LISTENING PARTY: The Wall

I don't know what it is about the early winter months that makes me nostalgic for overblown, bombastic, and pretentious rock albums. I figured I'd take a break from all that and listen to one of the least overblown, bombastic, and pretentious rock albums of all time. Pink Floyd's The Wall.

I have to admit that I had no idea who Pink Floyd was in the early days of December 1992, when my friend and bandmate Jesse let me borrow his copy of the wall, taped off of his father's vinyl. I subsequently dubbed a copy of that tape, which meant that for the first four years of listening to this album, it was on a twice-dubbed cassette copy of a 12-year old vinyl record. Meaning that, while 13-year Ryan listened to this album for the first time with the lights off in his bedroom, freaked out by all the strange noises and weird screaming that accompanied this album--due to the poor quality of the tape he had, there was still so much strange noise and weird screaming he couldn't hear.

"In the Flesh?"-So, if you're making an overly pretentious and overblown concept album, the first thing you need to do is record a piece of spoken dialogue and then split it in half and play the second half at the start of the record and the first half at the end, so that it creates a loop. I think Britney Spears did this same trick on "Oops, I Did It Again"

I have since read many books on Pink Floyd, a band that I have been fascinated with since that fateful December night 17 years ago when I first heard singer/composer Roger Waters barking out orders to the lighting crew before airplanes zoomed by and crashed. So I know a lot of the backstory behind the creation of this album: Waters' loss of his father in WWII, the slow descent into madness of Floyd's first singer, Syd Barrett, the increasing dehumanization of rock n' roll tours. But I knew none of that when I first heard this album. Instead, I thought I was going fricking crazy.

"The Thin Ice"- Yoko Ono's biggest solo hit was a song called "Walking on Thin Ice." I mention this because Roger Waters sings a little bit like Yoko Ono on this track. Which is to say not at all.

"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1"- This album was also my introduction to songs that had parts to them. In my youth, a song was a song, and then you'd just hear another one. But then Roger Waters came along and decided that songs were never finished, just replayed again later with slightly different lyrics and even more headache inducing vocals. This song ends with a long guitar coda overdubbed with sounds of children playing. This scared the shit out of me when I was 13 for some reason.

"The Happiest Days of Our Lives"- This song starts with a helicopter. I don't really know why. I also don't know why that this was its own song and not just the beginning to "Another Brick in the Wall, part 2" It's all about how teachers are mean to kids. Which means your seventh grade brother wrote it.

"Another Brick in the Wall part 2"-Somewhere, someone has written a 40-page dissertation on the way this song blends disco beats with the refrain "we don't need no education" but I don't want to read it, and neither should you. And the person who wrote it should be ashamed of themselves. This song is famous for its use of a children's choir on the second verse. Those kids were all paid for their services with a copy of the album. Roger Waters used the money he made off this record to buy a private island. I don't know what that means, except that while Roger Waters has gone to write and record several more rock operas and one for real opera, none of these school kids ever went on to record their own rock opera. So while we'll never know who was the real musical genius behind the Wall--Roger Waters or a group of 20 eight year olds--I think we can make an educated guess. What?

"Mother"-After hearing this song, I was terrible to my own mother for about five years. So I think Pink Floyd owes my mother an apology.



"Goodbye, Blue Sky"-This is a really beautiful song about a cat eating a bird. And then about some zombies.

Then there are two flowers raping each other.


"Young Lust"-I think this song reveals the brilliance of the collaboration between Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour. So this song is supposed to be about a young boy's grappling with his nascent sexuality in the grip of a controlling mother.
I feel like Gilmour took one look at the song title and said "'Young Lust'? My guitar knows how to do that." and turned Roger Waters lonely song about masturbation into one that was 100% about cock. That's magic, folks.

"One of My Turns"-This song starts with the mother from Leave it to Beaver playing an operator trying to reach Pink Floyd's wife. And some man answers, which leads Pink Floyd to bring a groupie back to his hotel room. And then the groupie talks about all the cool stuff that it's in the room. This lasts for about forty-five minutes. Then the song starts. Over a really 1979-esque synthesizer, Pink talks about feeling cold as a razorblade and tight as a tourniquet and dry as a funeral drum, and then the drums and guitars kick in, supposedly representing his freak-out. He asks the groupie if she's like to see his favorite ax. When I was 13, I didn't know that people referred to guitars as axes, and thus thought he had turned into a serial killer. Or a lumberjack.

"Don't Leave Me Now"-During this song he doesn't mention anything about trees or logs or how cold it is, so I'm thinking he's not a lumberjack.

"Another Brick in the Wall part 3"-I had to convince my mother to let me rent "Pink Floyd The Wall" the movie from our local video store because it was rated R. I'm pretty sure I saw it before Christmas, which was only about two weeks after Jesse lent me the album, but it seemed the longest two weeks of my life. I was desperate to see the film the band made about the album, and when I finally saw it, it was torturous. It felt like two whole weeks while I was watching it. I thought that maybe everything just felt like it took forever when I was 13, but last year I tried to watch 'The Wall' movie again, and after about four hours I stopped, unable to take anymore. And that only got me to the second roar of the MGM lion.

"Goodbye Cruel World"-This is the end of the first disc of the double album, and I wonder what someone would've thought if they bought this from like a used record store and it only came with the first disc. I'd ask them, but they probably have killed themselves due to extreme depression.
The stage show for this record involved a giant wall being built across the stage with this song being the one where Waters inserted the final brick. I actually think this is one of the coolest conceits for a rock n' roll show I've ever heard of, although I don't know how I'd feel as an audience member if the band I went to see didn't want to see me so much they built a wall in front of me.

"Hey You"- I remember I went with this girl named Jenny to a homeless shelter to volunteer, and when her mom was driving us, this song came on the radio, and Jenny said "Oh, Mom, I love this song! Turn it up!" and I decided this meant that she and I needed to get married. She went on to become a Patriots' cheerleader and I write about albums I listen to on a blog that nobody reads, so you can see how that turned out.


"Is there Anybody Out There?"-This is a mostly solo acoustic guitar piece. I'm sure if I went to the Wall show, this is where Floyd started throwing rotten fruit at the audience from over the wall.

"Nobody Home"-This is one of the most affecting songs on the album. And really, if you wanted to know what Roger Waters felt about the rock n' roll lifestyle, this song would do the trick. He talks about having the obligatory Hendrix perm, which someday, when I'm not too busy writing on this blog that nobody reads and wondering what Jenny is up to, I might go into a barber shop asking for the obligatory Hendrix perm just to see what might happen.


"Vera Lynn"/"Bring the Boys Back Home"- These two songs are really one song, which is all about WWII. Roger Waters is meant to connect rock n' rollers going out onto tour with young men going off to battle the Nazis. One group saved Europe from self-destruction. The other made it cool to wave around lighters and dayglo sticks in the air and yell out "Freebird." I'm not one to pass judgment.

"Comfortably Numb"- This is probably the most famous song from this album, and is probably tied with "Money" to be the most famous Pink Floyd song of all time. Which is funny, because it's all about getting a hyper-cortisone shot before going onto stage to perform in a giant stadium rock show. That really boils down the universality of the Wall to its core, doesn't it?


This performance is from 2005, the final performance of Pink Floyd ever, and the first time the original (well non-Syd Barrett original) members played together in 25 years. I mention this because for all the fun I'm poking at this record, seeing this band reunite after so many years was a big deal to me, even though I was an adult. It was a great moment. Even though David Gilmour looks a little bit like Skeletor.

"The Show Must Go On"- You wouldn't know it from the liner notes (the liner notes don't even mention the band's drummer,Nick Mason, so I'd hardly call them comprehensive) but this song features background vocals from Toni Tennille, from the Captain & Tennille. Which might be the scariest thing about the whole record.



"In the Flesh"- A reprise of the album's opening track, this time without the question mark, and with added racial slurs. There's some business when you watch the film that Pink Floyd (the character, not the band) has turned in a fascist. Which I guess is cool. I mean, I'd guess I'd rather have a rock star pretend to be a fascist then pretend to be a socialist, like when John Lennon tells us to imagine no possessions when he's playing an ivory grand piano in his mansion.

"Run Like Hell"- At this point in the record/movie/Roger Water's life, things are so bleak I applaud all of us for keeping on.

"Is there anybody weak in the audience?" We're all weak, Roger.

"Waiting for the Worms"-There's actually an interesting point to be made with the central metaphor of this song, about how isolating ourselves from the world makes us vunerable to the decay of self-doubt. The problem is if you weren't isolated from the world before you listened to this record, you probably would be by the time you got to this song. Although I suppose it's better than another Captain and Tennille song, I suppose.


"The Trial"- I can't even imagine being a Pink Floyd fan during this time, having grown up with the band since the late 60s. Getting stoned and listening to Ummagumma or Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun getting to the end of this record and hearing them performing a Gilbert & Sullivan number about dueling toothed vaginas.
And giant balls.

Somewhere there is a cassette tape featuring the band I was in when I was 13 performing a cover of this song. This alone will prevent me from ever running for public office.

"Outside the Wall"-At this point in the show, the giant wall would be torn down, showering lightweight cardboard bricks on the audience, followed by this quiet melodica-driven song. On the tape I had, the sound quality was bad, I don't think I even heard this song at all the first few times I listened to the album. I was still thinking about the raping flowers, and giant toothed vaginas, and how rock music turned you into a nazi, and I just pulled the covers over my head.

LISTENING PARTY: Magic & Loss

The same day I purchased Mighty Like A Rose by Elvis Costello, I also picked up Lou Reed's Magic & Loss. God love the cut-out bin. This is Lou Reed's concept album about the deaths of the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus and an unnamed friend, both from cancer, both within a year of one another. This might be the hardest "Listening Party" for me to do because the subject matter of these songs is so deeply personal, so deeply heartfelt, and so deeply, deeply earnest. But then again, this is the haircut Lou was sporting at the time:

Somebody wants you to know this is a Getty image, apparently

"Dorita"- This is a serious album for serious people. Do you know how I know that? Because Lou starts it was an instrumental 'overture' or as he labels it "an invocation of the human spirit in music." Really, Lou? Because you know that wankcase who goes into Guitar Center just to play all the guitars with no intention of ever buying any of them? "Dorita" sounds a lot like his wanky guitar noodlings. The guys behind the counter at Guitar Center aren't impressed, and neither are we, Lou.


"What's Good"- Another reason I know this is meant to be a serious album for serious people is that each song has a subtitle. This one is called 'The Thesis.' I learned in ninth grade English class that you never tell your audience what your thesis is. But I never went to grad school, and I'm pretty sure Lou Reed did, and maybe that's what they tell you to do there. This is my favorite song on the album. The other day I mentioned a few quotes from Mighty Like A Rose that were contenders for my senior yearbook quote, and this song has one too: "Life's like sanskrit read to a pony; life's good, but not fair at all." It's probably the truest thing Lou Reed has ever written. Or at least tied with that bit in Walk on the Wild Side about that guy going down on other guys while dressed as a girl. Or all the songs about guys getting stabbed that he's written. But this is the most adult, thoughtful thing he's ever written, and he put it at the beginning of his thoughtful and adult album. It's all downhill from here.


"Power and the Glory Part I"- Reason number 3 why this is a serious album for serious adults is that it features songs broken up into parts. Like a classical piece of music. Or the Star Wars movies. Speaking of Star Wars, this song features the vocal stylings of jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott. I don't really know why he's here, other than Lou Reed thought he'd have Little Jimmy Scott sing on his record, and when you're making serious music for serious people you can totally just do whatever the hell you want. Also, if making pretentious music were some kind of video game, Lou Reed would've just gotten a dozen new lives for name-dropping 'Leda and the Swan' halfway through this song.

"Magician"- There's not a whole lot to say about this song, and I better save what little I do have to say because it's one of about six songs on this record that has practically identical music on it. I think you can get away with that when you're doing a concept album. For example, on Pink Floyd's 'The Final Cut' record, Roger Water sings the whole album on one note.


"Sword of Damocles"-So I was 15 when I heard this record for the first time and I bet Lou Reed thought that naming a song 'Sword of Damocles' would send a kid like me running to an encyclopedia (remember those?) to find out what he was referring to. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Burns made a reference--with visuals!!--to the Sword of Damocles, like, two years earlier. If the Simpsons had made me aware of the prevalence of using methamphetamine among cross-dressers, I don't think I would've needed Lou Reed at all. This song is probably the most tuneful on the record, and Lou Reed almost sounds like he's actually singing a few times.


"Goodby Mass"- Okay, so this is just Magician again, with different words. And a misspelled title. Who spells it 'Goodby'? I think one would pronounce that "gud-be" and maybe that's what Lou Reed wants us to do. The subtitle to this song is 'In A Chapel Bodily Termination.' Say what? Apparently when you're the legendary Lou Reed you don't need correct spelling or correct grammar. Oh my god this song did that thing where you totally thought it was over and then another verse started. It's probably not a surprise that a concept album about death would make me want to kill myself, but the surprise is how much it makes me want to kill myself.

"Cremation"- The subtitle to this one is 'Ashes to Ashes' which seems like maybe the typography guy switched the two of them up. This song is really pretty good. Lou probably should've just put out this song with 'What's Good' and 'Sword' and called it an EP. Or filled the B-side with feedback. I think I'll mention that Lou engaged the services of the great Rob Wasserman on bass for this album. Lou has usually had pretty good taste in bass players, which is good, because most Lou Reed songs only have two chords in them, so it's up to the bass players to make them sound different from each other.


"Dreamin'" Oh, Lou. No one will ever take you seriously if you start dropping g's off your words!

"No Chance"-This song is different than most of the other songs on this album. A few weeks later, I picked up Lou Reed's 'New York' album, and basically "No Chance" sounds like every song off of that album. So if you listen to song, you can basically skip 'New York'. And if you've ever heard 'Sweet Jane' and 'Perfect Day' you've basically heard every Lou Reed song ever written.

"Warrior King"- I've made it two and a half minutes into this song without having typed anything. I seem to remember liking this song a lot when I was 15. So I think I've spent the last two and a half minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with me when I was 15.

"Harry's Circumcision"- This is Lou Reed's song about a mohel.

"Gassed and Stoked"- This song's chorus is an operator telling you that this is no longer a working number, which I think was, in the early 90s, supposed to represent the finality of death: the person you are trying to call is dead, and that is why the number no longer works. But listening to it today, it just sounds like Lou's friend didn't pay his cell phone bill.

"Power and Glory Part II"- Do you know how sometimes you really like a movie, and then they make a sequel and it's terrible? Or how sometimes you really don't like a movie, and then they make a sequel anyways, and you can't believe anybody would want to see it, and then one night you flip past it on cable and it's unbelievably terrible? Guess in which way 'Power and Glory Part II' is terrible.

"Magic & Loss" aka 'The Summation.' This song is six minutes and thirty nine seconds long. I think, if you just listened to 'What's Good', 'Sword of Damocles' and 'Cremation' it would take you less time. So that might be my recommendation. Although I do like the last minute or so of this song, where I'm guessing somebody in the control booth signaled to Lou that maybe his concept album needed a big finish, so he dialed it up to '4'. Yes, this is a pretty low key album, and to be honest, I probably prefer the seven times he plays the song Magician with different lyrics to the other numbers where he tries unconvincingly to rock.
I read an interview with Lou about this record, where he said that it was supposed to be instructive, it was supposed to tell people how to deal with death. He hoped, in 1992, that other musicians would follow in his footsteps. He even made a suggestion: MC Hammer should do a concept album about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. If only Hammer had listened to ole Lou, we might have been spared 'Addams Family Groove.' After all, there are fates worse than death.

LISTENING PARTY: The Soul Cages

(Once a week, I will listen to an album that has meant a lot to me and comment on whatever strikes me while I am listening.)



I’m probably taking down what little cool rating I may have by saying this, but I like Sting. Everybody likes the Police stuff, and I bet a fair amount of you might cop to enjoying “Fields of Gold”, but who among you is brave enough to admit that you like Sting’s early jazz-lite solo records? And did you ever think you’d hear someone extolling the virtues of “The Soul Cages”, perhaps the most pretentious of albums from one of rock’s most singularly pretentious artists?

“Island of Souls”- Any album that starts out with an oboe solo has pure gold written all over it. This is probably the time to mention for the uninitiated that this is Sting’s concept album about the death of his father. So this opening song is a dirge-like affair about his father’s life working at the Newcastle shipyards. See that, Decemberist fans? Sting was doing sea-chanteys before you hipsters decided it would be cool! It takes two and a half minutes for any drums to appear on this track, which is evidence that Sting means business. This album was released fifteen years before Sting picked up the lute and recorded a mess of Elizabethean songs, but the melody of this song (despite its more modern arrangement) is reminiscent of older folk music, and it is clear that Sting is more concerned with creating mood and telling a story than providing an kind of hooks. Which is fine. Here comes that oboe again.



“All This Time”- The single off the record, and probably the only one you’ve ever heard. I’m not sure, but this might have beat “Losing My Religion” to the punch with the “hit single with mandolin as lead instrument” thing. The lyrics to this song are amazing. Seriously. I’ve actually had my creative writing classes analyze them, as I think they tell a pretty remarkable story and contain some great images, which were then almost satirized in the music video for the song. Most kids today have never heard this song, so after we look over the lyrics, I ask them to describe what kind of song they think it is, and they all uniformly agree that it must be a moribund ballad, and then are surprised when this crazy, up-tempo pop song asks them that “if Jesus exists, how come he never lived here.” I’ve been frightened to actually google the phrase “men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one” for fear that Sting didn’t actually write it. Although I will admit that even if it is a rip-off, it is still pretty damn pisser for Sting to include it as the closing lines of a pop song.

“Mad About You”- Nothing at all about Paul Reiser, unfortunately. I’m going to take a moment to set the scene for when I first fell in love with this record. When I was in eighth grade, the music channel VH1, which now shows primarily shows about mentally disturbed meth addicts in their quest for love, was primarily a channel showing the Rosie O’Donnell-hosted show Stand-Up Spotlight. But in the spring of 1993, VH1 executives opted to pre-empt this already five year old show from its round-the-clock airings to broadcast every music video A-Z by artist. In this pre-you tube era, this was the only way I was going to be able to see all the Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads videos that I’d only heard tale of. Squeeze through Talking Heads was broadcast while I was in school, so I devoted an entire 6 hour VHS tape to capture what amounted to 14 minutes of music videos that I actually wanted to watch. The video for “All This Time” was featured between Squeeze and Talking Heads, and to be more specific, right after Lisa Stan field’s “Been Around the World.” to be continued.

Jeremiah Blues (Part 1) I love songs that have titles followed by parentheses. Somewhere in the vast castle Sting lives in is a track called Jeremiah Blues (Part 2) and maybe, I live in hope, Jeremiah Blues (Part 3). Actually paying attention to this song is kind of unpleasant. It sounds a lot like all the non-single songs from his follow-up album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” and only works on the album as a brief reprieve from the slower more melancholy songs. Did I mention this is an album about Newcastle shipyards and the death of the singer’s father? This song doesn’t really belong here.


(I know it was 1991, but where other than the 18th century British Navy is this haircut acceptable?)

“Why Should I Cry for You?” - I think if I were stopped at a traffic light and my windows were down I’d be embarrassed and change the song right away, but it would be betraying the 13-year old RJT who still lives inside me to claim that I didn’t sincerely love this song. There is some great B3 organ played by either the late, great Kenny Kirkland or the great but still not late David Sancious, more famous for being the guy who quit the E-Street Band right after they cut “Born to Run.” I love the way that Sting changes up the chorus near the end, so that when you’re singing along (and you would be if you here were listening with me) you inevitably get mixed up. Again, I think this is an album that plays very well while you’re listening to it, but certain parts of it seem weird when listened to in isolation. Example: the longest insrumental fade-out in history.

“Saint Agnes and the Burning Nun”- No concept album would be complete without the instrumental song with the intriguing title. What is this song about? Who set this nun on fire? This sounds like it is an Elizabethan ballad. I imagine in the vinyl days when this record was released, this opened side two and served as some kind of interlude piece.


(I don't know what song from this record he could be playing that require that high of a jump. Either that or Sting gets really into funereally paced songs about shipping docks.)

“The Wild Wild Sea”- Getting back to my personal history with this album, while I let Sting’s band do the weird opening vamp to this song: having been intrigued and captivated by the video for “All This Time” I order this CD from BMG music club, which is the equivalent of having a craving for steak some night in July and telling your mother you think they should have it for Christmas dinner. You wait a long time, especially when you’re 13, for BMG to actually send you these CDs and so it was several months before I found myself in the mood to sit down and really listen to this album once it arrived. The mood? It was a rainy and dark summer morning, and I was sitting in the basement of my father’s house being age-appropriately miserable. This song follows the model of “Island of Souls” in that it’s kind of shapeless. It must be hard for a band to play a song like this, that doesn’t seem to follow any kind of pattern and just seems to be a musical bed for Sting to continue his story of a man aboard a ship who sees the ghost of his father. Someone (I’m going to guess Sting) thought it was a good idea to include sound effects to simulate a storm at sea. The band gets a chance to jam out a bit near the end, which you have to imagine they’ve been waiting for since they started playing this song.

“The Soul Cages”- I really really loved this song when I was 13. It’s a pretty rocking song in the context of everything else. The guitars have a certain crunch to them that would’ve appealed to me the summer of 93, when distortion pedal sales must’ve been at an all time high. This song also has the strongest melody since “All This Time” while continuing the lyrical theme of death and the sea. There’s one unfortunate bit in the song where Sting tries to sing “tortured human soul” but doesn’t have the beats to fit it in, and with his faux Jamaican accent he sometimes uses, it sounds like he says the word “Jew” instead of human, and I had to consult the lyric sheet back then to make sure that’s not what he sang.



“When the Angels Fall”- I’ve been having a lot of fun poking fun at some of the more ridiculous pretentious flourishes of this album, but it would be unfair of me to give anybody the impression that I don’t still love this album. I’m not sure that if I heard it for the first time when I was 30, instead of when I was 13, I would feel the same, but I still put this album on each summer, and I certainly appreciate the lyric writing above all else, plus the bravery/arrogance of being at the time among the biggest pop stars in the world, and making as difficult and obtuse an album as The Soul Cages is. This last track is in the vein of “Island of Souls” and “The Wild Wild Sea.” It’s relatively shapeless, and needlessly long. The melody is a little bit stronger than those two, and it does build up to an appropriate crescendo for an album like this, and the final part of this song, where the band and Sting alike seem to pick up in intensity are really powerful. As “When the Angels Falls” builds to a crescendo, Manu Katche hits the snare one last time and as it reverberations echo out, Sting says plaintively “Good night.” And the record ends. If only he could come tuck me in as well.

The album may be overly earnest overall, but it’s the kind of thing that really speaks to an overly-serious 13-year old kid, and while maybe most of my peers were finding Pearl Jam’s 10 providing them with the same level of heavy and serious music, I’m really glad that I had Sting’s opus to his father. My room in my father’s basement was dark and poorly lit, but had surround speakers, which allowed me to get completely immersed in a record in a way I don’t think I could now. Even if that record is basically built around three dirge-like pieces interspersed with three pretty great pop tunes, two utterly forgettable ones, and one instrumental with a name like an obscure Swedish film

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