To see video from last night's show, click here.
DALLAS -- As the legend goes, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters conceived of The Wall after a 1977 incident, when he angrily spat on a fan.
Quite a contrast from the humble gentleman onstage at American Airlines Center Sunday night: "No, thank you," he said, during an applause break, turning to face all corners of the arena. "No, thank you."
A remarkable piece of rock theater, Pink Floyd's opus The Wall has scarcely aged a day since the British prog-rock outfit premiered it 30 years ago -- even if the feelings which bore it have long since cooled and calcified.
A quarter of that legendary band returned to Dallas Sunday to unveil a Wall built for the 21st century. Bassist/lyricist Waters and his bandmates split not long after The Wall ran its course, including a mythic series of shows that featured a literal wall being constructed onstage. Yet the 67-year-old Waters has carried on, functioning as something of a single-minded emissary for his estimable contributions to the rock canon. Any traces of spite or bitterness were nowhere to be seen Sunday at American Airlines Center; Waters instead focused on updating songs that've ingrained themselves in the permanent pop cultural memory.
It was startling to see a genuine rock opera unfold in front of me, so soon after having witnessed another, less successful take in Spring Awakening. There's a clarity to the songs that make up The Wall that pulls the listener effortlessly along; charting this particular path to hellish isolation and self-loathing is as harrowing as it is transcendent. The evening consisted simply of two acts, split by a 25-minute intermission, with Waters and a dozen-piece band performing The Wall in its entirety. Waters wisely drafted Robbie Wyckoff to sing David Gilmour's parts, rather than tackle them himself. (Dave Kilminster handled the incendiary guitar solos.) That said, Waters was in remarkably good voice and even duetted with himself across the decades, singing along with a bit of heavily stylized video from 1980 during Mother.
The music alone is powerful enough to sustain attention, never mind the multi-sensory spectacle Waters layered on. The show began with a literal bang, as sparks flew from the stage and a miniature warplane (the one heard near the end of In the Flesh?) dive-bombed the stage, sending up a small fireball. Over the course of the first set, the wall was steadily constructed, doubling as an expansive video screen and eventually sealing the band off from the audience. Speakers stashed throughout the room provided a powerful surround experience, an anomaly only in that most modern rock bands aren't terribly concerned with the quality of arena sound. There was even a flying pig, crudely adorned with slogans, that floated above the cheering crowd during the second half of the set.
The passage of time has drained a bit of the danger from The Wall, as well as turning the rock opera from one man's deeply personal reckoning into something of a broad sociopolitical tract. What once had an undercurrent of nervy self-hatred -- a feeling Alan Parker's cinematic adaptation of The Wall captured quite well -- now feels safer, less reckless. There are still flashes of the searing psychological drama -- One of My Turns or Goodbye Cruel World -- but many of the songs have been retrofitted for today's fractious world. Goodbye Blue Sky was re-imagined with corporate logos carpet-bombing the landscape; Vera was updated with modern footage of soldiers returning home from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other songs were given a charge in less-flashy ways: hearing an arena chanting along with Run Like Hell or watching as a carefully constructed wall comes crashing down, at the climax of The Trial, brings the album to life in ways that Parker's film or endless listening sessions cannot.
Surprisingly, the album and its timeless songs withstood Waters's tweaks. What could've been an ill-advised attempt to bring a rock classic into the modern era was, in fact, one of the best shows -- in any genre -- to make its way through North Texas in 2010. An artistic tour de force that doubled as a triumphant victory lap for one of rock music's chief architects, The Wall was a breathtaking display of brilliance.
Here's some video I shot last night of Roger Waters performing.
