Pink Floyd- The Wall pt1- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason
Upon the album’s release in late 1979, one of the more ironic trivia “bricks” in the original limited staging of The Wall by Pink Floyd is that, unbeknownst to hardly anyone then outside the band’s tight inner circle, the internal power struggle, dissatisfaction with the contributions of two members, and the thinly-veiled attitude of a third had finally resulted in original Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright being forced out. Ultimately, Wright was hired to play on The Wall tour as a sideman, but The Wall concept creator Roger Waters insisted that Rick’s severance include a clause forbidding Wright from ever officially rejoining Pink Floyd again, a barely submerged shoal of contention that would emerge far into the “endless river” of Pink Floyd’s future. The original performances of The Wall were so elaborate, so expensive, tickets so limited (Roger Waters refused to do it in stadiums originally), and the dates so few (about thirty) that Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason all lost money touring it, whereas as a salaried employee with expenses paid by Pink Floyd, Rick Wright, was the only one who actually made money!
“Time has a way of making you behave,” David Gilmour reminded me when recounting performing as a guest with Roger Waters in 2011 at London’s O2 Arena, but it could just as easily have been said by the surviving Pink Floyd alumni Nick Mason or even Waters himself, all of whom rejoined me for the first of our two-part peek behind The Wall. For instance, Roger Waters admitted to me that, in 1980, Pink Floyd had been guaranteed one million dollars per night to perform The Wall on a stadium tour. “And I refused to do it outdoors,” Waters tells me in this classic rock interview. “But how can you do a show that’s about the alienation you feel about doing stadium shows, in a stadium?”
Apparently Waters reconciled that personal dilemma, as evidenced by his multi-year globetrotting tour recently. This is part one.- Redbeard
