A Wall Over Troubled Waters, Part I

Pink Floyd • The Wall
1979

Part I: In Which I Encounter An Old Comrade, and Find Them Gazing Also - My History With The Wall and A Digression On Fascism as A Theme.

This album is the one that defined a generation. When I think of The Wall, before I can even get to the album and the music, I have to dig through all the other crap in my head that occupies space with it. High school in general. Jim drunk and bellowing it. Again with Jim, watching the film in his parents' TV room. The first CD purchase I'd ever made, as a birthday present for Bran. Learning how to play piano by making a tape of the song Nobody's Home, then painstakingly picking out each chord and note and rewinding over and over and over again to get it right.

And being a very early album for me in terms of my listening to rock music - up until age sixteen, I pretty much exclusively listened to orchestral movie soundtracks, of all things - my feel for it is much, much different than the music I listened to later. The Wall is an album I first - and last - heard before I really could consider myself a musician (for the sake of argument, let's say that I am one now, all right?) and certainly before I started to listen to music with any kind of sophistication. So my concept of the album is frozen in amber, a group of emotions and sensations that were experienced by me twenty years ago that never was opened and reexamined, since I put the album aside before my Freshman Year in college, and haven't heard it since.

Despite the fact that I listened to The Wall for only a short time - really, only my senior year of high school - anyone who has listened to the album knows that you can become very familiar with the piece with little effort. And if you're a socially awkward teenager when you first hear it, it sticks in you even deeper. That is, after all, the audience it's meant for, whether the band likes it or not.

So listening to it again was a strangely familiar experience, like running across someone you once spent a really intimate night with decades ago, to find that they're remained unchanged, but you now understand what they were trying to tell you over all that noise in the bar. On the other hand, now you're a little older, a little more sophisticated, and find you're more questioning of their argument.

Teenage boys, after all, buy into things with pathetic ease. It's tough to say who's more easy to sway with peer pressure, girls or boys, but it's clear that the messages that carry weight with the different genders are different. The Wall takes violence and despair, social decay and isolation (not to mention heaping spoonfuls of misogyny) and wraps it up it intense ear candy and sells it back to the listener. The more impressionable listeners - teenage boys are not known for their appreciation of subtext and irony - will take the message at face value.

It's amusing that Roger Waters had as one of his central theses on this album the idea that rock is akin to fascism and the singer a demagogue, because this is actually the album that probably made more sheepish converts for them than any other. Sure, they got a huge fan-base with Dark Side, which continued to grow through the '70's, but the albums that preceded The Wall were very universal in their lyric approach. Not The Wall. The Wall was your friend. The Wall understood you, how hard things were for you. When no-one else would listen, The Wall would hold you close and whisper in your ear.

Or spit in your face. The incident that drove Waters to write The Wall in the first place was the closing show of their 1977 tour - a stadium tour - where Waters grew so angry with a fan that he spat right in his face. That's when he felt that he'd gone down the wrong path, that the whole stadium spectacle thing was dehumanizing for audience and band alike. So he sat down and wrote a story - about a rock star named Pink whose extreme isolation causes him to re-imagine the arena concert as a Nuremberg Rally, with himself as Hitler.

And, boy: you think you can build an army with rock and roll alone? The real key to the heart and wallet of a teenage boy - as countless bands have successfully shown since - is to stroke their solipsism and tell them they're right, the world is a dark and horrible place. And there's your army of suicide bombers right there.

Next: More Themes, No Doubt.

D.

The Copper Globes

In light of this year's cancellation of the traditional Golden Globes broadcast extravaganza (replaced instead by a press conference) due to the writers' strike, I will tonight be doing away with all of the song and dance routines - as well as all of my usual witty repartee - as I announce this year's winners of the first annual "Thanks, Guy" Dave Kopperman awards for people who might have done something of note over the last year that has personally benefitted me.

However, in support of the Film & TV guild, the Rambler writers are on strike as well, along with our staff historian, librarian and archivist, so we're just going to go with anyone who has helped me within recent memory - which, given my very thin sense of gratitude added to my very poor retention skills, pretty much represents the last, oh... say, 72 hours or so?

Anyhow, without further ado:

Best Link: Christian Kriegeskotte
This Pittsburgh based composer and noted crank forwarded me a link to a widget that would allow me to embed audio into the Rambler in a much more attractive way - which, given how lame the traditional little MP3 thing looks to my eyes, is a real boon. Examples of its use can be seen at his own recently resuscitated blog, which I've also added to my list of links. His blog is the best written and supplemented on the list - and far better than the Rambler - but, then, he does live in Pittsburgh and will probably die before the rest of us.

Mitigating factors: dogmatic approach to anti-dogmatism in music; may believe in the literal philosopher's stone; name difficult to spell.


Best Advice from a Total Stranger: Cathy (?)
I did my first full video chat last night. I started with Karl, and then we got the idea to try to add a third just to see how it works, so Karl called up the former Apple Sales Rep to his school district, a woman named Cathy (thus giving her the unique position of being the first person I've met via webcam). Cathy is a woman of strongly held life philosophies, many of which she was willing to hold forth on authoritatively without much in the way of prompting. The general advice had much to do with a better way of managing your life and finances, mostly through intense planning and real estate (both on Earth and in virtual space), of which she herself is living proof. The specific advice was how to find the IP address of my networked printer, which I had been unable to get from Karl in the past. So she did right by me. All in all, a pretty fascinating conversation.

Mitigating factors: drinks Coors Light; allowed her cats to be killed by her dogs, which seems a little unsportsmanlike.


Best Advice from a Financial Advisor: Hayes Griffen
The curious thing about being told how best to manage my finances by Cathy - who had done so with her own quite spectacularly - was that earlier in the day, Yesenia and I had visited with our own financial advisor with Ameriprise. Hayes is our second advisor with the company, and this was our first real extended meeting with him. Two hours later, Yesenia and I left the office feeling really optimistic about the future, which really is how you want to feel about the future whenever you can bring yourself to consider it. I recommend it as a good way to start the year. Specifically, Hayes looked at both long term goals and gave exact, practical advice on how to deal with current debt, which is a good mix.

Mitigating factors: meeting was on Saturday morning during my 'sleeping in' time; money scares me.


Best Metaphorical Deal With the Devil, and by "Devil," I Mean Microsoft Windows, and by "Metaphorical," I Mean: Bubba
After successfully getting the IP address for the networked printer, the time came to deal with the reason I wanted it in the first place: to tell the Dell laptop running Windows XP - nicknamed "Pazuzu" - to actually acknowledge its existence and deign to print to it. This was a project I've dabbled with over the last few months, always with the same predictable non-results. Over the course of the evening, Bubba walked me through a few procedures.

An early success of note was putting the Dell into DOS mode and pinging the IP address, and finding that, yes, the computer could see the printer. Sadly, Windows could not, which is a little odd considering that WIndows is on the computer. Running the Printer Set-Up 'Wizard" - obviously more Saruman than Gandalf - only resulted in Windows disavowing that anything could be found at that IP address.

FInally, we went through a secondary routine deep in some other function that miraculously got the printer found and printed to. It was, however, achieved in such a roundabout manner that I commented to Bubba that it was as if you were driving a car with standard transmission, and couldn't switch gears using the clutch - but it turns out that there's a second secret clutch under the passenger seat, and they neglect to mention it in the manual.

Bubba also walked me through defragmenting the drive and cleaning up a bunch of needless start-up programs that weren't found in the "Add and Remove Programs" function, so the Dell now runs at something resembling a useful speed, which Yesenia will no doubt appreciate, seeing as how she's chained to it as the only computer that will work for her online Translation classes.

Mitigating factors: Still finds Windows superior to Mac, in spite of all empirical evidence to the contrary; Depeche Mode fan.


Thanks to the efforts of these kind people, I can now sleep better knowing that the Rambler will be more current in functionality, my future is secured and my Dell can print. And isn't that what we all hope for?

D.

Productivity

Did much today. Now am getting in bed to watch a much earned episode (or two) of TNG. Have a good Sunday.

Y'all.

D.

The Deadline Kid

New client meeting on Monday/
Got no time for Rambling/
Ooh, baby you got me hoping/
That I can find something that rhymes with rambling - yeah!

D.

I Digress

You know what fills me with an almost overwhelming sense of nostalgia?

Driving in winter, on a section of highway that has tube-blasted rockface on both sides - and when the rockface has those miniature frozen waterfalls.

Always makes me think of driving up to New England for Christmas when I was a child.

D.

One Man Garage Band

So, I got itchy to record that arrangement of Rick Wright's early Floyd song, See Saw, that I've been blathering on about doing for the last few days. And then it occurred to me that with the new Laptop, I could do what I always do on a new computer (since 2003 or so) - give it a spin with Garageband and see how it goes. So to kill two birds with one stone, I decided to do a scratch version of the song in Garageband, and see how it went.

Thing is, it came out a lot better than I thought it would, especially when you consider that all the recording was done just with the laptop's built-in mic, and, frankly, I'm not even sure where the mic is located on this thing...

...so, unless I get a further bug up my ass to try this again, this may be the final version. Perhaps. I think I may remix it slightly - it's late and I had to keep the speakers low. I suspect the rhythm guitars are a hair loud and jangly.

The other benefit is that I think I've proved my point, that it's a really, really lovely song sunk by lousy band performances, arrangement and production. Not that my arrangement and production are any better, of course, but... well, anyway, now you can focus on the melody and lyrics, which are both just great.



My approach was to keep the song generally in the same key and time signature, and to give it a more straightforward AABABCABBA form, to bring out what I se as the real sense of loss and longing in the song. The original song changes modes frequently, and I found I was able to keep the momentum going if I kept it in C, and didn't even have to alter the melody to do so, beyond singing one note a half-step down. The original song also took a suite-like approach, really getting heavily into instrumental segues that removed focus from the lyrics and melody.

Here's the original - you can see where I picked up some of the instrumental segues and reconfigured them to fit in the new feel.



The only element of the original I lost was the big 'bomp bomp bomp' before each bridge, which I couldn't really find a way to rephrase. Besides, I took it to be an arrangement trick in the original, simply a way to get from the Em at the end of the chorus to the Eb of the bridge - and I realized if I just left off the Em, I could get to the Eb without it sounding too odd. But you tell me.

Lyrically, you'll note that I rephrased one line, which had originally been stretched to fit the change in signature from 6/8 to 4/8. I just left it in 6/8 and dropped a couple of syllables. Here's the whole lyric, with my changes indicated in bold.

Marigolds are very much in love, but he doesn't mind
Picking up his sister, he makes his way (they go) to the see-saw land
All the way she smiles
She goes up while he goes down, down (I excised the first chorus)

Sits on a stick in the river
Laughter in his sleep
Sister's throwing stones, hoping for a hit
He doesn't know so then
She goes up while he goes down, down

Another time, another day
A brother's way to leave
Another time, another day

She'll be selling plastic flowers
On a Sunday afternoon
Picking up weeds, she hasn't got the time to care
All can see he's not there
She grows up for another man, and he's down

Another time, another day
A brother's way to leave
Another time, another day

D.

Mixin' Mortar

I've finally thrown myself into the deep end of the pool and listened to The Wall, today. First disc in the tub, and the second on the way to Port Chester for P.C.M.A. practice. As I mentioned to Karl - talking with him to try to arrange my thoughts on it - I surprised no-one more than myself by actually finding that I liked it quite a bit. Still, I think I need a couple of days to marinate (or fester) in it before I can write anything sensible.

With the review of The Wall, I'll have officially hit the halfway point!

Albums down:
1) Obscured by Clouds
2) A Momentary Lapse of Reason
3) Animals
4) More
5) Dark Side of the Moon
6) A Saucerful of Secrets

On deck: The Wall

Still to come (although not likely the order in which they'll be reviewed):
1) Piper at the Gates of Dawn
2) Ummagumma
3) Atom Heart Mother
4) Meddle
5) Wish You Were Here
6) The Final Cut
7) The Division Bell

Most of which I count among my top 100 favorite albums, and one of which - Meddle - has long been my favorite album, not just coincidentally because it has my favorite song. Ever.

Since I had no real plan when I set out other than to revisit these albums with a critical ear, I'm pleased to note that I'm capable of writing positive reviews at length. It's a sad truth that as a critic, I've always found it easier to praise things through an honest appraisal of their flaws than to go on at length about positive qualities, even for those works I love unreservedly.

And the Floyd catalog is more than just a bunch of albums that I own - in many ways, these albums shaped my aesthetic sense, particularly with instrumental approach and the weighted image approach to lyric writing. On a deeper level, the story of the band and the internal fighting serve as an object lesson for me. So the reviews, both positive and negative, are in some feedback-looped way a review of myself. Even moreso than your average article of criticism by any critic you could name, these Rambler Floyd reviews should tell you a lot about me by the time we're all done.

BTW: As mentioned in the second part of my Saucerful review I've been futzing around with an arrangement of that album's See Saw. And can I say: what a lovely song. Once you strip away the half-assed playing and the really overripe production, you find a lyric that stands up with any of the best in the Floyd catalog, along with a really melancholy harmonic and melodic set. I'm definitely going to get this one down on 'tape,' at some point.

D.