While watching the recently-released DVD of Roger Waters The Wall, I couldn’t help
but think one thing. The movie is an
over-the-top concert film of the show Waters took on the road from 2010 –
2013. It is visually stunning and well worth
it for any Pink Floyd fan out there. But
… it was so over the top … all I could think of was the recent ISIS mass
shooting at The Eagles of Death Metal show at the Bataclan in Paris. And how if the same thing happened at this
concert, everyone would assume the gun fire and carnage was part of the show.
A few other negative things played on my mind, too, in deep
retrospect, long after I had first absorbed The
Wall in the waning days of 1979.
Thoughts that never would have occurred to me back then, as a teenager,
with so much of my life ahead of me. At
the time, my only major gripe with The
Wall was the deep anti-education vibe.
“We don’t need no education/we don’t need no thought control” were the
key lines in “Another Brick in the Wall.”
I got it. Smart
kid. Look what Roger Waters is doing,
couching his anti-authoritarian message in the most easy-to-grasp terms for a
young rock-and-roll audience, take it to their level, in America’s case high
school. He’s an intelligent man assuming
a similar level of intelligence in his audience. That they know they need education but can
hopefully discern in their minds when authority is being abused in this
situation.
And he was dead wrong!
How many dozens of kids did I see, who hated school, who could have done
well there, and later in life, take that song and its message as justification
to completely disregard anything school had to offer. Look … even rich rock stars know education is
bullshit. Waters clearly didn’t have a
clue as to how many millions of kids out there didn’t “get it” on that higher
level and took the song as an excuse to blow off school.
I liked “dark sarcasm in the classroom”! A teacher hit me with dark sarcasm, I’d hit
back, and he’d smile. Ah, this kid gets
it, he understands how life works. The
few teachers I didn’t like were either phoning in their lesson plans and no
longer gave a shit about education, or were abusive in ways that went way
beyond something as advanced as “dark sarcasm.”
I suspect Roger Waters did well in school and had more than a few
teachers who remember him fondly. He’s
making this up to create a fictional world for his character?
That’s nice, but the problem with The Wall is that so much of it is so clearly tied into the reality
of Roger Waters’ life with the themes of rock-star alienation and a man dealing
with losing his father in a war. This
movie drives that point home, literally, with Waters taking a road trip, in
between concert footage, to visit first a war memorial in France to honor the
passing of his grandfather (who died there fighting in the trenches in World
War I) and then to Italy, to visit the beach at Anzio where his father died (in
World War II). The footage is
beautifully shot and helps to illustrate that major theme in The Wall.
But seeing those scenes put a thought into my mind that I
hadn’t considered before, and wouldn’t have before my parents passed away. I got along fine with both of them, don’t
have any overly negative view on how either of them raised me. Do I remember some negative episodes? Things I wished they had done
differently? Sure, we all do. If we have kids, they’re having the exact
same conflicting emotions about us.
They’ll always have those emotions.
And if they’ve been raised with any sort of common sense and decency, a
long way down that road, when the parents are gone, it will occur to those
kids, as adults, that their parents were human, made mistakes, but they had
kids for a reason and were ultimately decent people.
Or, they were flaming assholes, and one day, if the son’s a
rock star, he writes a song like “Mother.”
Or is this fiction? Was Roger
Waters’ mother as portrayed in The Wall,
a smothering presence who ultimately loathed her child? We know the missing/dead father is a very
real thing for Waters, emotionally and physically, but don’t know if the mother
is based on reality or just another shade of oppression Waters purposely added
to his wall.
Seeing Waters so emotional at these final places his
paternal relatives were alive made me wonder: what if both had lived and become
flaming assholes as parents of the sort as portrayed in the song “Mother”? I guess it’s Waters’ point that he never had
a chance to find that out, and that’s his tragedy, but would it be a tragedy if
they did turn out to be negative forces in his life? They were just people. Like you or me. Like your parents, whether they’re dead or
alive. Like the guy sitting next to you
on the bus. Or the woman the next
cubicle over at work.
There’s no romance had they lived. There would just be the reality of another
key person in his life, with the potential or being a nurturing or destroying
presence. Or most likely an uneven mix
of both over the course of decades. You
see, I only underline this because as an adult, for decades now, it occurs to
me that adults carrying on about how bad their parents were, like busted
chainsaws, tend to be assholes. That’s
just simple common sense: bad parents often raise bad kids, filled with
bitterness, blame and regret, that they may pass on to their kids should they
choose to take that path. That’s what
goes on in my head when I hear a song like “Mother” now. Great guitar solo, but I know better. (If you want a more recent take on a
similarly troubled adult, check out Eminem’s song “Headlights” about regrets he
has over how he portrayed his mother in earlier songs.)
I can assure you, no such issues occurred when I first heard
The Wall! It was Thanksgiving morning, 1979. I had gone out running, as I did every
morning as a teenager. When I came back,
showered and went up to my room, I turned on the radio to listen to some rock and
roll, WMMR out of Philadelphia. The song
was “Goodbye Blue Sky.” I didn’t know it
was Pink Floyd for sure, but thought it might be. I had never heard the song before. When it ended, another one began. Then another, each equally stunning to me,
just a beautiful flow of music.
The DJ then announced that the station was previewing the
new Pink Floyd album The Wall that
would be released the following week. I
was stunned, sat there on bed just staring at my bedroom wallpaper, listening
to the words and music, knowing I was hearing something that would resonate
with me for years, possibly my entire life.
I liked Pink Floyd as much as the next teenage rock kid in the
70’s. Still do, there’s a reason people
still listen to those albums just as intently 40 years later. But this was one of those deeply emotional
musical moments that become a part of me almost as much as real-life
experiences with family, friends, etc.
You better believe I bought that album the moment it was
placed on the store shelf, in this rare case at the local Boscov department
store as they had advertised a better price for the double album than Listening
Booth, my home away from home farther down the mall. Like so many kids, I was floored by the
album. Time hasn’t been as kind to it
for me, but I still recognize it as a great album. Dark
Side of the Moon will always be their grand statement. And I’ve come to believe Animals is a fantastic, under-rated album that isn’t far off that
high-water mark. These days I find The Wall too relentlessly depressing
and, as noted above, a little too clichéd in terms of the types of neuroses and
depression I recognize in other adults who simply missed some key personal
revelations.
Which doesn’t mean Waters didn’t hit this thing out of the
park with this stage show of The Wall
he took on the road. I kick myself now
for missing this at the time because the experience in person must have been
stunning, the gigantic graphics and flourishes of art work and color projected
on the wall built around the stage. When
pictures of people killed violently, be it in war, terrorist acts, demonstrations,
etc., are flashed on the wall, it’s a profound experience with the music
illustrating the emotional depth of their passing.
But another thing that spooks me, yet again, based on
personal experience, is the audience in this movie. There are constant shots of audience
reactions inserted throughout the movie.
And these are rabid Pink Floyd fans who know (and sing, annoyingly I’m
sure) every word to every song, while clutching CD’s and t-shirts to their
chests, often with tears in their eyes. God help me, I love music, have the decades of
musical experience to prove it, but I have never felt that fervently about
music, as if it was sacred. These people
looked like zealots in a religious ceremony.
I don’t envy that level of faith.
As with all forms of fanaticism, it mildly frightens me. (Lately, that sort of fanaticism scares the
shit out of me, for good and obvious reasons.)
I have a hard time separating that berserk level of fandom
from the isolating, inhumane conditions that Waters surrounds his
semi-fictional rock star character with in The
Wall. It doesn’t make sense to
encourage that level of devotion to a concept one knows is deeply flawed, and
in some senses, depraved. The whole
point of The Wall is to refute the
level of false devotion and treat people like human beings, nothing more or
less. So why would Waters place himself
in this role where he can clearly see that people are projecting the same
false, irrational expectations on him?
Then again, I’ve expressed the same skepticism at any live
music event, don’t quite get the stunning levels of acquiescence in fans in
that environment. “Getting into” music,
I can get behind. But there are often
things going on at concerts that I’ll never understand, expectations of
talented musicians that make no sense to me.
I guess so much of this is tied in with being a teenager, and that
mythical belief that this is an exalted, sacrosanct time in one’s life, as
opposed to another link in the chain.
Rock and roll, or at least rock and roll as we knew it in
the 60’s and 70’s, may end up being a memorial to that teenage myth. To me, it’s just good, often great music,
that occasionally transcends its boundaries and becomes something more in one’s
life. That’s a good thing … at times,
it’s a great thing. But, again, first
thing I thought about while watching this movie was Bataclan. And I don’t mean the cool Velvet Underground
reunion bootleg that I got.
