Alas, The Wall was built and if it wasn’t enough pressure to attempt to record its four sides of unified music and lyrics, the double platter needed to be handed in on time by November 1979 to meet a key contractual deadline, or else lose millions in potential revenue. So Waters, along with Gilmour, gathered all of the troops, which, for the first time, had to include session musicians to get all the various bits of music and sound effects completed in time to meet the deadline. Gilmour, less aggressive than Waters (like most of humanity, for that matter), could not keep up with Waters, and often the two battled over creative direction. In the end, for the most part, Waters won, and his vision was brought to fruition with the ample help of noted producer Bob Ezrin, who, along with Waters and Gilmour, produced the artistic tour de force.
Gilmour, temporarily, survived the Waters onslaught of dictatorship and determination. However, Wright would not, as he was going through drug problems at the time, and was not as quick to provide ideas or work, and Mason’s chops were also not up to Waters’ exacting needs. Ezrin, post-album release, would also not survive the Waters’ wrath as he spoke openly about The Wall’s production and subsequent live show ideas without the expressed permission from the notoriously private and press-antagonistic (at that time) Waters. Wright was fired, but allowed to play on The Wall tours, and Mason was tolerated. Gilmour put up with Waters until the bassist left the Floyd, seemingly for dead, after The Final Cut —another album where Waters used the Floyd to tell his story.
However, we are shortchanging the live presentation in 1981-82 of The Wall while discussing the motivations which led Waters to create his ultimate masterpiece. At the time, and, as evidenced in 2010, the double album offered a chance to be as theatrically audacious as a band could hope for without completely pissing off the audience. In a sense, as was once offered, the band could construct a wall and just have tapes playing. The audience would never know that the group wasn’t even there. How perfectly symbolic that scenario would have been, echoing the earlier suggested sentiment that punk rock was built upon the fact that top-tier bands had lost touch with their audiences.
Instead, on the ’81-’82 tour, which because of its size and expense, only hit Los Angeles, New York, London and Germany, the wall was built during the first half of the show, concluding at the end of side two of the album, and huge dangling puppets and airplanes flew overheard, while animated films were projected on its blocks. During the second part of the show, covering sides three and four, the Floyd and other musicians played from behind the wall, with the notable exception of David Gilmour who played the “Comfortably Numb” solo while standing on top of the wall. In the end, despite Waters’ aggressive determination to explore his vision his way, it was Gilmour who, artistically and symbolically, may have served as the central point in that moment, towering above the band and audiences with a solo that continues to create goosebumps to this day.
But it was and is Roger Waters’ WALL, and he proved that once again after the band’s nasty little transformation period in the mid-1980s when the rest of the group continued on without the band’s mastermind, and chose to explore the rich ambient nature of the Floyd sound. And they did, and they did it rather successfully until the early 90s when Pink Floyd was finally put to rest after over 25 years of spectacular sonic duty. In December 1989, the wall dividing East and West Germany in Berlin was finally taken down, effectively ending the communist regime in Germany, and solidifying that fractured country. Eight months later, Waters, along with a team of famous and obscure musicians, performed The Wall in front of 250,000 people, and the work was finally seen for what it really is—a chance for one to address those inner demons which plague us all; ultimately, allowing one to tear down the wall between hope and defeat.
On July 2 2005, the four original members of the Floyd lineup, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright reunited at the bequest of Bob Geldof (ironically, the very musician who played Pink in the subdued and flawed version of Pink Floyd: The Wall helmed by Alan Parker in 1982) to perform at Live 8. At their reunion at London’s Hyde Park in front of millions watching worldwide, the four members finally tore down the proverbial wall that had divided them from each other since the creation of Waters’ masterpiece; a work, in the end, which was created to save the band from financial ruin, and did just that, but also cost most of them two decades of relationships. In the end, Waters’ work speaks to an audience because he is humbly admitting that isolating oneself from others is never the answer. And that is certainly a sobering trait that speaks to both rock’s perpetually teenaged audiences and its aging fans, as well.
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