Thirty-three years ago, during a chaotic Pink Floyd show in Montreal, a younger and much surlier Roger Waters had an infamous, and somewhat intimate, encounter with an overzealous fan. The show was the final stop on Floyd’s 1977s Animals tour and with a weak sound system nearly drowned out by a rowdy, wasted crowd, it was a disaster in the making. Finally, one kid climbed up the netting separating the band from the crowd, and apparently Roger Waters from himself. Waters responded in kind by spitting in his face.
That moment brought everything to a head for Waters who, in his early thirties, was the driving force behind Pink Floyd, the biggest psychedelic band ever. For as rich and celebrated as he was, Waters was equally as angry and unhappy. His first marriage was crumbling and his relationship with Floyd’s other creative force, guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour, had begun to sour. At the heart of the matter lie Waters’ issues with abandonment that stemmed from as early on as the death of his father, who was killed in World War II, five months after his son’s birth.
Waters began what would eventually be two decades of therapy to help him come to terms with his past and, as any rock star worth his mettle would, retreated to a secluded house in the English countryside with a synthesizer and a mixing board where he wrote a rock opera. With a few songwriting contributions from Gilmour, it would become their generation’s last great concept album and the defining work of Waters’ career — the 30-million-copy-selling double album The Wall.
The 26 songs that make up Pink Floyd’s 1979 masterpiece deal largely with the self-imposed isolation Waters suffered at the loss of his father, his mother’s overbearing nature, his hatred of England’s regimented schools, and his frustration with his wife’s infidelity. The story unfolds through the point of view of the album’s main character Pink, whose withdraw from society and descent into madness is represented by the metaphorical “wall” of the album title. “All of the pushing away of people that went on in my young life and all the aggression and all the spikiness and difficulty all came from the fact that I was absolutely terrified every waking moment of being found out, of people discovering that I wasn’t who I wanted to be,” Waters said in a recent interview. “I had built this wall around myself that I then described in theatrical terms.” For added measure, Waters even included elements from the life of original Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, who was forced out of the band in 1968 due to his drug abuse and mental illness, leaving Waters to assume the role of the band's lyricist and conceptual leader in addition to his bassist duties. Along with lead guitarist/songwriter/vocalist David Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright, and drummer Nick Mason, Waters would help take Pink Floyd from an arty cult band to the top of the heap in 1973 with one of the best-selling albums of all time, The Dark Side of the Moon.
The spectacle of Floyd’s original live staging of The Wall, with its giant inflatable puppets and a 40-foot high wall that was constructed brick by brick, played only a handful of dates back in 1980-81 in each of four cities: Los Angeles, Uniondale (New York), Dortmund, Germany and London, England. Gaps in the wall allowed fans to view various scenes in the story until they are completely cut off when the final brick is put in place. One of the more notable elements of the tour was the performance of "Comfortably Numb," arguably Floyd's most beloved song, with Waters singing in front of the wall while Gilmour played his solo standing high atop it. At the show’s climax, the wall would collapse in on itself, once again revealing the band and symbolizing Waters’ return to the outside world.
Three whole decades have passed since that limited run of dates, and now Roger Waters, who just turned 67, has decided to trot out The Wall for one last go round. The tour, which kicked off in Toronto, Canada, on September 15th, will wend its way through America, Canada, and Mexico in 2010 and then begin a European leg in Portugal in March 2011 that ends in June 2011 in Dusseldorf, Germany.
The current staging of The Wall is basically the same show as the original — the grotesque puppets depicting several characters from the story are all back (teacher, Mother, wife and a pig outfitted with the crossed hammers logo), as are the surreal graphics splashed on the wall in its various stages of construction. But with 30 years of technological advances come graphics that could only have been dreamed of back in the early ‘80s. This version of The Wall comes complete with startlingly ultra-high-def images that include fallen soldiers from World War I to Afghanistan and an updated message that is stridently political.
The Wall Live tour made a stop here in Pittsburgh last week and as a longtime Floyd fanatic, proudly sporting my vintage tee from their 1977 Animals tour, I was transfixed from the first arresting moments of the opening number “In The Flesh,” with its flag-waving storm troopers, Roman candles and a fiery plane crash; to the children from the Boys and Girls Club of Pittsburgh who performed “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”; to the beautiful and harrowing ballad “Mother,” with Waters on acoustic guitar playing in front of a projection of himself playing the same song 30 years earlier; to the chill-inducing, ethereal “Comfortably Numb,” with Waters feeling his way along the base of the wall as guitarist Dave Kilminster quite ably played Gilmour’s guitar solo while teetering on top of it. I even lingered a bit once the lights came up to watch the stage crew stacking the many bricks for transport to the next town.
Some local critics have suggested that the music was almost secondary to the ongoing construction of the wall during the entire first set, the oppressive presence of it separating the band from their audience for most of the second, and its subsequent fall near the end of the show, but I thought Waters pulled off the taut balance between music and theater brilliantly.
And no, David Gilmour didn't choose our very deserving city for his one-off performance with former archnemesis Roger Waters. If you’ll recall, earlier this summer Gilmour and Waters were reunited onstage for a charity benefit for the Hoping Foundation. At the time, Gilmour had convinced the reticent Waters to join him on a few numbers by promising to play “Comfortably Numb” at one of Waters’ The Wall dates. With Pittsburgh now out of the running, my money's on London or New York.
