30 Days of Floyd, Day 10 - February 7, 1980

February 7, 1980

Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California

Welcome to the month of Pink Floyd, where I’ll be celebrating the 30-day countdown until the release of the Early Years box set. Technically, it’s 31 days, but I’ll be celebrating the 31^st day differently… maybe. I’m bad at commitment.

The plan is to look at 30 random concerts from Pink Floyd history, even going past the content covered in the Early Years.

We’re doing the Wall! It’s February 7, 1980 in good old Los Angeles.

Where to start with The Wall tour. It’s going to be a long one.

After dealing with rowdy fans during the In the Flesh tour (which was the Animals tour featuring no Wall songs), Waters was fed up and wanted to distance himself from his audience. That was the main focus of the concert; create a wall to separate the band and the audience. There was even a “surrogate band” that wore masks during In the Flesh to make them look like Floyd themselves. The tour only lasted 31 shows, but it was the biggest and most expensive tour to date. It was less of a concert and more of a show, featuring giant puppets, a giant wall, several musicians, and just all out antics. Even before the first performance, the band had already spent $1.5 million on the tour.

Some concerts were recorded and mashed together for the 2000 release Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81. For a long while, it seemed that this was all we were ever going to get. The film was recorded at film, but no one but Roger Waters knows how much. Rumors floated around that the film was dark and not good enough to be released. Recently, however, some clips have trickled out through the Immersion. Waters even uses a 1980 performance of Mother during his concerts projected onto a screen behind him.

The main intention of filming these concerts was to include them into the movie, and that idea was dropped sometime before the last performance. And Waters has held onto these clips. Forever. He owns the Wall and we’ll never get it how we want it.

But that’s not all. The Wall was the breaking point for Pink Floyd. In this period of time, Richard Wright was fired from the band by Waters for not keeping up with him. He still performed live, but as a session musician. Luckily for him, because he was not part of Pink Floyd anymore, he was paid and didn’t have to deal with the tour’s financial loss. When the Final Cut was released in 1983, it was the first time people noticed that Wright was not a Floyd member anymore. And then Waters left, officially, in 1985, after making that album which was basically a solo album.

So today, we’ll look at the very first Wall performance. Pink Floyd played 7 shows here in a row, day after day, before moving onto the Nassau Coliseum New York for 5 days between the 24^th and the 28^th.

Before each concert, a tape of We’ll Meet Again would play, and then they would send an MC out to kinda start the concert. Today’s MC is Cynthia Fox from KMET-FM, and she welcomes us. “Are the drugs happening or what?”

Before we continue with the concert, it’s important to know that Pink Floyd extensively relied on a “click track” for these concerts. A click track is pretty much a metronome for the band in their in-ear monitors. There was no jamming allowed, everything had to be on time.

In the Flesh? Interrupts her as is what happens. It’s not as good of an interruption as the MC in the Is There Anybody Out There? album, but it gets the job done. The crowd is excited as you expect, I mean this is the very height of Pink Floyd’s popularity. Waters is perfect in his presentation.

The crowd cheers for the ending as The Thin Ice baby noises start. It has an extended piano instrumental that lasts a minute before Gilmour starts his part. There were some rhythm problems with this song, but the vocals still sound spot on. Everything else is close to the original studio version, as it should be for The Wall.

Another Brick in the Wall (Part I) is pretty much perfect. The echoy guitar sound works great live and the crowd has settled down enough. Wright’s piano at the end adds extra spice to the song, and I think I would’ve liked that in the regular album.

STAND STILL LADDY moves into The Happiest Days of Our Lives. The crowd didn’t react as strongly as I thought they would.

Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) gets more of a reaction though. It’s pretty good, but even with Gilmour(?) counting in for the children choir it was a little off. It almost seemed like the song was missing something, but I think it’s just because the instruments aren’t really flowing together like usual. You need every instrument to be balanced for this to be perfect, and I think there’s not enough Wright. If you’re wondering about the solo, it’s as good as you expect, and the second half sounded much better than the first half of it. And then we get a keyboard solo with Wright swiping the keys and it’s magical. I like it more than the solo.

The acoustic guitar comes out for Mother. The crowd’s a little too excited for a quiet piece like this. Also, some fire extinguishers are going off. I forgot about this! We’ll get to that later. First the first Dark Side concet is interrupted, and now the first Wall concert is interrupted. The song was perfect in way, with every note and lyric sounding close or exactly like the album, except for Gilmour mumbling through a part of “Mother will always find out where you’ve been.” The solo could’ve been a bit more powerful, because how it sounds pretty close to the same level as the acoustics. But hey, we do get a longer solo.

Goodbye Blue Sky is all about those harmonies and it’s hard to judge those on an audience recording. They sound pretty good, but Gilmour’s solo vocals sound too rough. There’s also some idiot lighting fireworks on the softest song in the set. This is why the Wall happened in the first place.

Empty Spaces has an audible countdown, close to what you’d hear in A Day in the Life. The crowd starts to cheer, and Waters calls the entire thing off.

“STOP! STOP! Stop the film. We’ve decided to the best thing to put this fire that we have here out”

So we stop everything because there’s a fire. You know Waters is just loving all this. So we get some audience talk before they continue the song.

“They’re gonna have to rewind a lot of shit”

And we’re back. “Wasn’t that exciting?” “We’ll go back to the part of the story where the moon was out, and the clouds were going across the moon. You remember the bit where there was a moon with clouds going across it? REMEMBER THE MOON AND THE CLOUDS?!”

Oh that’s amazing.

So how did they recover from that? Wright plays us off with something that sounds like the beginning of Us and Them before the tape start back up.  Definitely interesting. I think it kinda screwed up Waters a bit.

What Shall We Do Now? picks up the pieces and Waters sounds better.

Young Lust is by itself, with a naked guitar solo before the rest of the band joins in. This might be the best version of this song I’ve heard. Gilmour is just nailing his parts here.

That is, until he forgot the start of the second verse. Whoops. Whatever, I still think it’s great. Especially his solo. The only thing this song is missing is Waters screaming during the solo, but we do get some great drumming from Mason and just an outstanding keyboard solo. A+.

One of My Turns is one of the best songs in the entire set when done right. The part in the film still gives me goosebumps. And it’s done great. The highlights are Waters going “no… NO!” and Wright’s playing throughout the entire thing.

Don’t Leave Me Now up next. It’s hard to judge anything in the beginning, but Waters is still on top. When the band kicks in, there’s a funny sort of high pitched “ooooh babe” vocals that doesn’t fit too well. But the guitar solo is nice.

Another Brick in the Wall (Part III) / The Last Few Bricks is 12 minutes long. There’s a couple rhythm problems, but Waters sounds like he’s having some sort of fun up there making little “hup” noises. After that it turns into the Last Few Bricks, a great song that’s sort of like a summary of what has happened so far musically. It’s actually the only real jam in the performance, a delay of concert while the bricks are laid out. The length of the song depends on how long the brick layers take to do their job. So with this longer brick laying, we get a jam with an Any Colour You Like feeling after a sort of instrumental summary of today’s musical events. They slow it down a bit for the jam, allowing for some of the best playing in the Wall’s performance with guitar solos and organ interludes. This is the highlight of the entire show right here.

Vera was never really done well live. But this is probably as close as you can get it, with some weird countdowns (countups?) that I feel like might have been accidentally included in the concert.

Bring the Boys Back Home is mostly tape playback with Waters yelling. There is no orchestra here.

Comfortably Numb. It starts off very… poorly. It’s the taped brass with a drum machine (or, even possibly, the click track) and Waters singing quietly compared to the rest of it. Gilmour is barely audible for a while, and that’s not the recorder’s fault. Everything is very underwhelming for a while and very cheap sounding. The harmonizing is good, though, and the first guitar solo is exactly like the studio version. By the time Mason’s drums are audible and the click track isn’t, it’s too late.

The Show Must Go On starts with a tiny little keyboard intro, like a lullaby, before the glorious harmonizing. No “must the show go on?” part, so boo. Gilmour’s vocals here are different but also charming in a way. At one point I thought he just gave up and went “blah.”

Cynthia Fox returns on stage to promote KMET-FM. A bunch of silly sthings.

In the Flesh interrupts her again. The running joke of The Wall. Waters probably had a good talk with all his engineers backstage about all the flubs and how they can be fixed, because everything sounds good here. Mason is back in the mix and everyone else is heard. Waters could be a bit higher in the mix because I missed the best line. “If I had my way I’d have all of them shot!” But...

“DO YOU LIKE MY PIG?!”

Run Like Hell. It starts more like the single version, with the isolated guitar in the beginning that goes on for a bit before the band comes in. It’s like a reoccurring theme, the band comes in latter.  A lot of energy in this one and an interesting bass line near the end.

Waiting for the Worms is the highlight in terms of vocals. Gilmour and Waters are perfect in their parts. And it just keeps on going through the “waiting” part. And the crescendo ending works well, maybe not loud enough though.

STOP does not exist on this tape.

The Trial is mostly tape. We do not have an orchestra. Poor Waters has to do everything up there live. But it’s amazing, and he’s amazing. He’s getting into the spirit of the song, and I imagine him just walking around stage putting on the different outfits. And he does a small yell before the judge, which was the most disappointing part of the song because he has no effects on his voice. Come on, that’s the whole character!

And the Wall comes down. I’d love to see it, but all we have is a sound effect and the crowd reacting. Good enough, I guess.

Outside the Wall, everyone comes out to do weird things. Gilmour is on mandolin, Mason is on an acoustic guitar, Waters is on a clarinet, and Wright is on an accordion. You can’t hear the backing vocalists as well, and it doesn’t sound as involved as you hoped it would. But it’s a very sweet way to end the concert, especially if you could see it.

The last track is titled “Thanks a Lot!” which I read as sarcastic. It might be.

Being the first Wall concert, everybody is fresh and ready to go. Perfection isn’t a word you can describe this one, but that just makes this better due to how perfect these concerts were supposed to be. If you’re going to listen to a Wall bootleg and not anything official, this is probably it. It even comes with a show interruption and that’s always special. Just listening to these things is half the fun, the real fun would be the concert theatrics. It’s weird to think that the low point is Comfortably Numb.