The Great Wall is actually several great walls. Chinese kingdoms were always being invaded from the northern interior, and so they started building walls around 900 BC and didn’t stop until the 1600’s. 13,000 miles long, or so, and every inch built before the invention of power tools. The urban legend has it that it can be seen from space; this is not true: the Great Wall can be smelled from space.
Were I a Scot, I would settle any of those insipid My country is better than your country arguments by pointing to Hadrian’s Wall. The Legions, man. Hadrian had the Legions at his disposal, and still didn’t want to deal with the fucking Scots. The Roman Empire: salinators of Carthage! skinners of Dalmatia! You know why you’ve never heard of Dacia? Because it pissed Rome off.
Rome! The Legions!
Vs.
Damp redheads!
And Rome blinked. Rome blinked hard, like a young boy watching his daddy tug off truckers on Christmas morning. This wasn’t was what anyone asked Santa for. Political considerations figured in, too–wouldn’t you know it?–but a good portion of the problem is that the proto-Scots just wouldn’t fight right. They kept ambushing soldiers in the dark! What kind of person does that? That’s not how you fight! You go out to a field first thing in the morning, both armies, and then there are some speeches and stuff–gotta have the speeches–and then the archers shoot, and then the lines march forth. There are rules to this sort of thing, Scotland. Fuck ’em: wall.
What a wall it was, too. Look at this bullshit:
THAT’S how you keep gatecrashers out of your festival! Get your legions to surround your field with this sumbitch, and no one’s getting in without your say-so. First, the little fuckers are gonna get stuck down in the ditch, which your boys have been shitting into for weeks; archers take care of them. Maybe the teens have archers, too. They take out your guys and–using ladders fired via giant slingshot–surmount your wall. They leap down into death. See the Vallum? That’s the kill zone. The teens didn’t want to pay $6.50 to see Marshall Tucker and Deep Purple, and now the teens are dead. There’s no way past that arrangement. There would, in fact, be no way past that arrangement until humans mastered flight. Nothing bound to the earth can surpass that bullshit: man, horse, jeep, tank. Look at that beautiful impediment up there. It’s just so in-the-way.
Look at it!
HADRIAN PROTECTED HIS FUCKING DOJO!
You promised you wouldn’t get weird.
I made no such pledge.
…
Yeah, you didn’t. But you forget a lot of shit, so I thought I could sneak one by you.
I cannot blame a scoundrel for scounding.
Get back to it.
Sure.
More recently, Berlin has had a wall, but its purpose was dissimilar to the others mentioned. The Berlin Wall was also: A, no fun; B, complicated; and C, depressing beyond words, so I’ll leave that for another day. We will stick to the rockyroll walls. There were two in Rock History that earn the honor of singularity, of capitalization.
You know the Wall of Sound:
The Wall of Sound, also known as the Wall, or Wally–
DO NOT CALL ME THAT.
–was a massive leap forward for rock music in terms of presentation and production quality, the authentic conclusion to several years’ worth of creative work by the group, and an absolute mindfuck in person. It also firehosed money out of its ass, and (among other things) broke the band up.
This is the other wall:
It was The Wall. The show was a massive leap forward for rock music in terms of presentation and production quality, the authentic conclusion to several years’ worth of creative work by the group, and an absolute mindfuck in person. It also firehosed money out of its ass, and (among other things) broke the band up.
The existence of both was similarly brief: 37 shows for the Wall, 31 for The Wall. (At least until the Roger Waters’ lawyers wrested control of the IP from the Pink Floyd organization, and Rog started touring the act again.) The Dead’s boondoggle was slightly more portable than Floyd’s, as The Wall only appeared in two American venues: the Fabulous Forum in Los Angeles, and the Nasty Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. (The Dead also notched more stops in Europe than Floyd, as they dragged the Wall to five locations around the Continent, while The Wall was only erected in London and Dortmund.
Let’s start at the beginning: Nazis killed Roger Waters’ father. It wasn’t personal, but Roger took it that way. He grew up, bought a bass, almost learned how to play it, developed a spectacular nose and pillowy lips, formed a rockyroll band with a guy named Syd Barrett. Syd wrote songs and played guitar and had a groovy haircut. Two other guys were involved, Rick Wright and Nick Mason, but they don’t matter. The lads called their group The Pink Floyd Sound; they were dreadful, but at least they weren’t another fucking London blues band, and so they started drawing a crowd.
Then Syd went nuts. Not everyone is supposed to take LSD. Performing became impossible. The original idea was to keep him in the band as a non-performing member, sit him down with Brian Wilson in the sandbox, but he lost the ability to write songs, too, and so Syd was shipped back to his mother’s house where he would garden and paint until his death in 2006. But he never really left the band: Dark Side was about him, and so was Shine On, You Crazy Diamond.
Roger and the other two soldiered on, bolstered by the addition of guitarist David Gilmour, who Roger knew from high school, and they spent the first few years of the 70’s making forgettable records to smoke mid-grade pot to.
And then BOOM: Best Record EVAR out of nowhere.
Dark Side of the Moon has sold 31 billion copies, and that’s only vinyl. Add in tapes, 8-tracks, compact discs, and Dark Side constitutes around 6% of all matter in the observable universe. You know every note to DSotM, don’t you? Of course you do. Hell, I bet you even know all the notes that can only be heard when you’re on hallucinogens. You had this conversation in a dorm room.
“If you can hear this, you’re frying.”
“Dying, man. He says ‘dying,’ not ‘frying.'”
“Rewind that shit.”
…
“Frying!”
“It’s not frying, dude.”
“Dude! We’re frying! And we can hear that shit!”
“It’s ‘dying!’ The whole record’s about death, man!”
“FRYING!”
“DUCK SEASON!”
And so on.
Success may or may not have spoiled Rock Hudson, but it fucked Pink Floyd up real good. Roger, specifically. Imagine a tall Napoleon who could sort of play the bass. Over the course of the next two albums–Wish You Were Here and Animals–Roger gradually asserted his dominance through threats, bullying, demands, and a couple times he straight-up noogied Rick Wright. By 1978, Rog had pretty much total creative control of the group. He could do whatever he wanted.
And what Roger Waters wanted to do was write an opera.
It would be about Rock Stars, and how tough their lives were. It would be about The Fans, who were gagging for the iron fist of a hard man. It would be about Wives, who were bitches, and Chicks, who were sluts. (The Wives were also sluts.) It would be about The System, man, and it would be about The Man, maaaaaaaaan. It would be The Wall, and it would be perfect music to be angry and suburban to. The album sold eleventy squillion copies, and you know every note.
But that’s the record. We’re not here to discuss the record. (Or the film. Honestly, I’ve written about Bob Geldof enough.) No, this is Thoughts on the Dead, and here: you gotta take it to the stage. Can you do it live? Pink Floyd’s answer to that question is: Yes, but only briefly, and at immense financial penalty, and also we’re gonna need about a dozen back-up musicians and a children’s choir.
Opening shot. Walk into the venue and this is your view. 150 feet from end-to-end and 30 feet high. 450 “bricks” made up the facade, each made of cardboard that could fold flat for easier transport. (Although that seems like an extraneous feature when you’re only playing four cities.) This is Earl’s Court, which looks far more like a basketball arena than its posh name suggests. Roger refused to play stadiums, because he wanted his opera about alienation to be intimate.
A local deejay opened the show with some banter–Jim Ladd in Los Angeles–and then they did the Plane Bit. Half-sized model of a bomber “flies” over the audience’s heads and “crashes” behind The Wall. That routine began on the Dark Side tour, and they did it in ’94 when I saw them at Giants Stadium; the gag stayed in the show for a very good reason: that shit blew motherfuckers’ minds.
Now the band appears. But it’s not the band.
It’s the Surrogate Band. See the guy with the Les Paul on the left? And the bassist? They’re wearing, respectively, David Gilmour and Roger Waters masks. This is a comment on something. They play a few tunes, and then the real group came out. So terribly meaningful, darling.
Song, song, song. Brick, brick, brick. And then it’s goodbye, cruel world; last piece in the puzzle and The Wall has been built just in time for intermission. The merch tables were open, as were all concessions.
This is what it looked like:
Where there any girls at this show?
Anyway, time for Act II. The Dead played second sets, but this was opera. Put some respect on it. Act fucking II, swine.
There is all types of bullshit projected onto The Wall. Three 35mm projectors synced to the soundtrack–that’s why Roger had to wear those headphones–and various inflatables. You didn’t think you were gonna go home without having various inflatables waved in your face, did you?
They brought the pig.
Now, cartoons and fascist hogs are fine and all, but they’re not enough to keep your discerning rockyroll crowd entertained. They came to see their heroes, so the designers had to figure out a way for the band to play through the wall. This was accomplished via the two most iconic moments of the show, one of which is so iconic that no photographs exist of it. (We’re gonna get to the Bush League part in all this in a minute I promise.)
First, a stage-right panel popped out, revealing Roger in a hotel room set.
Objectively bitchin’. Roger sang Nobody’s Home from that station, and then came down in front of the curtain to sing Comfortably Numb while wearing a doctor’s smock.
You know what’s coming, right?
You can picture it, right?
Well, you’re gonna have to keep right on picturing it; there are no readily-available photos of David Gilmour pinned athwart The Wall in a merciless spotlight with his Strat and his melodicism. You can kinda see it here (and listen for the crowd go ape) at 16 minutes in:
FUN FACT: David Gilmour was not standing on top of The Wall, as it was made of cardboard. He is, in reality, balancing on the tiny platform of a cherry-picker with a roadie hanging onto his ankles. You know, for safety.
“Hey, TotD! Why is the quality of that video so shitty? Couldn’t you find a better one for us, the loyal Enthusiasts?”
FUCK YOU AND YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR SECRET FAMILY! HOW DARE YOU QUESTION ME?
“Way over the top, broham.”
SAY THAT TO MY BALLS!
“I wish I hadn’t spoken up.”
You’re right to wish that, Enthusiast. For we now come to the ultimate similarity between the Dead’s Wall and Floyd’s The Wall: Their leagues were as bush as the day is long. Nothin’ but bush, baby! No trees, shrubs, hedges, scrub, grass, or even topiary shaped like Minnie Mouse’s gaped pucker. Just bush! If Gavin Rossdale and Dubya didn’t shave their cha-chas, there wouldn’t be this much bush. We’ve got bush.
The footage was fucked. Someone used the wrong film. Alan Parker didn’t know how to shoot a concert. Roger Waters sabotaged the project. The film was stolen by a gentleman thief named Raffles. The lighting was wrong. Mercury was in retrograde. Million different excuses why there’s no complete 35mm version of the concert, but excuses are like prairie dogs at a Phish concert: everywhere you look, and full of the Plague.
A couple of songs survived:
Mmm, grainy.
Otherwise, your only option is the videotaped version. Way to go, boys.
Okay, so now we’re getting towards the big finish portion of the evening and both the Floyd and the Surrogate band are in front of The Wall for In The Flesh and Run Like Hell. It looks exactly like this:
And it is at this point in the proceedings when one wonders how much of this exercise was merely a pretext for Roger Waters to cosplay as a Nazi.
Et, voila: le mur tombe!
Roger and the boys would enter from the wings and play an acoustic number called Outside The Wall, and then he would inform the crowd that there would be no encore, as the stage had been destroyed.
31 shows. Floyd learned in 1980 a truth that the Dead had learned in 1974: the entire goddamned point of a wall is that it cannot be moved easily, if at all. A wall that changes position is not a wall: it’s a door. The band lost millions and, essentially, split up. Roger and David Gilmour threw lawyers at one another for a decade or so over who owned the name “Pink Floyd,” and since David had one of the boring guys on his side, he won. They hired a bass player and booked themselves into every enormous stadium that Roger refused to play, and did two tours–one in ’87, the other in ’94–that made well over a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). Roger stayed behind The Wall; he’s been touring it on and off for 30 years now.
They say if you listen real careful, if you put your ear to the carpeting, you can hear a teenager boy listen to The Wall for the first time. “Yeah,” he nods. “I don’t need no education.” That’s the power of opera, Enthusiasts.
Very interesting.
Wooo! Wooooo woooooo!
I was at one of the Nassau shows. Rode my Huffy over from my house at Mitchel Field. It was amazing. Shit looked awesome. Music was boss. Drama. Noise. Drugs. I was with a girl, so there was at least one there. She rode over on her own Huffy.
Of course it all looks so tacky and cheesy now. Same with The Mothership. And KISS. But I wonder when our brains broke collectively as a culture to the point where we could not be awed by a pile of cardboard bricks or some sparklers on Ace’s guitar or a spaceship made in shop class.
Probably when the goddamn Jumbotron came along.
P.S. Say more mean things about Rick Wright and we might have to have words. WORDS, I say!
Do it ToTD..
Dooooo It … say mean things about Rick Wright..
This is 2019 and spectacle and argument and gossip are what we do now..
Fight Fight Fight…
On another note..
I had a huffy, banana seat, and what did they call the thing on the back? Was it a sissy bar?
Anyhow we would build ramps and jump the bike like evil knievel, Jump so high the wheel would fold in two on landing.
We would also see how many could be on the same bike,
One on the seat, one standing and pedaling, one on the cross bar, one on the handles, and at least one on the back standing on the wheel nubs and holding the sissy bar.
That clown bike arrangement never moved fast enough to hurt anyone, but the rest of it.. How are we alive?
Sled biking as well, ride the bike down a snowy hill.
All of this. A Huffy with a banana seat. Cinder block and 2×8 jumps complete with little sister on seat.
And speaking of snowy hills, did you ever make a “seat ski”?:
take one old ski.
make a “t” seat of 2×4 scraps
nail that thing to the ski.
Get the most gullible kid in the neighborhood to take the first ride.
Well, I was a bit older by the time of The Wall, so this bike was a Huffy 10-speed.
But BEFORE that? The KING OF ALL POSSIBLE BIKES EVAR . . . .
All bow the the muffuckin’ SCHWINN STINGRAY. The most banana of all banana seats, teeny tiny lil hot rod wheel in the front, a sissy bar that you could haul half a dozen sissies on, and the totes bad ass 5-speed shift with big honkin’ knob right on the center post between your legs, so God help you if you ever made an awkward sudden stop and slid forward off the seat.
We did all the ramps and jumps shit too. But I will note that as ULTIMATE BAD ASS LOOKING as the Stingray was, it did have one heinous design flaw (well, beyond the ball-crushing stick shift): when you took off on a massive jump and leaned back hard on that sissy bar to get air, the front end was so light and you put so much weight backward, you could pretty much flip the thing completely over and land hard on your back, well before your anticipated landing halfway down the block.
But if you got up from that and walked it off, well, hell Evel Knievel is better remembered for breaking every bone in his body than he is for sticking any landings.
Oh, and in re how are we still alive, also this . . .
https://jericsmith.com/2015/01/26/oral-history-3/
I owned this bike. Yellow. 3-speed. I thought it was the baddest bike ever made when I got it. What the fuck was I thinking.
But I’d do it again.
gorgeous. thank you.
Kid that lived up the street from me had a blue Huffy with a sissy bar, a gear shifter similar to a car’s, and a steering wheel. Here’s an old ad for the bike. 40 years later, I still think back on that sweet ride with a mixture of awe & envy.
Actually there is this wall footage too,
https://youtu.be/xBQsQoGodPY
Which can be found on my ‘if the thunder don’t get you the lightning will’ YouTube playlist for those interested. Peace.
Carlos,
Nice to meet you and welcome to the comment section, but we are talking about bikes now.
We tend to either focus religiously on the topic and go way to deep, or we spin off on a tangent.
This Comment Section is plainly off on a tangent..
Can you please join us there?
Thanks…
Okay..
So Bikes..
We would play this game in our teens in the supermarket parking lot.
Rider on handlebars, driver on seat.
Drive is blindfolded or agrees to keep eyes closed.
And then you go.. the handlebar guy tells you how to steer..
The panic in his voice, either helps you make the turn or it induces your own panic.
You move slowly gaining confidence, till you are going between parked cars, leaving skid marks on the doors as your handlebars bump into the cars..
We would cut the forks off of bikes we found in the trash..
Not the whole fork, just the tines of the fork, keeping with the analogy.
Then we would slide those “sleeves” of other bikes fork over our forks, and call it a chopper.
it was not a sound design at all, but gravity more or less allowed it to work for a few days.
Oh, yes, the Chopper forks!!!! We did that too, making some truly ridiculous machines in the process. As you note, not a lot of structural integrity. But bad ass cool while they lasted. That’s what happened to my Stingray, eventually. We also decided at some points that brakes were for sissies, so if you had hand-caliber breaks, they had to be removed. Stopping was done by foot dragging or running into things.
Also: a period when we combined ramp jumping and dodge ball. You took your best jump, and all of the other kids would throw balls at you. But contact had to be while you were in the air, else a foul was called on the thrower.
Sorry bout that, I do remember banana seats being very cool and chopper bars with banana seats was the epitome of cool. I seem to recall you could indeed carry a lot of people on one bike, and I rode a bmx bike all winter in Saskatchewan, got good at taking turns on sheer ice. Don’t know what a huffy is. Another tangent and hot tip There is a guy on Twitter ‘super70sSports’ who will bring back many memories of the 70s , 80’s toys/sports/pop culture with hilarious captions.
Carlos is my new hero,
ToTD should give him a guest post.. but nooooo he is too busy whining about his hurricane..
(man I am in a sassy mood, must be the weekend or the cooler days, or the bikes, I think it is the bikes)
Can we talk more about ice biking?
I know ToTD is like living with Iggy Pop and about to get hurricaned, but Ice biking is more interesting.
We didn’t ice bike, we skitched: grabbing bumpers of passing cars on icy streets and seeing how far they could pull you before you hit a rough patch and face planted. But our FAVE winter dumbass sport was playing hockey in an abandoned swimming pool at the closed 1930s era officers club on the base at Mitchel Field. None of us owned real hockey equipment, nor could we skate, so we just shimmied thru the fence with our street hockey shit, jumped down into the pool, and slid around in our boots on the leaf-filled green ice at the bottom of the pool, smacking the orange ball, and each other, like champs The peeling cement walls of the pool were the crowning mark, like having really hard, really rough boards, so checking was also encouraged, and a real delight.
Are we so nested that we can not reply to a reply..
We called it bumper-hitching, not skitching.
Hard soled dress shoes or like cowboy boots were the best.
Most grabbed the bumper, bad-ass or dumb-ass folk would grab the wheel well and be sliding like right next to the tire.
Mostly it was done without the consent of the driver, you would ambush at the stop sign.
But teen drivers would respond to the “signal” of two hands, palms pointed inward, fingers upright and wagged up and down as the “can we hitch” signal. Sort of like a double flip the bird but with all fingers up.
We would walk on the Lake Erie Ice, not as dangerous as it sounds, if you used your sense.
The salt truck would pause the salt if they saw we had a street hockey setup going. God bless em.
Bumperdragging
Bumper hitching it was, used to do it to city busses, the drivers would stop and get real mad though,
Saw the Floyd in 94 at commonwealth stadium in Edmonton, outdoor night show. Hitching there from Jasper when nick mason and blonde copilot drive by me in some antique roadster! he had the old driving goggles and long scarf flying in the wind they slowed down and smiled but alas no ride, there might not even have been a back seat so I’ll let it pass.
Went to Nassau.
Paid $35 to a scalper named George for $15 seats in the 9th row.
I was a concert photog of some moderate skill in those days, but taking pictures was verboten.
And it was made fairly clear that Roger Waters would kill you with his bare hands if you tried.
I tried.
My father was heavy. I wasn’t. I am now. I wore his huge pants and used tape to attach a camera body and a few lenses to my thighs.
9/11 hadn’t happened yet.
Maybe it still hasn’t, but most truthers I’ve met are more batshit crazy than Kaley McAnaney.
Anyway, security was light.
I shot with Ectachrome 200. Might have pushed it to 400.
The box of slides is somewhere in my house. A picture of Dave on top of that wall might be in there.
But I only have what I had printed at the time.
https://flic.kr/p/8FBZEv
If you mess with the memory of Rick Wright, you’d better bring along a friend.
https://flic.kr/p/8FFceh
The owner of the Colts paid like $4M for this guitar. But his dad moved them from Baltimore, where I saw the Ken O’Brien Jets play the Colts in front of like 20,000 people, having paid $5 to an usher to get in. And now his quarterback left him. Karma.
https://flic.kr/p/8FFcgJ
Dude, Ian Hunter shots are killer !!!
Like a chopped banana bike on a huge jump.. Nice !!!
Ian Hunter with the late great Mick Ronson, opening for the Kinks. What a show.
Dude, these are GREAT fucking pictures!
The same guy without a quarterback owns this guitar, here played at the very same Nassau Coliseum, about 13 and a half months before The Wall.
https://flic.kr/p/8FBZzx
Oh wait. Irsay doesn’t own Wolf. So what.
Great great great photos, thanks for sharing, nice story about smuggling the camera in.