Back in the later seventies when Roger Waters conceived Pink Floyd's The Wall, the band's landmark double-album about isolation and psychological torment - with its rebellious cry, "We don't need no education!" - the bass player says he was "a scared young man."
But these days, Waters, who will take the spectacularly staged The Wall Live world turn to the Wells Fargo Center for three shows this week, sees his magnum opus in more positive terms.
"I'm an optimist," the 67-year-old British songwriter says by telephone from his place on Long Island, N.Y. during a brief pause in the tour, which began in Canada in September and is likely to carry on even longer than its last scheduled appointment in Manchester, England, in June. (Tickets for the Philadelphia shows, on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, were proclaimed as sellouts last spring, but additional seats are for sale.)
In its day, The Wall, which came out in 1979, was a colossal commercial success, especially considering it's a largely autobiographical work about separation, pain, and suffering, beginning with the demise of Waters' father in World War II when Waters was 5 months old.
The album spawned such classic-rock hits as "Run Like Sin" and "Comfortably Numb," whose title, Waters reveals, was conceived in Philadelphia at the Spectrum.
And, of course, it produced "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," which will be performed here with the assistance of a chorus of children drawn from choruses throughout the region.
The Fence has sold 11.5 million copies, and since it's a double album, the Recording Industry Association of America counts each copy twice, ranking it as the 3rd most popular album ever released in the United States, behind Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 and forward of Led zeppelin IV and AC/DC's Back in Black.
Waters toured in 2007, playing in its entirety Pink Floyd's 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, which the RIAA ranks as the 26th best-selling U.S. album. (On his stay in Philadelphia, he walked across the street to make out the low pitch at a Phillies game. "They lost, 13-nil," he says with a laugh. "I don't believe they'll be having me back.")
Moving on from Obscure Side to The Wall, which was written almost exclusively by Waters, is a way for the 6-foot-3 silver-haired singer to further reclaim the Floyd legacy. Waters left the group in the mid-'80s, and confused his hold on its legacy during the '80s and '90s when guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboard player Richard Wright (who died in 2008) toured as Pink Floyd.
What The Wall is actually about in 2010, Waters says, is addressing "the supremely relevant head" of whether the vast technological changes that have taken place over the final three decades will be exploited to separate people or take them together.
"We get a best opportunity to commune with ourselves in a way where we can fend off the evil influence of government, big business, and greed," he says. "I truly think we get a better chance as a people because we can Twitter and Google and e-mail everything to each other."
In Waters' current show, the 26-song album runs from beginning to finish, from "In the Flesh?" to "Outside the Wall," played amid the dust of the fallen barrier, with Waters on trumpet.
Giant puppets based on artist Gerald Scarfe's drawings rise up to threaten the crowd, and in true Pink Floyd over-the-top style, an airplane suspended on a wire flies from one end of the arena to the other before crashing into the fence and bursting into flame.
"I ever felt the obligation to leave some theater that would act if you were 100 rows back rather than 15 rows back," Waters says.
Seen last week at the Izod Center, in the Meadowlands, the 12-piece band fills the place of Gilmour & Co. with vocalist Robbie Wyckoff and guitarists Snowy White, G.E. Smith, and Dave Kilminster, who takes the epic "Comfortably Numb" solo from atop the 36-foot-high wall. And what may be the show's best trick finds Waters doing a live double-track duet with a black-and-white filmed version of himself from 1980 - "poor, miserable little Roger," he calls him - while Scarfe's giant "Mother" glowers down on the pair.
The record has a powerful antiwar theme. Photos of people who have died in wars from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan that fans have sent to Waters' Facebook page, as function of his Fallen Loved Ones program, are projected on the wall during "The Thin Ice" and throughout the lengthy intermission.
In the lovely fragment "Vera," film clips of families reuniting with returning soldiers are seen as Waters sings, "Does anyone else in here find the way I do?"
The songwriter says he learned about empathy though his own loss. "I've learned about my own pain, when I was a small kid and done my life, really, with the release of my father. I've learned that there's a general notion and a smell of community between people who mourn loss in their family. There is no us and them. We are all the same."
Waters came to consider in the office of pop music to build the way people believe about social and political issues, he says, when he was growing up in the '50s, listening to American artists such as Leadbelly and Billie Holiday.
"There was a pirate radio station called Radio Luxembourg that everybody listened to. That was probably where I first heard jazz, which was what attracted me to go with, and so the blues.
"The matter that kindled an enormous desire in me at some detail in my spirit to compose a song, though, was 'Georgia on My Mind,' the Hoagy Carmichael song. I can recall being a 15- or 16-year-old sitting up in the night, listening to the Ray Charles version and thought if I can always do anything that might yet get near to moving another human existence as often as this moves me, I will have fulfilled all my dreams."
At the top of their stadium-size progressive-rock success in the '70s, Pink Floyd were held in despite by emerging punk rebels. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols wore a Pink Floyd shirt that blotted out the members' eyes and had "I hate" above the ring name.
"I didn't care," says Waters. "The Sex Pistols always seemed supremely irrelevant to me. I'll assure you why. It was never really about anything. It was merely a marketing exercise. . . . Maybe I'm being unfair. But it never really interested me, musically, philosophically, politically, or in any way."
Waters reunited with the former members of Pink Floyd at the Last 8 concert in London, organized in 2005 by Bob Geldof (who starred as Pink in the 1982 film The Wall). In July, Waters and Gilmour performed together in England at a benefit concert for Palestinian refugees, and Gilmour pledged to join Waters on "Comfortably Numb" at an unannounced date on The Wall tour.
When Waters looks backward on the Floyd oeuvre, he ranks The Wall at the top because of what he sees as its relevance.
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