Former Oasis leader Noel Gallagher won’t be in the audience when former Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters brings his “The Wall Live” tour here Sunday night, but he doesn’t need to be.
“I know every word to every song on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall.’ I could sing it for you now, but I don’t have the time,” Gallagher told me during a U-T San Diego interview last month. “It’s an amazing masterpiece and monument to Roger Waters’ megalomania. I like megalomania. Rock ’n’ roll would be nowhere without it.”
Gallagher, 44, acknowledged there was another factor that made “The Wall” so appealing to him: “It came out just before I left school, when I started smoking pot and (expletive) doing magic mushrooms.”
Gallagher, 44, acknowledged there was another factor that made “The Wall” so appealing to him: “It came out just before I left school, when I started smoking pot and (expletive) doing magic mushrooms.”
Happily, fans don’t have to do anything more than listen to the best parts of “The Wall,” which came out in 1979 as a two-record set by Pink Floyd, to have a near magical experience.
Admirers of this alternately audacious and overblown concept album range from Smashing Pumpkins’ leader Billy Corgan to the members of My Chemical Romance (who hired “Wall” producer Bob Ezrin to oversee the making of their “Wall”-inspired album, “The Black Parade,” in 2007).
Corgan caught Waters' "The Wall Live" tour in late 2010 in Chicago, and he sounded awed when he talked about it with me in an interview later that year.
"Sitting and watching 'The Wall,' in hindsight, this appears to be a master work, especially when you see it staged," Corgan said. "It has been 30 years since 'The Wall' (debuted) and what has anybody done since then that’s been close to this as a cultural critique?"
Then there’s former San Diegan Eddie Vedder, who led the audience at Pearl Jam’s 1995 San Diego Sports Arena concert in a singalong on the “We don’t need no education” refrain from “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” a standout song from “The Wall” that gave Pink Floyd its only chart-topping single in the United States and England.
By coincidence, this same arena (now known as Valley View Casino Center) is where Waters will perform “The Wall” in its entirety Sunday night. He’ll be leading an 11-piece band that includes his son, Harry, on keyboards, former “Saturday Night Live” musical director G.E. Smith on guitar and bass, and keyboardist Jon Carin (who has the distinction of being perhaps the only musician extant to have also worked with a latter-day edition of Pink Floyd, guitarist David Gilmour’s post-Floyd band, and — yes! — Spinal Tap).
Sunday’s concert has been sold out for months. Waters, 68, has not performed in San Diego since a 2000 date at Coors (now Cricket Wireless) Amphitheatre. That show was mesmerizing one moment, polished but perfunctory the next. With any luck, Sunday’s Valley View concert will be an all-epic, rote-free affair.
Fun fact:During a 2000 U-T San Diego interview, Waters discussed the Los Angeles recording sessions for “The Wall.” I asked if he’d heard the whispered speculation that, during the sessions, a fellow Pink Floyd member had a fling with a very attractive and at-the-time very married female “Wall” backing singer. Waters’ coy response: “No, but I bet I know which one!”
Written by
George Varga
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From: www.utsandiego.com
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