Drummer Stewart Copeland of The Police [ tickets ] isn't quite sure how his rock trio fits in with the jam-band heavy Bonnaroo [ tickets ] Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, TN, but he's willing to make the best of it when his group plays at the June 14-17 event.

"What The Police is doing [at] Bonnaroo, I don't know," Copeland said during a recent teleconference. "But I'm looking forward to it because I think it's going to be a completely different Police show from any of the other shows on the tour, because Bonnaroo is a very different kind of gig. We've been rehearsing for four months. The band is so tight you could open a bottle with it.

"And Bonnaroo, I think, the mission there is--at least my mission, anyway--is to completely deconstruct the whole thing. I've almost got Sting (singer/bassist) and Andy [Sumner] (guitarist) convinced, we're going to go on stage at Bonnaroo and we're going to play five songs for half an hour each. And we're going to tear it all down and rip it up."

Copeland is a Bonnaroo vet, having played drums with Oysterhead--the jam-rock supergroup that also features bassist Les Claypool of Primus and guitarist Trey Anastasio, formerly of Phish--in 2006. He said he learned to let his hair down while performing with Oysterhead at Bonnaroo.

"We got maybe 14--well, -we laughingly refer to them as songs, but really they're just jumping off points--and we played for two hours," Copeland said. "And a lot of it seemed like we were completely lost. And then we are, like, floundering on stage. And everything I learned about stage craft for 30 years was just, like, cringing, but I looked down at the front rows, and I could see that those people are really into those moments when we're lost, because to them it proves that this has never happened before. It's never going to happen [again].

"This is the real thing. It's a real journey, and [Bonnaroo fans] want to go on that journey with us, with all of the hairy parts, the great parts, the highs, the lows, the wheat, the chaff, the rough, the smooth. "

Copeland explained Bonnaroo has a "whole different stage ethic"--the complete opposite of The Police.

"We have songs that everybody knows, and we want to play those songs, and we've been tweaking the arrangements and everything, and I like doing that, too, as a matter of fact. There's a real value to that, to really chiseling away at the statue to just get it just perfect. But I think with The Police, we're going to play a completely different kind of show at Bonnaroo, if I have anything to do with it."

Though The Police will leave room for improvisation, the band has a "400-pound gorilla who loves to organize," Copeland said, no doubt refering to frontman Sting.

"It is a blessing and a curse, both, because we have this incredible musical mind with just a torrent of musical ideas. For four months, we've been carving away at several statues and throwing them out and changing different things. And we've really been blasting away, honing our show. And reinventing all of these songs, so that they still are what people will remember but have ... some new flavors that are exciting."