Has there ever been a rock 'n' roll reunion more surprising, more welcome, or more eagerly anticipated than the return of Pink Floyd at Live 8 earlier this month? And was it not a triumph? Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright set aside their decrepit squabbles and turned in the greatest concert set of the century (brash words, yes, but what the hell). Never in my lifetime did I expect to see the understood restraining order so wickedly violated, with Waters and Gilmour, forever at stubborn stalemates (and perhaps still), summoning the magic they shared a hundred years ago, when we were all so much younger and took bands like Pink Floyd for granted, bands that could effortlessly command a generation's rapt attention.
It was better than I could've ever expected. It was like there'd been no distance between performances, no weathered chasm of acrimony. They came out with "Breathe," Dave in fine voice, followed by Roger's trademark bass lope through "Money," featuring an appearance from fellow old-schooler Dick Parry on sax. Dick Parry! The band paid tribute to Syd Barrett with "Wish You Were Here," then wrapped with a "Comfortably Numb" so goddamned transcendent that I hope and pray those on-scene MTV jabberjaws were executed, their ashes mocked and defiled, for interrupting Gilmour's guitar solo moments before the splendor of those wracking, raging withdrawals of untethered squall. I quickly called my buddy Jeff. He wasn't home, so I blubbered into his voicemail. "They've got to tour, man," I yelped between swallows of anguished sobs. "They've got to." And judging from those lucky awestruck souls gathered in London-and the subsequent 1,000-percent leap in sales of the Floyd's Echoes best-of-I wasn't alone in that sentiment.
Well, that was a lot of florid dross, eh? But when you're a guy, ardent Floydism is as natural as having thumbs. It's an important rite of passage. Mine came in 1987, the autumn of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason-a dubious introduction, but an introduction nonetheless. It was the perfect backdrop for a season of plummeting leaves, darkening skies, and lawns decaying to a fine, barren gold. The reconstituted Pink Floyd had returned after a four-year drought that began with the all-but-in-name-only Roger Waters solo project, The Final Cut (Gilmour and Mason were used sparingly, having become surrogate members of their own band, and Rick Wright was in exile), which Waters supposed would be the Death Wail, since he felt the leftovers certainly couldn't survive on their own wits, right? But here were the Floyd again, Waters-less, with Gilmour and Mason smirking from an inner-sleeve photograph. (Wright, although back in the lineup, was absent.)
The first single, "Learning To Fly," prompted that initial separation from my babysitting money. The song was what my teenaged self fancies as literate rock, in a class with Sting's ...Nothing Like The Sun or 10,000 Maniacs' In My Tribe. It was the stuff of teatime poetry, a heroic guitar hook lacquered over relaxation-tape metaphors and lifted by a female chorus doubling as a "circling sky" and eternal hope of the "earth-bound misfit." The rest of Reason didn't disappoint: The feminine ahhh-blanket returned, at multiplied strength, to backend the Side One closer, "On The Turning Away," which found David Gilmour slackening his tie for some (slightly subdued) six-string nastiness that I struggled to imitate through Christmas. It was part of my third official rock 'n' roll fantasy: Somehow I have the foresight to pen "Turning" myself, debut it at a class assembly, make mouths suck air when the choir blooms, then, when I bust out that note-perfect replication of Gilmour's solo, I watch quietly as the bleachers buckle under the collective dampened weight of my peers. Reason also boasted a couple of hoity-toity instrumentals, including the wintery "Terminal Frost"; the epic "The Dogs Of War"; "One Slip," with the album title slipped into the chorus; and the two-part (fancy!) "New Machine" and its wizened bleats I somehow identified with as a 15-year-old ("I have always been here/I have always looked out from behind these eyes.").
Although Reason was my first consciously aural introduction to the Floyd, I was certainly aware of their existence. After all, 1982 was the year of The Wall as a cinematic tour de force. In preparation, record stores plastered their corners with white linear brick designs, and the 1979 double-LP was resurrected for prominent display. Gerald Scarfe's hallucinogenic beasts panted from above as you thumbed through the album leaves for some J. Geils Band. Siskel and Ebert dished on the movie for Sneak Previews, though I can't recall how either of them felt about it. What I do remember was the clip they showed: zombie school kids riding a conveyor belt into a meat grinder. Being ten years old, I didn't get the social commentary-I quite literally thought The Wall was some demented horror sludge in the spirit of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker and Happy Birthday To Me, centered on a psychopath turning singing children into hamburger patties. Oh, and a wall was involved.
With Lapse a distant memory by January 1988, I decided it was time for The Wall. Rather than rent the movie and buy the album, I killed two birds with one stone by renting the movie, then recording its soundtrack through the house stereo. Every night I slept with Roger Waters cooing into my brain a strange lullaby, "It was just before dawn/one miserable morning in black '44." I'd force my friend John to play the cassettes every morning on the way to school, much to the delight of our carpool buddy David, who'd rock back and forth in the passenger seat and seethe, "I've got a little black book/I got my poems in/Got a bag, toothbrush, and a comb." At night I'd mime-growl in my bedroom before an adoring nonexistent din, my nonexistent guitar skills on full, amplified display: "I am just the new boy/stranger in this town." Later I'd rip into the infernal racket of "Comfortably Numb" and assure that faceless collective, "There is no pain/you are receiving." My mom would endure these tapes on long car trips, turning crimson at every mention of mother as oppressor ("Mama's gonna make sure all your nightmares come true/Mama's gonna put all her fears into you") and squawk, at the apex of her disapproval, "Cory, this is sick." Which made me dig it even more.
The Wall was the perfect teenaged album, equal parts kicks, destruction, and heightened drama. At 15 I felt every freed mouthful of bile, every chronicle of fumbled romance, was all about me. It explained why I felt so weird and disconnected, so fucked-up beyond repair. I was so wrapped up in stretching interpretations that it took me years to figure out that The Wall's storyline is pretty simple: Pampered rock star bitching, bitching, bitching. It had nothing to do with a teenaged pan-scrubber at a Mexican restaurant agonizing over why Lisa won't go with him to see Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (though Queen's "Spread Your Wings," that's another story).
With the Floyd beast stirred, I needed more. The Wall was shoved aside for the less assuming Relics, a $3.99 Nice Price special documenting the band's psychedelic roots. It featured what I still believe to be the finest Gilmour showcase, "Biding My Time," where he suddenly interrupts a Dixieland interlude with some firecracker rock/blues. After Relics came, naturally, A Nice Pair, a fusion of the band's first two records, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets, detailing the rise and fall of one Syd Barrett. Then came Dark Side Of The Moon, the monolith of the oeuvre, on vinyl loan from David. It was like an initiation into the greatest club ever, with its own language and shorthand. David and I would each champion our favorites: he dug "The Great Gig In The Sky," insisting that the melody was so gorgeous that lyrics would be intrusive. I was heavy into the finale, "Eclipse," the musical equivalent of floating gently from your house and into clouds and space, your home planet becoming an innocent iris in a distant fadeout. That summer I dabbled in Atom Heart Mother and Meddle, relishing in the fact that the latter's entire second side was taken up by one track. By early 1989, the first anniversary of my young lust, I was grooving to Obscured By Clouds, watching the stereo equalizer readouts waltz to "Wots...Uh, The Deal." Wish You Were Here was the official soundtrack to my senior year, the wistful title track and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" providing grist for memories as I collected my diploma and regarded my classmates as a group one last time: "Remember when you were young? You shone like the sun," with a dollop of Dark Side's "Time" lobbed in for good measure, perhaps as a warning for a future I never dreamed would come: "And then one day you'll find/ten years have got behind you/No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun."
Well, those ten years did indeed pass, followed quickly by another five. In that time the reconstituted Floyd lasted another disc, The Division Bell, a final effort punctuated by the frustrated Gilmour asking, "Should I sing until I can't sing anymore?" Roger Waters released his greatest solo album, Amused To Death, which remains to this day the perfect time capsule for the early 1990s ("Watching TV," "The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range," "What God Wants," "Perfect Sense"). I've changed jobs a couple of times, harvested a crop of graying locks, and moved out of state to Southern California, where, as Waters would put it, "the kids on Melrose strut their stuff/It's absolute zero cold enough." Sometimes I forget about the 15-year-old kid in Albany, Oregon, that soul in tension learning to fly (condition grounded, but determined to try). But on the afternoon of Saturday, July 2, his eyes were mine, and they were glued to the television. We were both on our feet, our hearts in our throats. The sight was unbelievable, the music powerful as ever. Roger. Dave. Nick. Rick. Together. As it once was. As it should always be. Welcome to the machine? Perish the fucking thought.
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