Thursday, July 27, 2017

Roger That


For the second time in roughly a month, I attended a legendary concert. Last month I had the pleasure of seeing Joe Walsh and Tom Petty. This time, I got to see Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame perform in front of a packed Xcel Center. The last time he was in town he presented The Wall, and I was secretly high on meth, and probably drunk and maybe on mushrooms. This time I was sober, and I brought my camera to show you what I saw.

 

 

We sat patiently in our seats. Our view was almost straight on and we were on the third level, it would be a perfect angle for the show. For 15 minutes there was nothing but a screen showing an ocean view with a person facing away from us, sitting on the sand. There was noise all around us from seagulls and barges. Eventually, some lovely female chanting interrupted the serenity. And then, the sky in the background of the scene started turning red, and it quickly escalated into a frenzied chaos of lights from there as the beginning chords of Breathe from Dark Side of the Moon broke through. The crowd went wild.

We screamed and cheered as the heavy bass line slaughtered our brain with melody from One of These Days, a song I had always hoped to hear live, and then the melodic transmissions continued on with Time, the song that I attribute to my early love for the band. What followed was epic, and a great translation of the original song. Great Gig in the Sky is has always been a one-woman act, but the two ladies (Jess and Holly I believe) from the group Lucius took it to another level; almost a dueling banjos sort of deal with their voices. It was truly breath taking. The links I have provided in this post are all from the current tour.




 






 Lucius battles over Great Gig in the Sky

Who knew that I would get to hear such a lineup of songs? I mean, last time he was in town, he played The Wall from start to finish: no frills. He played it to whatever the musical equivalent to verbatim is. Don’t get me wrong, it was great, but this was better. There was more depth and longer riffs, and I’m sure that technically it was very true. They played Welcome to the Machine, followed by a captivating version of Wish You Were Here.

We then time travelled to The Wall where he did the standard Another Brick in the Wall part 2 where some “inner city” kids danced to the beat and tore off prison jumpsuits to reveal shirts with the “Resist” logo. It was pretty cool. It was time for an intermission.



 

The second act began with red flashing lights and a platform curiously appearing from nowhere, well from the ceiling actually, and settling just over the crowd going up and down the length of the floor jutting out from the stage;  intriguing. Seemingly out of nothing, smokestacks slowly emerged from the metal scaffolding and before I could catch on, we were staring at the famous Battersea PowerStation from the iconic Animals album. The strumming for my favorite Floyd song began. It was time for Dogs. This video shows the lowering and rising that I tried to describe above, and the song in its entirety which includes what I believe to be the best live guitar solo in existence. There were pigs everywhere: one floating above the building, and a larger one floating around the stadium. There were many pictures of Donald Trump who is also a pig. The set continued with the actual song Pigs, and the PowerStation became several floating projector screens for the remainder of the show: pictures to follow.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


We drifted from Animals to some of his newer stuff which was pretty good, back to the Dark side. At some point, a mysterious floating orb came and went, and ducked and dodged—sometimes hovered, but always remained in motion. It was nearly the end, so I thought. We were already into over two hours of music and he started in with Us and Them, Brain Damage followed by Eclipse which included a minor snafu which he owned up to right away. I will try to include a video of this here.
Here is the link to the video I took of the transition between Brain Damage and Eclipse. It gets colorful at the end. It was a huge file so I uploaded it to YouTube.
When I thought it would be done, the ladies from Lucius joined him and they began a chilling montage of Vera and Bring the Boys Back Home that made me tear up just a little. Their voices cut through the smoke and lights to deliver a powerful message that we need our troops back home. Sadly, on the day Trump ordered that transgender troops were no longer allowed to participate in his game.

 The screens that were once the Battersea PowerStation were now a colorful, ever-changing array of footage and live transmission.





 The Orb. What are you?



















 Confetti for the finale.

 

And then it was Comfortably Numb: another fan favorite, and another memorable guitar solo. It was done. We went home. I remembered everything, and I took some mental snapshots to go along with these which I have also shared on FB if you haven’t seen them yet.

I will never forget this concert, and it made me want to see his counterpart David Gilmour even more. If you ever have the chance to see Roger Waters, if he ever comes to town again, be sure to get tickets, you will not regret it.

 

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