The Wall. Bloated and self-indulgent, yet near perfect in its execution. Though I was only 4 years old when Pink Floyd first executed its extensive stage show in 1980, the concept album’s legacy began to pervade my consciousness as soon as the beginning of middle school.
It was then that I first began noticing the Wall’s bricks carefully stenciled on the notebooks of the upper classmen; the album’s nightmarish iconography emblazoned on t-shirts, stickers and half-sewn jacket patches—and of course the cardboard CD jewel cases (remember those?) that clung to the inside of rusting metal locker doors. These middle school upperclassmen, which to clarify meant 8th and 9th graders, seemed to be tapped into something…some otherness, something called Pink Floyd.
With the Wall, came the first sense of rebellion…escapism. A break from the suburban norm of Atlanta. Sure it was a band from another generation but what it signified was a good deal more interesting than the top 40 of Madonna and Wang Chung. And really, thinking back it wasn’t even so much about the music (as I’m sure I barely grasped the majority of the content of Roger Waters lyrics), but the promise of an, err, less conservative worldview.
A gateway, this was a world of beers salvaged from basement refrigerators and cigarettes pilfered from your friends mother’s pocketbook, both consumed behind the school parking lot and/or in the woods behind a church or shopping center. This was a world where marijuana was smoked out of bent coca-cola cans and makeshift tin-foil bowls. This was the beginning of sneaking out of the house at midnight and returning home before dawn. Heady stuff for a thirteen year old. Whatever this middle school subculture was, I wanted in. Far removed from Pop Warner football, this, the Wall, as I understood it at the time, was a glimpse of something else. Something far removed from the suburban drudgery of being thirteen in 1989.
And then I discovered Black Flag and Minor Threat. But that’s a story for another time.
That was 20 years ago. I have since gone through many phases of Pink Floyd fandom, from utterly denouncing them and their ilk (see Black Flag reference above), to championing founder Syd Barrett and everything in between. If you haven’t seen it yet, Mojo has taken another look at the Wall’s uncompromising 1980-81 live show revealing everything that went into making it a reality. In addition to interviews with its creator, Roger Waters, the magazine goes behind the scenes talking to the production crew, stage band, hangers on, etc. To commemorate the issue the magazine has curated a two-disc compilation, The Wall Re-Built, inviting contemporary musicians to each cover a track from the Walll. Sample a couple of tracks below. Sweden’s the Amazing slow the raucous “Young Lust” down to a piano-driven dirge, while Gnomonsong’s Papercuts employs fuzz and dreamy dissonance on “The Thin Ice.”
In 2010, I wonder if this album still grabs the imagination of thirteen year old boys the way it did in the days before the Internet. The days before endless “free” music, movies, etc.
MP3: Papercuts :: The Thin Ice
MP3: The Amazing :: Young Lust
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Bizzare. The Wall came on my shuffle this morning. I twittered “Look Mommy, There’s an airplane up in the sky.”
I was born in ‘82 into a massive Floyd family. While I can’t speak on 13 yr olds of 2010, this album captivated me throughout my pre-teen and teen years, well into the 90s. I still put it on now and again, mostly to revel in Gilmore’s massive guitar tone and get all lamely nostalgic. I think it still holds sway as one of the greatest, yet most divisive records of their career.
1 | StarkNY January 28th, 2010 at 12:47 pmThe Wall was my gateway into the world of Floyd. Once the doors opened there was no stopping my descent into “Meddle,” “Saucerful of Secrets,” and the grandaddy of all psychedelia…”Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”
2 | aburtch January 28th, 2010 at 1:34 pmI was born in ‘84, eight years later than the author of this text, and I can assure you The Wall still had the same magnetism for me at the age of 13 as it did you. I can still vividly remember first getting into Pink Floyd, and The Darkside of the Moon and syncing it up with my sister’s copy of the Wizard of Oz on the floor of my bedroom. The Wall would come later because it was difficult for a fourteen year old kid to drop the dough for the 2 CD masterpiece. I actually watched a borrowed copy of The Wall with a likeminded friend before I paid for the music, and was blown away because I had never seen anything so crazy. The cigarette burning through Syd Barrett’s fingers was the stuff of legend. I quickly moved on to other music, and while I moved to AC/DC and The Clash, and subsequently blues music instead of Black Flag and Minor Threat I can assure you that thirteen year old me was affected very deeply by Pink Floyd. A band that in my opinion doesnt get as much critical cred as they should. Great piece. Perfectly captured the teenage feelings of discovering Pink Floyd.
3 | BuzzKillington January 28th, 2010 at 1:42 pmthis is pretty much in step with the way i discovered floyd. while the frequency in which i occasionally dust the album off the shelf these days has diminished, i am still taken back to that first time i saw the movie, dropped that single hit of flying pyramid and allowed my mind to be blown like never before. i may have outgrown my jr. high school acid days but those sounds still give me chills.
p.s. to buzzkillington: i believe it was bob geldof with the burning cigarette, but i could be wrong. great scene… sets the tone quite well.
4 | reveles January 28th, 2010 at 11:23 pm“Something far removed from the suburban drudgery of being thirteen in 1989.” Damn. You nailed it. Right down to the bent coke cans, this was my exact initial experience with pink floyd and middle school rebellion.
5 | Chad January 30th, 2010 at 1:53 pmremember this one?
6 | Litiot February 1st, 2010 at 6:55 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebuild_the_Wall