Message in a Bottle, Stewart Copeland, and Artistic Blindness

I've been an obsessed music fan for more decades than I like to consider, and one thing that has hit me over and over is just how wrong so many great artists can be about their own art.

Today's installment: drumming great Stewart Copeland's absurd opinion of his own performance on the Police's all-time greatest song:

“There are some things I would have done a little different now,” said Copeland. “There are too many drum overdubs. It’s such a great song, and then it comes to the end, and [if I hear the song on the radio] I’ll switch over to another station because I screwed up.”
However, Copeland isn’t taking all of the blame for the over-the-top drumming in the hit’s last few seconds.
“Where was Andy [Summers, Police guitarist] at that moment?” he mused. “Andy was a really good filter, because we all overdid it, but then usually Andy would say, ‘No. Too much. Too much. Less is more.’ And he was usually right. Where was he when I needed him at the end of ‘Message in a Bottle’?”

It's a fascinating insight...until one listens to the recording in question, at which point Copeland's POV is unambiguously revealed to be completely and totally wrong.

(Sidenote: how silly does a drummer look air-drumming? Even the great Stew-Cope can't make that look cool. Fortunately, the World's Coolest Man—and at that point he really was a serious contender—is next to him in a bowtie to take quite a bit of the heat.) 

I mean, seriously, just listen to this guy! He could have gone on like, unaccompanied, for another twenty minutes and it still wouldn't have been enough. 

Waitress in the Sky

Oh my good golly. All those years and I'd been getting one of my favorite songs completely backwards.

“‘Waitress In The Sky’ has been misconstrued since day one. It came from my sister, who was a flight attendant, and she used the phrase in disgust, explaining that she was treated like a waitress in the sky. So I took the role of the demanding bastard in the aeroplane who expects the flight attendant to be a nurse and a maid. Some took it as a slam, but it was me trying to speak through her experiences. Nobody ever threw a drink on me over it."
—Paul Westerberg

Oh ho ho.

It's funny, what I took to be the class consciousness of the lyric always appealed to me, but I had trouble with what a jerk the narrator seemed to be. Not that his resentment was necessarily without some justification, but how he appeared to be taking it out on the wrong person.

And now I know why all that was. My oh my.