Over the weekend, while watching Live Earth, on what amounts to a shot in the dark, I was lucky enough to score some tickets to The Police show in Tampa. And last night, at the St. Pete Times Forum, my face was melted by one of the most iconic rock bands of all time.

It's weird when I think about the influence The Police have had on my musical taste. As a six year old kid, Synchronicity was the first CD my dad bought. He kept it outside in a tall cabinet in the garage. Needless to say, my older brother and I would borrow it and incessantly air banded and tried to play our real instruments to that disk. Okay, well I pretended to know what I was doing with my Chiquita travel guitar while my brother could actually play some of Stewart Copeland's beats on my dad's old Slingerland kit.

Stewart Copeland started the show by whacking a huge gong, followed by Andy Summers' opening guitar lick from "Message In a Bottle." It was The Police and it was awesome. The stage, a huge oval with a platform around the back, was minimally lit at first. Quite honestly, it didn't look like the setup one would expect from a tour as magnificant as The Police. It felt a bit club-ish. A small venue plopped into an arena.

Then suddenly we were introduced to the trio as the band rocked into "Synchronicity II." The familiar red, yellow and blue that graces the cover of the the Synchronicity album splashed across the lighting that hung beneath three huge video screens as Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers appeared on the big screens. It was the first of many surreal moments I encountered throughout the evening. I was there and this was the band that I've been rocking to for 25 years.

As the evening progressed, the set became more sophisticated. The lighting more intense, but tasteful and not distracting. The video screens were filled with tightly directed and well composed shots of the band members, closeups of their fingers in action and occasional photographs.

I felt it took a bit too long for the mixing engineer to dial in the sound. There was a moment about five songs in where it started to sound like one of the most popular bands in the world.

The highlight of the night for me was "Wrapped Around Your Finger." Stewart Copeland had a percussion pit behind his drum kit with an assortment of percussion instruments which he played before switching to his kit when necessary. It was a slightly more mellow and tribal feeling rendition than the cut on the album. It was different and inviting.

They pulled out most of their hits and peppered a few rarer tracks in that I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't recognize but enjoyed all the same. Missing from the set was "Spirits in the Material World" and "Synchronicity I."

My girlfriend and I, along with 21,000 other people, sang along to "Can't Stand Losing You", "Walking on the Moon", "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da", "King of Pain", "Invisible Sun", "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic", "Roxanne" and "Walking In Your Footsteps." (Not in that order)

The band was called out three times for encores in which they obliged. The first encore was an erie styling of "King of Pain" and a driving rockin' "So Lonely."

The second encore was "Every Breath You Take" and the final encore was "Next to You." The climax was a wall of bass, guitar and drums as the video screens crescendoed with fast-cut images of the band in their day,

This was easily the second best concert I've been to. I can't place it ahead of Radiohead in West Palm in 2003, but it was well worth the money, the headaches of traffic, the horrendous parking situation and the general suckiness that is Tampa. I'm seriously thinking about catching the show in Atlanta, GA which is the last show of the U.S. leg.

It's hard to describe the impact The Police had on rock music for the very short lifespan of the band. They accomplished so much in five or six years and then they were gone. When you start to compare The Police to other bands, it's hard to find a more influential band, outside of say Nirvana, that splashed onto the scene and then disappeared leaving behind a lasting discography and legacy as one of the best bands in the world who still have a drove of rabid and adoring fans.