The wall during intermission at the United Center on Monday (excuse the crappy cell-phone pix).
In the community of super-geek Pink Floyd fans, of which I have been a lifelong member, I have had three decades of bragging rights for having been among the select few in just three cities (New York, London, and Los Angeles) who saw the group perform its epic double album "The Wall" onstage in its entirety upon its liberation in 1980.
Three decades ago last February, my mom and step-dad, bless their indulgent hearts, drove me and a high-school buddy 2 hours from Jersey City, New Jersey, to Uniondale, New York-in rush-hour traffic across Manhattan, no less!to fix us at the Nassau Coliseum. They went to see the movie "Fatso" with Dom DeLuise nearby, then picked us up three hours later, our minds well and truly blown.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing. As promised, the band built a giant wall that spanned and loomed over the arena, and (not actually any motive for a spoiler alert here, is there?), tore it low at the end of the show. In between, the masters of rock-as-theater showed all manner of twisted cartoon films on the building in progress; paraded out giant balloons of the key characters (teacher, mother, and evil wife), as easily as their old trademark pig; crashed a model Spitfire into the wall amid a herald of pyrotechnics (one element sadly missing from the current show), and, most impressively, performed "Comfortably Numb" with David Gilmour soloing atop the giant barrier, backlit by a stunningly bright white patch that effectively cast his tail over the total floor of the stadium.
You couldn`t help but be impressed. But still at 16, the budding rock critic in me was well aware of the problems with the medicine and the spectacle. Thematically, it all seemed like a slightly jumbled and confused hodgepodge of ideas that the band`s auteur, Roger Waters, had handled much more efficaciously in earlier classics, be it the anti-war message ("Corporal Clegg"), the self-flagellating examinations of the corrupting force of rock stardom ("Wish You Were Here"), the attacks on the sheepish mentality of the rock audience ("Animals"), or the consideration of the many forces that conspire to take us to insanity ("The Gloomy Face of the Moon").
Hey, teacher: Leave those kids alone!
From the revision of acoustic/idyllic Floyd a la "More" in "Mother," to the update of the rampaging metal Floyd of "The Nile Song" in "Run Like Hell," it seemed as if we had heard all of the best musical ideas before, too, and that they barely were being recycled here, often in simpler form, and with a more straightforward, dare I say disco beat. There were enough of passages of faux-Broadway filler, too, and that all sub-Brechtian cabaret trip of "The Test" was a stone cold drag, and utter torture to suffer if you weren`t being distracted by the visual shenanigans.
My biggest beef, however, was that this was more house than rock, a balance Pink Floyd always had been measured to hit in equal proportions in the past. The circuit before "The Wall," the band had come out and played all of "Animals"; taken a break; returned and played all of "Care You Were Here," and then encored with the better parts of "The Black Face of the Moon." That, dear reader, pretty much is as well as arena rock gets. I didn`t see that jaunt-I was a mere 12 when that went down-and I knew the 1980 tour wouldn`t be like that. But once that massive cardboard or Styrofoam wall came tumbling down, it would have been decent to see one of my favorite bands ever play something else besides that sad little coda, "Outside the Wall" (which also happens to be the foremost thing you learn in the present and on album-the root is the end, the end is the beginning, and it`s all but one giant musical Mbius strip, don`t you know).
Then as now, with the 67-year-old Waters undertaking the thirtieth anniversary tour of his magnum opus, kicking off the beginning of four nights at the United Center on Monday, and hinting that this might be his final concert jaunt ever, the point doesn`t include a line of medicine that wasn`t on the album. For a top ticket price of $250 plus egregious Ticketmaster service fees, what you get is 115 minutes of music, a 20-minute intermission, and, of course, that wall (73 meters wide and 11 meters tall, per the measurements in Roger`s native Merry Ol`).
When pigs fly
This might not trouble you, given that Waters` last tour a few days back featured a performance of all of "The Black Face of the Moon"-and, on the hopeful side, the current excursion doesn`t include anything from his final two decades of dreadful solo albums, either. The head is exactly that the evidence is "The Fence" and the fence is the show, and either you mean that`s worth a week`s salary, or you don`t.
I sort of dug the whiz-bang. But for me, it was partly nostalgia-and of course, I did not pay to get in.
Aside from the sad irony of such an arch critic of capitalism gleefully climbing in bed with Ticketmaster/Live Nation, three other aspects of "The Wall 2010" rubbed me wrong. First were the painstaking efforts of Waters` touring band mates-for-hire to slavishly, creepily imitate every subtle refinement of the parts as recorded by Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist Rick Wright. If you`re not going to finally bury the hatchet with your old chums and get them on board (save for Wright, who died in 2008), why hire ringers and drive them to duplicate every single note the other guys played? Clearly, they once gave you something you loved and still need.
Two, "The Fence" is a poor vehicle to integrate the complicated morass of present-day politics. Sure, there ever was a nugget of "war is bad" moralizing to the album and stage show, but it was couched in the personal disaster of poor Pink (his dad was shooting down in the Conflict of Britain, dooming junior to a miserable life as a celebrated and fabulously wealthy rock star). We could have connected the rousing crescendos of "Fetch the Boys Back Home" to the senseless losses of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan without the pictures of the dead soldiers and suffering children exploitatively flashed on the wall throughout the show, thank you very much.
Finally, there is the odd disconnect between Waters and many of his fans, which actually is the most lucid of the various strands of history in "The Wall." It was jarring in 1980 to see some people cheering "Comfortably Numb" and bragging that they wanted to get that way, too, and as fast as possible, when of course Waters is telling about the motivation to air in, not the desirability of falling out. It was sad to see people screaming along that "we don`t take no education," when he thinks the precise opposite, and is opposed only to the "thought control," not the notion of higher ed. And whip of all were the concertgoers who returned the crossed fists salutes that Pink as Fascist Rock Star gives in an attempt to release the concert experience into something more like the Nuremberg Rally. In that guise, Waters wants us to excommunicate him, not inspire him, but the same blind acceptance prevails 30 days later.
Is Waters sneering at the people who`ve made him rich, even as he gives them just what they lack one more time? Isn`t that just what the pathetic Pink, the anti-hero of "The Wall," would do?
As I said, the first is the end, and the end is the beginning.
Other posts byJim DeRogatis
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