This past Saturday, I witnessed one of the greatest rock and roll spectacles I’ve ever seen: Roger Waters performing The Wall. The whole thing, start to finish. I’ve seen quite a few concerts with theatrical elements to them (for example, Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, and Ghost), but Waters trumps them all. Not necessarily in content, as I prefer the more gruesome offerings of the aforementioned artists, but in presentation. He’s in a class by himself.
The wall, half-built.
The Wall was, for me, one of those albums that I always half-knew, but didn’t really understand in-depth. I never gave it the same intense listening as I did The Dark Side of the Moon. And though we bought tickets to this show about eight months in advance, I didn’t bother deeply listening to The Wall until a week before the show.
And… wow. I don’t need to review an album that’s been discussed for 30-plus years or so (I might as well review Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and comment on its innovation and influence), but let’s just say that I connected to it a lot more than I ever expected to. It is brilliantly crafted.
So, the show itself. It was at the Rogers Centre, and our seats were clear across the stadium from the stage, to the right. If the stage was north on a compass, we were southeast. Normally, I’d want closer seating (or no seating), but as it turned out, sitting further away meant we actually had the best seats in the house.
“Goodbye, Cruel World”
When we got there, we were greeted by a massive stage with a partially constructed 35-foot-high wall. More bricks in the wall appeared as the songs progressed and the story was told (i.e., the character suffered more mental trauma), and by the end of the first act, the wall was complete. After the intermission, a few songs were played from behind the wall, and then the rest in front until it eventually came down at the end.
“Comfortably Numb”
“We don’t need no thought control.”
The clever thing about building a giant white wall on a stage that stretched across a quarter of the venue is that it acts as a screen, and Waters took full advantage of it. The video presentation was like nothing I’d ever seen. There were close-ups of Waters, but it was never just “here’s a camera on the performer”; the close-ups were blended into the rest of whatever else happened to be displayed at the time. The effects were so good that I sometimes forgot that I was looking at a flat surface. Add to that some heavy-handed political imagery, a local choir of kids (who sang part of “Another Brick in the Wall, part 2”), tons of people waving goosestepping hammer flags, and some distorted giant marionettes from the film adaptation of The Wall, and you’ve got one hell of a show.
And the sound! I’ve never heard such crisp and clear sound in a huge venue before. It was staggeringly loud, but it never once hurt my ears—the volume made the experience immersive, not exclusive.
Some specific highlights:
- “Mother,” originally about the character’s overprotective mother, but now also sporting a strong don’t-trust-the-government message, among other things. Big Mother is watching, after all. Clever.
- “Comfortably Numb” has now become a favourite song of mine, especially the latter half of David Gilmour’s second chorus—those boys can write lyrics that cut right to the core. The video on the wall was stunning for this one.
- “In the Flesh,” with the character gone mad and hallucinating, imagining himself as a dictator. This is the part with the hammers.
While the show was loaded in flash and thunder, it’s the emotional resonance of the lyrics that counts for more. Here are the last lines of the album, and the show (emphasis is mine):
“All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall
Some hand-in-hand
Some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all, it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.”
It’s powerful stuff. The music and the story told within it have to a degree shown me where my own walls have been built; some I didn’t even realize I was building, and others were brought into sharp relief. For a time, the wall works. It’s comforting. There’s almost a kind of happiness in hating everything, in throwing a middle finger to the world. But the wall’s got to come down sometime. Thanks, Roger.
The wall, torn down.
(Originally posted on mississaugalife.ca. All photos by ocad123.)
Leo Graziani 