It seems like the group Pink Floyd was destined to create the double-album The Wall. In fact, when you take a look at the history of the group, it almost seems like their entire career was leading up to the creation of this now-classic album. From the moment their original lead singer, Syd Barrett, disappeared into a psychedelic stupor, the band was leading to the point where it would create one of the most popular and influential albums of the latter half of the twentieth century.
The band, by the end of the ’70s, was in a kind of creative stupor. They had started out as a band that played strange, small clubs in and around London to captive audiences who sat, silent, dazzled, as they filled those small rooms with swirling psychedelic noise and dazzling colored bubbles and lights. All of that changed when the band created Dark Side of the Moon.
There are many fans of rock and roll and the band, in particular, that would suggest that Dark Side was their greatest album. Certainly, it was the album where the lyrical talents of reluctant front-man Roger Waters and the musical abilities of guitarist David Gilmour were working in perfect tandem. Waters had always wanted to just play bass, leaving the songwriting to Barrett. However, when Barrett left reality, the song writing was turned over to him. At first his lyrics were nebulous and unspecific. However, that began to change and it became very specific with Dark Side.
Gilmour, meanwhile, had been a good friend of Barrett. When Barrett began his slide into madness, Gilmour was often the one called in to substitute. It was only natural, then, when the band decided to move on from Syd, that Gilmour would take his place. Barrett did not take well to this, at first, but eventually the band, and Barrett, adapted.
Dark Side of the Moon became a phenomenon. Although the band had started to reach across the ocean with some moderate success in the States, it was with this album that they truly became a supergroup. They were no longer going to be playing small nightclubs and strange places where the audience sat quietly, cross-legged, on the floor. The album sold well and then stayed on the Billboard Top 200 for a record amount of time. It continues to sell.
The album had a profound effect on the band. They were suddenly multi-millionaires. They could do anything and everything they had ever dreamed about doing. What it cost the, however, was the ability to create as they pleased, which had been the way they preferred to work. They were now a commodity. They were now a product as well as a band. Thousands upon thousands of dollars were riding on their future efforts and the pressure to create another Dark Side was tremendous. Their touring schedule became grueling and they had to travel around the globe over and over and over again. They were suddenly celebrities and couldn’t walk about like they had before.
What this lead to was a kind of creative exhaustion. They toured for two years with Dark Side. When the group returned to the studio, more after pressure from their label than any real desire to return to work, they were completely exhausted. They had no more ideas. As such, Gilmour and the rest of the band were relieved when Waters decided to step in and take further control of the project and the group itself. Although the result has become another classic and, to many, their favorite Pink Floyd album, the band was entirely unsure of what they had produced. That first album was Wish You Were Here and it dealt entirely with the idea of being exhausted and being “there, but not there.”
The album was another success. This lead to more touring. Waters was now starting to crack. He was starting to understand the pressure that had been on Barrett all of those years before and he felt he was losing touch with his audience by playing the ever-larger arenas. The shows were getting bigger, playing to larger audiences, but at what cost?
The band, once again, returned to the studio after a two year break for touring. Waters was now in even-greater control of the band. Gilmour attempted to exercise more control over the music this time around, but Waters’ lyrics were getting ever-more specific. The next album was Animals. While it may not be considered as much of a classic as Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here it did become another hit. Now, even larger venues were in order. The result was the “In the Flesh” tour.
Waters was losing contact with the rest of the band at this point. He would often fly to venues in a private helicopter while the others took limos. He was not speaking to the band as much. He confessed, in later years, he wondered if he was mentally ill. He began to envision the many thousands of fans as mindless sheep while he was like a despotic dictator, capable of twisting their thoughts and even actions.
This culminated in an incident that shocked Waters. While playing a huge arena in Montreal, he began to gesture toward one male fan near the front of the stage. Exactly what this person was doing is unclear, but Waters began to perceive he was trying to antagonize him. He motioned the young man down to the very front of the stage and then spat in the man’s face. Waters was stunned at his behavior.
From this incident he began to perceive of a show where, during the course of the show, a wall would be built between the band and the audience. He originally conceived of a black wall, built over the course of the concert. And that, at some key point, eventually the band would be entirely hidden from the audience. Thus was the initial germ of an idea that would become The Wall.
Once again, when the touring ended, the band retired to their respective homes. The band was not even entirely sure if there would be another album. Once again, they were exhausted. Rick Wright, the keyboardist, has barely participated in the past two albums. It was also known by the band, and acknowledged by Wright later on, that he was addicted to cocaine. Gilmour worked on a solo album. Nick Mason, the drummer, returned to collecting the classic cars he enjoyed driving.
Waters began working on this next project. He had two ideas in mind. One was a narrative about a dream he had and would become his first solo project The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. The second was The Wall. He wrote out the narrative concepts and composed songs which he sang into a tape recorder in his home. When the band again gathered to discuss their next move, he brought the two tapes with them.
Both Mason and Wright were creatively spent. It was decided that Wright would officially be removed from the band and take a session player wage going forward. Mason was saved by the fact he had helped, in the past, with sound effects and other areas in making the records. Gilmour was the only other creative force in the band at that time and he took the two tapes with him and said he would give them a listen and his opinion of what album should be next.
Gilmour stated that he found Pros and Cons to be much too personal to Waters and un-relatable to the band and others. He also claimed that The Wall was very depressing and, in parts, boring, but he thought there was enough of a concept there that he could work with it. So, The Wall won.
From the beginning Waters had big ideas for The Wall. He conceived of the project as an album, a stage show and a film. However, the first stage was to complete the album and the story was far from complete when the band began working in their recording studio.
The Wall is a concept album. Concept albums had been the order of the day for the band since Dark Side of the Moon. Some concept albums attempt to tell an actual story, while others simply have a unifying theme that binds the songs together. The Wall would attempt to tell a story, but also have a unifying theme.
The story of The Wall is a combination of Waters and Barrett. It tells the story of Pink, a rock and roll star who is on another grueling tour in the United States. Throughout his life, various events have caused him serious emotional damage. To deal with them he has been mentally building a “wall” that is shutting him down emotionally from the rest of the world. Each event is another “brick.”
The first brick is the death of his father at Anzio, in Italy, during World War II. This was autobiographical of Waters life. He had often lamented the death of his father when he was still an infant and growing up without him. He was particularly upset because he was told by his mother that his father was very musical.
The next brick in the wall is his over-protective mother. Waters was quick to point out that this was not autobiographical. He felt that his mother was very encouraging. Waters’ mother was an activist and instilled socialist beliefs in Roger from the time he was a child. However, he stated he knew people who were smothered by their own parents. It was also pointed out that when Syd Barrett officially vanished from public life, he went home to live with his mother.
The smothering from his mother causes Pink to be unable to relate to women. This is explained in the song “Mother.” So, that when he finally does meet and fall in love with a woman he is, at times, abusive both physically and mentally, and completely unable to relate to her. While he tours the United States, he makes a call home to speak to his wife and another man answers. The final brick in his wall is that his wife is cheating on him.
At this point Pink disappears entirely behind his wall. He now sits, catatonic, in a chair, with a television on showing him war movies, in his hotel room. He begins to remember things from his past and wonder about his life and why things have happened as they have happened. He looks at himself as sad and pathetic. When, finally, his manager comes to the hotel to take him to his concert, he finds Pink unresponsive. This leads into the classic “Comfortably Numb” which describes a doctor giving Pink an injection to revive him long enough to do the show.
There is just one more moment of clarity, on the album, at this point. During “The Show Must Go On” Pink wonders if maybe he can just “leave the show.” However, he soon discovers that he cannot and that the show must go on, whether he is ready, or sane, or not.
On the album, at this point, Pink has become completely insane. He views himself as a Nazi-like dictator and his fans as his blind followers. As he goes on stage, he is teetering on the brink, the drugs pumping through his system. He yells into the microphone that the real Pink is “back in the hotel” and that he is a surrogate, sent in his place. The band then launches into “Run Like Hell” which is meant to be a song from Pink’s set. The lyrics send him tumbling headlong into his hallucination.
What follows next is profoundly disturbing. Pink rails against minorities and those he considers inferior. He imagines his fans as his soldiers, marching through the streets and weeding out the “weaklings” and the unfit. Pink is, essentially, having his breakdown on stage in front of his fans.
The listener is now behind the wall with Pink. We are inside his mind as he puts himself on a humiliating trial where he laments the pain he has caused. He sentences himself to have his wall torn down and be “exposed before his peers.” This was the climax of the album, concert and film. The wall comes down and Pink is left barren, exposed. Listeners with sharp ears will hear that the album ends with the words “Isn’t this where…” and that the start of the album the words are “…we came in?” Thus, the entire process is a cycle and Pink is doomed to start rebuilding his wall all over again.
The album is a deep, searing look into the mind of a man going insane. It is personal to Waters, but incorporates elements of Barrett’s breakdown and even the mental problems of other members of the band, such as Rick Wright. Despite the disturbing themes and images, the album has become a classic and a hit. It was helped by having “Another Brick in the Wall Part Two” become a huge radio hit.
It was a struggle for the band to get this album together. Arguments broke out and producer Bob Ezrin was brought in to act as mediator. He helped the album achieve the coherence and order that it currently has. He put some songs back in that the band had grown tired of. He also sent Waters away to do rewrites and take some things out that he felt were too close to Waters and not universal enough.
Once the album was finished, the Wall was performed on stage. However, it was only performed a few times. It was such a massive undertaking that a full-fledged tour was impossible. Plus, tensions within the band made such a tour impossible as well. The show only played three nights in Los Angeles and three nights at a venue near London.
During the course of the show, the audience was shown a multi-media bonanza. Gerald Scarfe was hired to draw animations that were projected on a screen behind the band or on the wall itself when it was complete. Giant inflatable characters of the teacher, the mother and Pink’s wife were created. A wall 40-feet high would be built each night out of white cardboard bricks and then torn down at the end.
At the same time, the concept for the film was taking shape. Originally the film was to star Waters as the main character. The concerts were to be filmed with segments that would further the story filmed as well. However, things began to change when filmmaker Alan Parker was hired to direct.
It seems as if the meeting of Waters and Parker was like the proverbial rock meeting the proverbial hard place. Both of them are strong-willed, determined people who each wanted their own way. Conflicts started almost immediately. Parker wanted to tell a slightly different story that would go beyond Waters’ psyche and Waters wanted to keep the film more in line with the story on the album.
Immediately gone was Waters as the main character. Singer Bob Geldof was hired to take on the role. It was a move Waters never really warmed to. Geldof only sings a few times during the movie. The concert scenes that had been filmed with the original band were also gone and new concert scenes were filmed. Waters began to feel betrayed.
The film, in many ways, has to be seen separately from the album. It is an all-out attack on the senses. The music is loud, the images disturbing and the performance by Geldof mesmerizing. It is, essentially, an hour-and-a-half long music video that plays most of the songs heard on the album. Parker, however, excised certain songs along the way, adding to Waters fury.
The animation from Gerald Scarfe features prominently throughout the movie. For fans of animation, this is a movie that falls into the must-see category. The images are very, very disturbing, showing the madness growing in Pink’s mind better than any real-life images could. Some of his images, such as the crossed red and black hammers, have become iconic.
The film changes the story only slightly. Pink’s descent into being a dictator seems to take place entirely in his mind before he arrives at the venue where he is to perform. His trial seems to take place, again in his mind, while he reviews a book of lyrics in a bathroom stall. The exact fate of Pink is not entirely clear. After the wall explodes, accompanied by a frenzied scream of terror and pain, we are treated to an image of a bombed-out building and children scrounging the wreckage. What is it meant to imply? It is not entirely clear.
The movie, however, is powerful and deeply moving. While Waters has never truly warmed up to it, there is not denying the power of the film. Waters, in fact, when he would tour in later years he would sometimes carry film cans on stage while wearing a jacket with a knife protruding from his back that would ooze blood.
With the album, the stage version and the movie, the band had been working on The Wall for years by the time the movie was shown. All of that time spent deeply in the mind of Roger Waters was too much. When Waters proposed that their next album he leftover songs that they could not find a spot for in The Wall and that it should be called Spare Bricks that was the final straw. The songs would eventually become the album The Final Cut an album many fans consider the worst of the album canon. It was a financial failure in terms of Pink Floyd but the band never toured with it. Waters declared he would never work with anyone from the band again and the line up of Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason was done.
Over the years, the band has managed to be reborn. Two more albums were made and more tours were had featuring Gilmour, Wright and Mason. Waters, meanwhile, launched a moderately successful solo career and even played The Wall on a gigantic scale in Berlin when the wall was finally torn down and Germany reunited. The original line up even had a momentous reunion on stage during the “Live 8” performances in the early 2000s.
Rick Wright died, thus ending most likelihood of any reunion tour. However, in 2010, Roger Waters has announced a tour of The Wall. It’s the first official tour of the album since it was released back in the late ’70s. The movie is also celebrating the anniversary of its release and was even shown as during Roger Ebert’s film festival “Ebertfest” in Champaign, Illinois.
The Wall has now become a classic. It has become a milestone in rock and roll as well as among fans of the band. At the time, it was a curious and strange album that many involved with the project wondered who would want to listen to it. Over time it has proven to be an enduring classic and a staple for “classic rock” radio stations around the world. Now, with the new tour, a new generation will find itself exposed to this album. Thus, like the album itself, it is a never-ending cycle.
