Just how many of you motherfuckers saw The Wall tour?
OR
Photo taken by Commentator Larry at one of the ’80 Nassau shows. Rick Wright is the Rick on the right, and to his right is the Rick Wright of the Surrogate Band, who I am desperately hoping was referred to by the production crew as “Rick Wwrong.”
OR
Rick Wwrong is playing a Fender Rhodes with–I believe–an early synthesizer called a Minimoog on top of it. The Mini was a breakthrough, kinda, in that it was the first all-in-one package synth. Before the Mini, there were patch cords and all sorts of bullshit involved if you wanted to make WEEEE-OOOO-WEEEE-OOOO noises.
Look at this nonsense:
Settle down, Moog synthesizer. Are you playing prog rock or launching Soviet missiles? This is why keyboardists get called nerds.
Rick Wright (right) is playing the venerable and massive Hammond B3 organ, which has something called a Prophet-5 perched atop. The Prophet was even more advanced than the Moog in that it was quintuply polyphonic (hence the name). Five whole notes at once, man! Moog could only manage a single tone at a time. The instrument was also a bit of a status symbol among musicians, as it cost (adjusted for inflation, like I always do) $12,000, which Enthusiasts with degrees in finance will note is way too fucking much money to pay for anything without an engine.
The synthesizer wars were like an arms race,
Someone got velocity sensitive keys, someone else got poly figured out, someone else had an onboard sequencer, put a vocoder on it.
For a stretch from 72 thru to mid 80’s, You can date the song by the synth..
I am not nerdy enough for that but I can here an arp omni II if I am paying attention, and I am pretty sure I can recognize a mini-moog
Then Midi came along and the all started to have that fat but boring midi stack sound, and so it goes.
Friggin Peter Gabriel was all GaGa over his fairlight CMI.. Like you could draw the wave form on the screen man…
Give me saw-tooth wave and some white noise baby !!!
As mentioned earlier, I saw The Wall Tour. I lived at Mitchel Field, a mostly abandoned old air base in the middle of Hempstead Plains, from ’76 to ’80. There were some military quarters left, but most of the base was either collapsing old brick buildings, or had been turned over to Nassau Community College.
They were building what I still think of as the “new” NCC campus when I was there. I have stood atop its tallest tower when it was just a skeleton of concrete and rebar. High. Both ways.
Why do I mention this? Because we lived as close as it was possible to live to Nassau Coliseum at the time. Even the kids from Uniondale were further away, and had to fight their ways across Hempstead Turnpike to get to the box office.
So back before Ticketmaster and its ilk fucked everything up, when a new concert was announced, we were the GO TEAM for hauling ass over and nabbing tickets.
I saw pretty much EVERYBODY who I wanted to see. And that was a glorious era for coliseum sized shows, as well as the beginning of the Islanders heyday, so I got to see a lot of Hall of Famers punching each other.
To this day, my brain still sorts Billy Smith and Chico Resch as the Billy K and Mickey Hart of hockey.
Look at the photos. Read the bios. Uncanny.
Bobby Nystrom and Garry Howatt
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LUjrxxYBsi4
For the last week or so I’ve been trying to get a modest, working midi setup for home recording. It’s killing me. I have patches and dll files and vst’s hiding in far flung corners of my computer and my daw cant find anything. And I don’t even really care. I record guitar bass and drums. I’d just to throw a trumpet (or B3) on top if the mood strikes me. Synth with parabolic wave forms? Eh. The whole thing is just like that moog picture only virtual. Can’t I just get fucking healy to set it up for me??
Anyway thanks for the opportunity to vent. Resume yammering about the floyd and their rock extravagances. And good luck with the hurricane (seriously).
I hate MIDI. Its point of emergence was exactly the point that I stopped making music myself. If you can’t plug a quarter-inch jack into it and make the rock, then I want no part of it.
See: https://jericsmith.com/2010/09/28/the-analog-kid-speaks/
Thanks and I mostly if not entirely agree. I think that I think that because the sounds exist and are theoretically easy to access that I’d like them at my disposal. Like I said a trumpet on top when I feel like it. What makes me mad is that i havent played guitar for a week because all my time has gone to configuring plugins – incorrectly as it turns out.
I think now is probably a good time to point out that Rick Wright was the only “member” of Pink Floyd to make money during the Wall tour, since they fired him before the shows started and then hired him back, on salary, to play the gigs. So while the remaining band members took a bath, Rick still got paid.