The Wall

Everybody knows The Wall. Waters hated playing arenas so much that he said out loud he wished he could build a wall between the band and the audience. They hired Bob Ezrin to help flesh out the story and the rest is history.

There's a lot of important background stuff going on with this album. Roger had two ideas, one became his solo album the other became The Wall. That's the simple part.

The hard part is that Pink Floyd had a history of handing their money to real sleeze balls. They needed to make a big album to have money because NWG was about to lose all their money, but leave the band with the 80+% tax liability for earning it. Hard to pay a couple million in taxes when your actual bank balance is zero. Finally, Gilmour pulled the plug and became the band's financial manager himself. Every check from here on out has David Gilmour's signature at the bottom. End of discussion. He didn't particularly want to adult that day, but he was the only one who was going to do it.

Gilmour and Ezrin combed the ideas' hair and made it look pretty, and the whole band was super excited. Brick by boring brick (thanks, Paramore!), building the wall. Buy new equipment, Roger fires Richard after demoting him to overnight production, but David keeps him as a salaried musician for the tour. April 6th 1979 was the deadline to become ex-pats to save their money. Off to France. Divorces and yelling and Gilmour trying to be everybody's dad, and hey it turns out that Pink is the disembodied psychic humunculous of Syd Barrett that lives inside Roger's brain! Look, Ma! Nazis are still a thing. We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Somehow Gilmour made it all happen. Hello, Michael Kamen and all the New York orchestras/choirs! You remember Michael for writing and conducting Metallica's S&M in the future, right? There's a ride at Disney World for that!

Columbia literally tried to coin-flip Waters for royalties, but Roger finally won that argument when Brick #2 made them shut up and start counting all their new old Nazi gold coins.

This is all spiralling out of control like a wounded Vickers F.B.5. Kurt Loder loved it, Robert Christgau hated it, no clue what Tabitha Soren thought. Everyone unanimously agrees that it's ridiculously extravagant and pretentious. The proof is in the pudding, but you have to eat your meat first. Let's just listen to it...

... man, that's good. Just incredible. Forget that it's basically happening in real life at the same time. This is what Pink Floyd was progressing toward. All the weird individual components working seemlessly together to paint a ghastly portrait of a fractured psyche. Some of the best and most delicately painful solo work by Gilmour. It is an undeniable work of art, if uncomfortably close to non-fiction. It's a major achievement of recorded rock music, whether you like it or not. I personally can't see how you could not like it, but go ahead if you don't. It's on par with Jesus Christ Superstar, the sun and moon of rock operas as far as i'm concerned.

Cut!