Roger Waters: The Wall Tour 11/4/10 Izod Center Review

Pink Floyd’s 1979 over-the-top rock opera The Wall was both an enormous financial success and a cry for help. For one, it continued to signal the tensions between the group - with Waters becoming the defacto leader. Secondly, it was a display of the bands struggle with being among the worlds largest rock stars. While the band had traded in their use of lush sonic landscapes for a more rough around the edges rock album on Animals, The Wall was a fit of manic paranoia that was much more introspective and alarming than ever before. For many fans The Wall was a masterpiece, to many others such as myself, it was an overrated disappointment that showed Waters wasn’t able to carry the load himself.

Last night at the way-past-it’s-prime Izod Center in East Rutherford, NJ, Roger Waters would perform The Wall with a kind of majesty and bombast that made the music secondary to the grandiose stage show.

Before the start of the show the on stage wall was only partially erected stretching from one side of the arena to the other. When the lights dimmed and Waters walked out on the stage for “In the Flesh”, the arena exploded, and in unison rose to their feet. It was immediately evident the stage show was going to be to spectacular. The wall was illuminated in graffiti, Nazi-esque soldiers were propelled in the air on a bridge holding their cross-hammered flags and fireworks spat out from the stage with relentless fury. At the finale of“In the Flesh”, a plane came crashing down from the rafters and knocked down a portion of the wall creating an explosion of fire from the debris. Already, only five minutes into the show, both my eyes and ears were overwhelmed. I was hardly able to grasp the reality that the show could hold this kind of momentum from beginning to end.

Throughout the first half of the show the wall was slowly erected. A team of stage hands pieced together the enormous structure with what seemed to be a scientific approach. During songs like “Mother” and “Another Brick in the Wall”, enormous puppets -reaching heights of what must have been at least 40 feet - danced around on and behind the stage. By the time intermission rolled around, the wall was fully intact and the band was completely barricaded from the audience.

Throughout the entire show the wall doubled as a tool of isolation and a gigantic screen. The images displayed on the wall took on a 21st century theme with mocks of Apples “i” marketing and during “Goodbye Blue Sky”, planes dropped religious symbols, dollar signs, and Mercedes and Shell Oil logos on helpless lands. The structure would also take on scenes from the film adaptation of the album, in particular the beautiful rose scene during “Empty Spaces” as well as the crazy cartoon episodes of “The Trial”.

The second half of the show would open up with the band behind the wall performing “Hey You.” As the second half progressed Waters was making himself seen by taking out a few bricks here and there - because lord knows we don’t want to stares at a wall for an hour. The band would eventually all come to the front of the stage dressed in their militaristic garb for the second disc version of “In the Flesh”. During the songs performance, there was a terrific chemistry between the spotlights on the crowd and Roger’s biting insults. The show would finally conclude with the wall crumbling to the ground and the band emerging from the rubble.

The performance was something magical, something which had me consistently reminding myself that I’m seeing something special - something to the likes of which I will almost certainly never see again. It was a mixture of 21st century technology, mechanical ingenuity and fine musicianship. The Wall musically is good at best, it was half the aural achievements of Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, but as a live performance, no Pink Floyd album - nor any album for that matter - could hold a light to this production. Epic, breath-taking, spectacular, magical - all fitting descriptions, but nothing can describe a performance with this kind of bombast.