The Wall

I was thinking about how it was forty years ago that I graduated from high school and then went off to college, and that made me think of the big album that year, The Wall, by Pink Floyd. According to Wikipedia, it was released on November 30, 1979, but I swear I could walk across campus, in the fall, and hear "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," from open windows. As the sound from one window faded out, I would pick up on another. I didn't know who it was at first, but I knew I had to have it.

The Wall is Roger Waters' magnum opus, written almost entirely by him, but with the rest of the band's enthusiastic support. It was a double album, eighty minutes in length, about a rock musician called Pink, a mixture of the founder of the band, Syd Barrett, and Waters himself. A series of events, such as his father's death in World War II, his rotten education, his smothering mother, his wife leaving him, have contributed to him building a metaphoric wall around himself, isolating himself from the world.

The album, despite mixed reviews, was a huge success. "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" was their first number one single (they didn't release a lot of singles). In another way, though, it was the end of Pink Floyd, as the band basically scattered after that, even though there were a few more albums.

Listening to it again the other night, I was first drawn in by the instrumentation. The music is gripping and soaring, and covers a lot of different styles. David Gilmour's guitar is, as usual, non pareil, and his solo on "Comfortably Numb" is epic.

The lyrics of this rock opera are sometimes great, sometimes a bit pretentious and silly. Some of them are instantly memorable, such as the first two parts of "Another Brick in the Wall."

"Daddy's flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
A snapshot in the family album
Daddy, what'd you leave behind for me?"

"We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave those kids alone
All in all, you're all just bricks in the wall"

As a teacher, I might be tempted to bridle at this lyric, but I imagine schooling in England in the '50s was probably pretty horrible. I also find it amusing that Waters chose to give the lyric incorrect grammar, so maybe the kids do need at least some grammar lessons.

Though Waters wrote almost all of the record, Gilmour contributes on some of the more rock and roll-ish songs, such as "Run Like Hell" and "Young Lust."

"I am just a little boy
A stranger in this town
Where are all the good times
Who's going to show this stranger around?
Ooh, I need a dirty woman
Ooh, I need a dirty girl."

The Wall really crawls inside Pink's head, and there are some weird and disturbing moments, such as in "One of My Turns," when Pink brings home a girl and ends up chasing her away with menace (and possibly an ax). "Comfortably Numb," which I think was the favorite song of my college mates, was not about pot, as they probably thought, but was about Pink being given pain medication.

"There is no pain you are receding,
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb."

At the end of the record (spoiler alert) Pink is put on "trial," and the sentence is his greatest fear--to have the wall torn down. Syd Barrett, god bless him, has passed on, but I hope Waters is feeling better.

The Wall is one of the great albums of rock history, even if it's only Pink Floyd's second-best record (after Dark Side of the Moon). Someone asked a question on a Facebook page I follow that asked, besides the Beatles and the Stones, if you had to spend the rest of your life on a desert island with the output of one band, who would it be? I answered The Who, but I wonder if it wouldn't be Pink Floyd, and basically just for their four albums in the 1970s. I don't know if I could get tired of them.