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz Aspen Labor Day Experience: Sting\u2019s early years, through the lens of Lynn Goldsmith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Sting, photographed at home in London, by Lynn Goldsmith in 1982.<\/strong>
Lynn Goldsmith<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

When photographer Lynn Goldsmith met Sting, he was a 20-something in an unknown British rock band called The Police who hadn\u2019t yet released an album.<\/p>\n

As a favor to a friend, the famed rock photographer met the trio for a shoot in New York in 1978. She soon found herself chronicling a band on a meteoric rise to rock stardom. Through The Police\u2019s entire creative life through 1983 and through their five studio albums, Goldsmith had unfettered access in the studio, on the road and at home.<\/p>\n

She also co-wrote a song with Sting, which she recorded in 1983 as Will Powers. The track, \u201cAdventures in Success,\u201d got a belated global boost in 2018 when it was featured in a Squarespace Super Bowl advertisement<\/a> (it features Keanu Reeves singing along to the motivational Goldsmith\/Sting tune while standing atop a speeding motorcycle).<\/p>\n

As Sting comes to Aspen this weekend to headline the 2019 Jazz Aspen Snowmass Labor Day Experience, Goldsmith \u2013 long based in Basalt and a fixture in the photo pit at Labor Day fest \u2013 took a look back at her time chronicling Sting and The Police.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t just want to be rock stars and be successful,\u201d Goldsmith recalled this week. \u201cThey were artists who were really interested in evolving as human beings. I thought they were special.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldsmith had co-managed Grand Funk Railroad during the heights of the trio\u2019s popularity in the 1970s. She\u2019d met Miles Copeland in those days, when he was managing a band opening for Grand Funk. So when his brother, drummer Stewart Copeland, was struggling to get attention for a fledgling new trio called The Police in 1978, he called on Goldsmith \u2013 who by then was focused on her career as a photographer \u2013 for help.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe told me that his brother was in a band called The Police and they had a single called \u2018Roxanne\u2019 with A&M Records,\u201d Goldsmith recalled. \u201cHe was coming to New York and bringing the band because the single had flopped and A&M was going to drop them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The manager asked if Goldsmith could drum up some support for the band in the States and make some images, she recalled. Goldsmith agreed to meet them in front of a barber shop in midtown Manhattan \u2013 near her office \u2013 to snap some pictures.<\/p>\n

There, she captured a young and pre-fame Police in their streetclothes, with Sting \u2013 in Harry Potter glasses \u2013 reading a paperback novel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no idea who sang and who played what, which is unusual for me, because I believe research makes for more powerful imagery,\u201d Goldsmith recalled.<\/p>\n

She hadn\u2019t dug into the music yet, but she was taken by the bandmembers\u2019 natural style and intellectual curiosity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were not really, at that point, musicians who were really smart,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I met The Police, each one of them was really smart, funny and interested in other things outside of music.\u201d<\/p>\n

From there, she took them on a shoot around the city, photographed them at a small club show, and began placing the photos in magazines. The band slowly gained traction. The band\u2019s debut album, \u201cOutlandos d\u2019Amour\u201d would be released that fall, \u201cRoxanne\u201d would get a reissue in February 1979 and would become the band\u2019s first hit, before global pop stardom came with the release of \u201cReggatta de Blanc\u201d in 1979.<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, Goldsmith had a front-row seat for the band\u2019s rise as songs like \u201cMessage in a Bottle,\u201d \u201cWalking on the Moon\u201d and \u201cEvery Little Thing She Does is Magic\u201d helped define the era in the early 1980s. She shot recording sessions and concerts and made portraits of Sting and the band, placing her evocative photos in rock magazines, on the cover of Rolling Stone as well as news publications like Newsweek. (Pop culture was still a rarity in news magazines but The Police were big enough to break through. Goldsmith recalled Newsweek photo editor Joan Engels asking her, at the height of The Police\u2019s fame, \u201cSting? Who is this Sting?\u201d)<\/p>\n

She\u2019d pop in on their recording sessions and concerts, visit the members at home to make portraits. So when a magazine was looking for photos to illustrate a story, Goldsmith had them at the ready.<\/p>\n

Sting, as well as Andy Summers and Copeland, had modeling instincts.<\/p>\n

On a visit to Sting\u2019s London home in 1982, she created a shirtless portrait of the singer and bassist lying in the grass. During the recording of \u201cGhost in the Machine\u201d in 1981 at Montserrat in the Caribbean, she recalled, she summoned the band outside for a sunset photo and Sting intuitively grabbed a saxophone to use as a prop.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had a sense of style and a sense of himself,\u201d Goldsmith recalled. \u201cI don\u2019t have that with 90 percent of the artists I work with, where I have to direct and pick clothes and position someone. I\u2019d be making pictures of Sting and he\u2019d take his shirt off or whatever, like he did on stage. He was a great subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sting, photographed at home in London, by Lynn Goldsmith in 1982.Lynn Goldsmith When photographer Lynn Goldsmith met Sting, he was a 20-something in an unknown British rock band called The Police who hadn\u2019t yet released an album. As a favor to a friend, the famed rock photographer met the trio for a shoot in New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2448157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 22:17:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2448157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2448157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2448157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2448157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}