My first encounter with Pink Floyd was when my friend lent me his โThe Wallโ cassette when I was 17. I already had read about PFโs legendary โThe Wallโ tour where they had a wall built and torn down in front of the audience. So I was curious. I went home, inserted the cassette (yes, there used to be those things) preparing to listen to some fine music.
I still distinctly remember 6 minutes into my first listening that the music was something special. Gilmourโs wailing guitar was acting as the backdrop for the trauma that the young Pink, the central character, was facing. The sound effects were adding a bit of a haunting ambiance, yet the album was getting stronger by the minute.
As I reached Another Brick in the Wall Part 1, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, ABITW Part 2 and Mother, I was wondering if music could sound so exceptional. As I was listening through Empty Spaces to Goodbye Cruel World on Side 1, I was blown away. Yet, on Side 2, further gems including Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell awaited me. Listening to this album for the first time was a surreal experience. Thinking about it still gives me goosebumps. Apart from Waiting for the Worms and The Trial, that I never came around to like, this album was perfection.
I still havenโt seen anything so rich in imagination, put together inside such a beautiful music. This was the life of Pink, a character loosely modeled based on Roger Waters own losses. Are you kidding me? A full double album narrating a troubled life?
Many years later, I heard that the record company executives didnโt find the album that interesting in their first preview. For any person remotely connected to music, and finding this album average, should be fired on the spot. I still do not understand why this album is not the best of all time (no offense to the Beatles, whom I dearly love, but none of their albums come close to the imagination humming through the Wall) and ranks like 80 something on all-time best albums list.
Seriously, you are telling me there are 80 albums better than the Wall?
The Wall is one of the best albums. It is probably the best album of all time. It is Roger Watersโ towering achievement, with a strong input from David Gilmour on many of its best songs like Another Brick in the Wall, Empty Spaces, Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell. Too bad PF broke apart soon after the release of the Wall. They surely would have produced some further masterpieces had they stayed together. They were still in their 30s and were probably hitting their creative primes. Waters did come back with an excellent Amused to Death, but his music was never the same without Gilmour who went on to make excellent Momentary Lapse of Reason and Division Bell. But the second incarnation of PF, after the first with Syd Barrett, was coming to a quick close. Well, if it was ending, The Wall was as good as anything for the final curtain, though the band hung around to make The Final Cut that I never liked that much.
Anyways, The Wall is an achievement like nothing else. The goosebumps are still here, 34 years after I first heard it.