Some friends of mine , the Foster brothers , ran a club in Willimantic , CT called The Shaboo Inn . Think you’ll all enjoy this story :
” The Police, October 1978 — The band’s show at the Shaboo was just its second in the United States, and Foster did it as a favor to drummer Stewart Copeland’s brother Ian Copeland, who booked the band. “He goes, ‘Lefty, do you want Iggy Pop in six weeks?”’ Foster remembers. “I said yes. He did the agent thing where he said, ‘If you want Iggy Pop, then you’ll take my brother’s band.”’ So Foster took a band he had never heard of and set the cover charge at $1. “The record hadn’t come out yet, so we knew it was going to be dead,” Foster says. Plus, the World Series was on, and the Yankees were playing the Dodgers. This didn’t sit well with Sting.
“It’s a tie game, and Sting is in the barroom pacing, completely bored, going, ‘I really want to play,”’ Foster says. “He was driving everybody nuts, so finally, I say, ‘Look, what’s your name? Sting? Sting, look, we’re all going to watch your band, but it’s a tie game; it’s the World Series. Wait until 10 o’clock, and then go on.”
Shortly thereafter, the band broke on the radio.
“At the end of the night, we handed him $12,” Foster says. “They get in the car, and they drive away. Two days later, all of a sudden, ‘Roxanne,’ every 2 minutes on the radio. WHCN was all over it. To make a long story short, one year later, they sold out Madison Square Garden for a week.”
I remember our local college radio station playing “Walking On the Moon” before they got commercial radio play. I recorded it on cassette tape because I thought it was great. At least that’s how I remember it, and they got famous (and rich) later on.