Roger Waters on the best Pink Floyd stage show: “It was very well crafted”
Rock and roll has never been only about putting a bunch of guys onstage and letting them jam for an hour. Anyone can just play off each other in a jazz band or at a blues bar, but the ethos of rock is making every note feel like it’s the last that anyone will ever play in their lives. Most rockstars owe it to their fans to put a little more drama into their music, and as far as Roger Waters could tell, The Wall was the height of what Pink Floyd could accomplish on the live stage.
Then again, Pink Floyd were never strangers to adopting wild eccentric pieces for their live shows. Syd Barrett had already introduced them to all kinds of avant-garde stage tactics as a space rock act, and even if they weren’t always the easiest to understand, hearing Waters make dolphin noises did at least make them stand out from the other psychedelic acts trying to paint themselves up as the next answer to The Beatles.
But even without any of their studio experiments, Floyd was always looking to expand what their stage act could do. With Barrett having stepped back in the early 1970s, records like Live at Pompeii saw them operating in a totally different headspace. They were still trying to write the best tunes they could, but when listening to the studio version of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ compared to the live version, it’s like night and day when Waters hits his signature screams.
Everything was still escalating when they got the flying pigs during the Animals tour, but The Wall took it one step further. As opposed to typical stagecraft, this was practically a Broadway-style show that happened to feature Pink Floyd playing. Nothing was off the table at this point, and looking at how they brought the story to life, many of the images from the live show might actually eclipse what they used for the movie.
In fact, there are pieces that probably would have been better served if they weren’t tied to a motion picture. While the dazzling images from the film’s animated sequences work surprisingly well, hearing ‘The Trial’ being played out in real-time onstage is still one of the best versions of the tune, especially with Richard Wright and David Gilmour still in the group to anchor everything down.
Even though Waters had come a long way and even expanded the concept of The Wall in his solo career, he still thought the Floyd version eclipsed anything they did when asked about his best live shows, saying, “I think The Wall was pretty special. It was very well crafted, and in all, it was a great show. Well put together.”
But outside of just being a solid story from back to front, the power behind The Wall is seen in virtually every conceptual piece that came afterwards. Those themes of loneliness are the reason why Trent Reznor had the courage to create The Downward Spiral, and there’s a chance that My Chemical Romance would have never made it to The Black Parade had they not heard the opening strains of ‘In the Flesh’.
And even though many of the remakes of The Wall have been fantastic on their own, there’s always going to be a bit of magic to hearing Gilmour sing ‘Young Lust’ and having him perched atop the wall when singing his part in ‘Comfortably Numb’. But considering how much time and effort went into staging the whole thing, The Wall is by far the most grandiose piece that the prog rock giants have ever been involved with.
