Same Words, Different ‘Wall’

Roger Waters at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.
By JON PARELES
NYT

Roger Waters exorcised personal, and just partly fictionalized, traumas when he wrote “The Wall,” the rock opera his band, Pink Floyd, released in 1979. Now, 30 years after the group first toured with “The Wall,” Mr. Waters is leading his own band, building and (spoiler alert) knocking down a wall again onstage.

The music (some written by Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour) has barely changed, give or take a few more guitar solos onstage. But with three decades of added perspective Mr. Waters has moved “The Wall” away from personal confession and toward its other theme: an indictment of power and authority misused.

“The Wall” tells the story of a rock star, Mr. Pink Floyd. It touches on the death of his father (in World War II), vicious schoolmasters, a clinging mother, infidelity, divorce, rock-star excesses and the hollowness, paranoia and demagoguery of fame. Fears and drugs combine to wall him away from the world, until, after a surreal trial, the wall crumbles to both expose him and restore his humanity.

“I was a miserable young man all those years ago,” Mr. Waters told the audience on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. “I’m happier now,” he added, to moderate applause.

(More here.)