Usually enormous concerts are incredible disapointments. Like when I saw Bob Dylan in Omaha last summer, I had to keep reminding myself that the reason this was cool was because that mumbling speck out under the lights in the distance rushing through songs that faintly resembled something I’ve listening to and loved was actually Bob Dylan. Therefore, Bob Dylan was at this moment, here, performing for us (well, mumbling and ruining his old songs and generally behaving as if we weren’t even there), and so was nowhere else in this world at this moment. I knew exactly what Bob Dylan was doing right now. That was kind of a cool thought.

Otherwise, a dull experience.

Sorta like when I saw the pyramids: the apartments I grew up living in were much bigger than these little things, and I had to keep reminding myself, this is cool because it was done a really long time ago, before cranes and stuff.

In contrast, even pretty lame bands can have amazing shows just because they are so close to you, and their charisma and expressions are present in a way that is impossible in an audience of 25,000.

So I expected I would need to justify the 30 euros I had spent (okay, Shelly had spent) on each of our tickets with a similar mental game. I mean, I had heard that Velvet Underground reunion tour destroy pretty much every great song they had ever written. I am not sure if the hard rock “Sweet Jane” was the worst, or the off-tone harmonizing in “I’m sticking with you”, but I fully expected the 50+ year old Police to similarly butcher “Every breath you take,” and I was prepared to rationalize.

Instead, I was jealous at how damn good Sting looked, and though I wasn’t sure if viewing the entire concert through the enormous movie screen closeups of The Police performing could possibly count as live, (especially as we were so far away fromt he stage that by the time the sound reached us it was out of pysnch with the much faster moving light of the projector), it was actually a good show.

The sound quality was clear, they still played their instruments well, and Sting’s voice hit all the same notes. Stewart Copeland kept putting on this hysterical white man’s overbite when he’d get really into it, Andy Summers’ intense guitar face made him look sort of confused and tired, and Sting looked alot like Sean Connery, with his white bristley beard and the face he made when singing “doo doo doo” and stuff like that.

Plus we were out under the stars at the confluence of the Sava and Danube river - turns out usce means where the rivers meet - and the crowd was mixed from tweenies to people older than Sting, plus found a nice cooooold glass of Pelinkovac at an outdoor cafe run by the first tattoed Serb I’ve met.

Oh, and Counting Crows opened, and kept self-effacing with comments about them looking forward to the Police concert too, till I almost felt empathy, except that they didn’t try to say anything in Serbia (Sting said Dobro Vece and Kvalla), and did say “Well, we’ve never been here before, so I really don’t have anything to say, so I am not going to talk much, and we’ll just try to play as many songs as we can until the Police come on stage.”