But it’s also going to be a story about losing you unexpectedly.

This is an essay or story about Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That Rogers recognized this ugly thing inside himself and wrote an album partially about it was maybe his one good impulse leading into The Wall. In retrospect, Waters reflected that what alarmed him most about the act wasn’t the disgust he felt at the fan or the circumstances, but the thing that allowed him to do it-the fact that he had been unwittingly buying into the idea that he actually was better than the blank faces in the audience. Floyd fans know what I’m talking about-when Roger Waters, disgusted at what he had become, disgusted by the nature of stadium tours, and disgusted at the alienation he felt from fellow humans in the crowd and the sense that those fellow humans felt alienated from him (as if he imagined a wall between band and crowd) spit in a front-row fan’s face. The Wall grew out of an incident at a show in Canada at the end of the Animals tour. Though it all reads a bit forced, a bit on the nose, I’ve always imagined this final moment of the first act to be haunting to witness-to hear the understated, short song performed by Waters as the last hints of light shining out through the wall are snuffed out. At the end of the song each night, he’d slide the last brick into place with his own two hands, completing his isolation, finalizing his and the audience’s alienation from each other, a process that maybe Waters felt more profoundly than those watching, but which, nonetheless, was one of the driving forces for the album/show/movie’s creation. Screen in the center of the stage, and then, eventually, across the massive, blank face of the wall itself, looming over the audience, taunting them.Īt the end of the show’s first “act,” which, of course, coincided with the end of the double LP’s first disc, Roger Waters would sing the brief “Goodbye Cruel World” from behind the wall, visible through only the last remaining hole in the monstrous, white façade. Every night, animation flickered, first, on good old Mr. Every night, giant inflatable puppets dangled and danced across the stage, berating the show’s main character, subtly named Pink. Every night, the crew build a wall across the front of the stage, obscuring the band from the audience. Of course, “touring” in the traditional sense wasn’t particularly practical for the show, which wasn’t so much a concert as an intricately staged theatrical production. Not in the traditional sense-a week in L.A., then five months off, followed by six nights in London, then six more months off, then a week in West Germany, then three months off, followed by five more nights in London. Pink Floyd’s “tour” for The Wall wasn’t really a tour.

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