12. Pink Floyd, The Wall (1979)

The week that Pink Floyd’s The Wall debuted on the Billboard Top 200, the band’s earlier album The Dark Side of the Moon was in its two hundred and eighty-ninth week on the same chart. The only album really approaching that level of formidable durability on the tally in the moment was Led Zeppelin IV, and that trailed the Pink Floyd classic by about a year. Although the two studio albums that followed The Dark Side of the Moon — Wish You Were Here, released in 1975, and Animals, released in 1977 — were significant hits by any reasonable measure, there was still a mild sense that those discs didn’t quite measure up to their iconic predecessor. Pink Floyd had decisively crossed over to rock god level, and they needed an album that truly reflected that. As fate would have it, that newfound status was weighing on the mind of the band’s frontman, Roger Waters.

Pink Floyd’s tour in support of Animals, dubbed “In the Flesh,” was a commercial bonanza and, for most of the band’s members, a prolonged trudge of personal misery. The band’s renown had swelled to the point where only stadiums could accommodate the crowds that wanted to come up and see them play live. The reported attendance for their show at Milwaukee County Stadium exceeded sixty thousand. Four nights later, more than ninety-five thousand packed into Chicago’s Soldier Field. Waters grew increasingly disenchanted as the tour went on, berating audiences and raining hostility on everyone around him, including his bandmates. At one point, keyboardist Richard Wright abruptly left the tour and threatened to quit the band altogether. Guitarist David Gilmour recounted feeling like the band had reached an evolutionary end point with nothing left to accomplish.

“Playing to very large audiences, some of whom were our old audience who’d come to see us play, but most of whom were only there for the beer, in big stadiums, and consequently it became rather an alienating experience doing the shows,” Waters said.

Thoroughly sick of one another after the tour’s last load out, the members of Pink Floyd scattered. Gilmour and Wright went off to record solo albums, and drummer Nick Mason produced an album by progressive rock guitarist Steve Hillage. In the absence of his regular collaborators, Waters started working on new songs. There were two different concepts playing tug of war in his head, and he developed material for them more or less simultaneously. When it was time to reconvene Pink Floyd, Waters presented both concepts to the other three, receiving tepid responses. Essentially forced to choose one of the ideas because disastrously managed finances created an urgent need to issue a new album, they bypassed the one about a midlife crisis sufferer and his adulterous road trip (which would late evolve into Water’s solo debut, The Pros & Cons of Hitch Hiking) and instead grudgingly voted for the autobiographical story of a rock star, embittered by fame, who’d spent a lifetime erecting emotional barriers. The working title was Bricks in the Wall.

“It was too depressing and boring in places, but I liked the basic idea,” Gilmour later said.

As Waters fleshed out his ideas further, he quickly determined that the album would have an enormous scope. Worried about the task of wrangling it all into place, especially with bandmates who were indifferent at best about the project, Waters felt bringing in an outside producer would be beneficial. If nothing else, that person could be a mediator when intra-band conflicts arose. It was the first time since Ummagumma, released in 1969, that a Pink Floyd album wouldn’t be self-produced. For the job, Waters selected Bob Ezrin, who had recently presided over Peter Gabriel’s acclaimed solo debut.

Ezrin did more than move sliders up and down. Tasked with making sense of Waters’s self-absorbed concept, Ezrin took it upon himself to give some shape to the storytelling. He took the partially formed songs that Waters had and essentially wrote a short film script around them. The script centered on a character named Pink, stringing the songs through in a manner that expanded their resonance. Waters’s original concept absolutely remained, but the gaze now strayed from his own navel.

“We went out of our way to take it away from being a completely autobiographical work,” Ezrin explained. “Roger was thirty-six at the time, and it was The Roger Waters Story. My sense, though, was that our audience probably wasn’t that interested in a thirty-six-year-old rocker that was complaining. But that they might be interested in a gestalt character, Pink, that was a composite of all the dissipated rockers we have known and loved. And that allowed us to get into some really crazy stuff.”

Crazy stuff does indeed abound on the resulting album, which was given the more succinct title The Wall. It really does come across as the concept album to end all concept albums. Stretched in length to a double album, The Wall plays like the War and Peace of rock operas. It has a relatively cogent narrative, much of it based on Waters’s personal history, and more layered sound effects than a Star Wars movie. In true novelistic fashion, there are recurring motifs throughout, the most obvious showing up as duplicative song titles, such as the massive-sounding “In the Flesh?” being answered three sides later by “In the Flesh.” The most prominent occurrence of the conceit is the trio of songs that hammers away at the central metaphor. “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)” is spectral and spooky as it briefly details the loss of a parent in war (“Daddy’s flown across the ocean/ Leaving just a memory death”), and “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3)” is steeped in exhausted glam rock as the recently betrayed central character entirely gives up on seeking affection from others (“I have seen the writing on the wall/ Don’t think I need anything at all”). Ezrin zeroed in on the middle song of the triptych, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” overruling Waters’s preference that it be lean and stark. Ezrin felt it had the makings of a real hit, so he added a disco beat and a intense-sounding children’s choir belting out some of the lyrics. Released as the album’s first single, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” became the second — and last — Pink Floyd song to cross into the Billboard Top 40. It spent four weeks on top of the chart.

Setting aside how well the component pieces of the story fit together, The Wall is made up of a strikingly strong set of songs. The length and sprawl of the album allows Pink Floyd to make all sorts of sharp stylistic turns. Sometimes those shifts are literally segued together, which is the case when the thrumming menace of “Empty Spaces” abruptly gives way to the Stonesy romp “Young Lust.” Arguably, no cut is more divergent from the band’s standard mode than “The Trial,” which is almost like a discard from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht operetta. “Mother” is fiercely raw despite being delivered on acoustic guitar, and “Run Like Hell,” a repurposed leftover from Gilmour’s solo album, essentially formulates the brand of slick hard rock that would dominate AOR stations in the decade to come. The album is appropriately at its gentlest on its closer, the achingly delicate “Outside the Wall.” For all this variety, the album also has ample moments that are quintessential Pink Floyd, notably the bracingly direct “Hey You” (“Hey you, out there on the road/ Always doing what you’re told/ Can you help me?”) and the rapturously fulsome “Comfortably Numb,” another Gilmour carryover.

Some takes from the making of The Wall suggest those fantastic Gilmour contributions weren’t embraced by Waters, who sometimes saw the album as a solo creation that he was allowing the rest of Pink Floyd to play on. Waters usually identified the making of Wish You Were Here as the beginning of the end of his personal and professional camaraderie with Gilmour, and he described their relationship as fraught when recording The Wall. Gilmour remembered it differently.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about the start of major hostilities between myself and Roger,” Gilmour maintained. “We had a highly productive working relationship that operated pretty well through The Wall. There were some major arguments, but they were on artistic disagreements. The intention behind The Wall was to make the best record we could.”

What’s indisputable is that there were a lot of tensions at play when the album was being made. As the recording process dragged on (in total, the band spent about a year on The Wall), Pink Floyd’s record label came to them with an offer. They’d get a more generous cut of sales of the album if they could complete The Wall in time for it to be released ahead of the 1979 Christmas season. Because the Pink Floyd coffers were low, that was an enticing prospect. Waters and Gilmour split up to different studios so they could work on individual parts simultaneously, Ezrin shuttling between the two spaces. In the midst of that, Waters demanded Wright return from a planned family holiday to complete work on the record. After Wright refused, Waters impetuously fired him. Most Pink Floyd fans didn’t realize one of the band’s founding members was off the roster, partially due to the musicians’ general aversion to discuss such matters with the press.

“We have always shunned publicity mainly because we hate that side of the business,” Wright said at the time. “We have really just concentrated on the music and let that speak for itself. It is an attitude we’ve had from the start. We want our lives to be private.”

Another reason it seemed Wright was still properly on the roster was that he was right there on the stage when Pink Floyd toured in support of the album. Rather than being a proper member of the band, Wright was hired on as a contracted musician, no different than other hired hands such as bassist Andy Bown and drummer Willie Wilson. The diminished status wound up working in Wright’s favor. He took in more money from the tour than the three official members of the band because their shares were depleted to subsidize the hefty investment required to mount the planned production.

In its stage performance, The Wall was a a multimedia extravaganza. (Waters had also warmed to the idea of a companion film version. Directed by Alan Parker, Pink Floyd – The Wall hit screens a couple years later, enjoying solid reviews and box office.) The band synched their performance with projected animations and special effects, including the nightly construction of a wall between the performers and the audience. That wall was made up four hundred and fifty cardboard bricks, and it stood thirty-three feet tall and two hundred and sixty feet wide in its finished form. Gilmour reportedly had a instructional sheet that was about six feet long taped to his amplifier to help him keep everyone on task and on time throughout the show. The nature of the show — and Waters’s firm preferences — precluded Pink Floyd from taking the tour into large arenas, where they might have had a shot at selling enough tickets to recoup their costs. Waters later estimated the tour lost the band more than six hundred thousand dollars.

It’s probably safe to conclude that the sales of the album eventually made up for the concert tour shortfall. The Wall was a blockbuster. It topped the Billboard album chart for fifteen weeks straight in early 1980 and moved more than a million units in the U.S. within the first two months of its release. By now, it’s sold more than eleven million copies. Its double album status translates that to twenty-three-times platinum status, behind only seven other albums in the U.S.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.