PHILADELPHIA - 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 ask no education!" - the bass player says he was "a terrified young man."
But these days, Waters 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 stop in the spectacularly staged "The Wall Live" world tour, which began in Canada in September and is probably to run on even longer than its last scheduled appointment in Manchester, England, in June.
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 end of Waters` father in Public War II when Waters was 5 months old.
The album spawned such classic-rock hits as "Run Like Sin" and "Comfortably Numb." And, of course, it produced "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2."
"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 leading 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 Black Face of the Moon," which the RIAA ranks as the 26th best-selling U.S. album.
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 Fence" 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 experience a best opportunity to pass with ourselves in a way where we can fend off the evil influence of government, big job and greed," he says. "I actually think we make 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 Figure?" 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 endanger 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.
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 point 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 percentage 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 passing of my father. I`ve learned that there`s a general smell and a sensation of community between people who mourn loss in their family. There is no us and them. We are all the same."
Waters came to think in the office of pop music to determine 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 begin with, and so the blues.
"The affair that kindled an enormous desire in me at some degree in my spirit to publish 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 scorn 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 only 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 Fence" at the top because of what he sees as its relevance.
"I love `Dark Face of the Moon.` `Wish You Were Here.` I love `Animals.` We did some great, great work together, and I`m proud of it all.
"But to me, `The Wall` stands out, because it has more to separate us now that`s important than the others. ...
"It tells us that we must not leave our political and economic masters, what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, that we must not let our leadership to carry us that we need to kill others in place for us to protect ourselves.
"That`s what I`m saying in `The Wall.` You must not mind to that voice. You must hear to another voice, and it`s the part that wants to bring down these walls, lean across these barriers, and looking into each other`s eyes and grasp each other`s hands, and say, `No.` "
No comments:
Post a Comment