IN Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, 16-year-old Walt Berkman plays “Hey You,” from Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, for his parents, telling them that he wrote it. They believe him.
But that’s not the end of it. He enters a school talent show, again claiming the song as his own. We’re never told exactly why he does this–perhaps he’s acting out over his parents’ divorce, or fearful of never escaping the shadow of his father’s success. Who cares, the crazy part is that he wins. We’re expected to believe that no one involved–not his family or his friends, nor anyone running the talent show–would know a song from an album that has gone platinum 23 times over.
And the worst part: We actually do believe it. There’s just something about the way The Wall fell off the cultural map for so many years that makes it seem remotely possible. A gold standard of headphone-listening cool after its release in 1979, and then a midnight-movie staple when the film adaptation was released in 1982, The Wall–like everything else about Pink Floyd–eventually became the height of uncool. Through the ’90s, the album and the film were widely written off as cynical musical masturbation from an out-of-touch rock dinosaur.
That dinosaur? Roger Waters–back then, at least. But over the course of the last decade, Pink Floyd’s reputation has skyrocketed, their music recognized once again for its far-reaching influence. A few years ago, I wrote an article about how Floyd was becoming cool again, and the trend has only continued. Waters’ new tour re-creating the original spectacle of The Wall live is starting to look like a victory lap.
A Brief History of Pink
Perhaps the grumpiest man in the history of rock, Waters is best known as the driving creative force behind the best years of Pink Floyd. Sure, we all have a soft spot for original Floyd leader Syd Barrett, but thanks to his overly romanticized and totally tragic descent into madness, we’ll never know if he had more than one genius album in him. And I wouldn’t call David Gilmour untalented, but he was always better as Waters’ creative foil. Once they split in the mid-’80s, with Gilmour carrying on the band, Pink Floyd actually became the bloated, bland rock dinosaur it was accused of being.
What kept it from becoming that for all those years was Waters’ uncompromising and brutal creative nature. Through The Dark Side of the Moon, Animals, Wish You Were Here, The Wall and even the much-maligned The Final Cut, Waters oversaw the construction of epic rock manifestos that definitively defined the album format. His music could be pompous, depressing and excessive, but it also spoke to almost anyone willing to slip on a pair of headphones and give a listen to Waters’ bitter assaults on the darkest impulses and weaknesses of the human condition.
For better or worse, The Wall has become his personal rock legacy, partially because there has never been an album like it before or since, and partially because it was so freaking gigantic in its scope and execution that it continues to bowl over new listeners seeking an escape from songs about girls, cars and ice-cold beer. The original 1980 tour for the album is legendary; with its huge inflatables, intricate plot and an actual 40-foot wall built between the band and the audience, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. It was also too ambitious for its own good, somehow losing more than half a million dollars despite the fact that the album was at the top of the Billboard charts for 15 weeks and ended up selling 11 million copies.
Waters swore never to perform The Wall again until the Berlin Wall came down, and when it did, he embarked on an equally oversize and far more profitable 1990 tour that was unfortunately watered down by its cast of guest singers (Bryan Adams doing “Young Lust”? Really?). Waters’ solo work has never gotten its due (his masterpiece Amused to Death is probably a better album than The Wall), and despite having been an ex-Floyd for 25 years, he can’t seem to leave The Wall behind. With the album having been covered at this point in styles from rock to bluegrass to electro, he seems to have accepted–perhaps even embraced–that despite the ups and downs in its cool factor, it’s not going away. And perhaps after this newest tour, we may finally be able to watch the talent show scene in The Squid and the Whale and know for sure that that could never happen.
ROGER WATERS ‘The Wall’
Tuesday, Dec. 7, and Wednesday, Dec. 8, 8pm
HP Pavilion, San Jose
$58.50—$253.50
