The Wall, part two: don't leave me now
One side down, The Wall sounds like a record conceived and recorded in isolation. Pink Floyd's earlier material benefited from being test-driven in front of many an audience before ever being committed to record. There are some areas where The Wall might have been given richer treatment if it'd been honed based on audience response.
But it's a testament to the power and reach of this band that they were able to create an album - a double album - varied and convincing enough to hold our attention based on instinct alone, like the Beatles, post-1966.
So let's flip the record over and listen to Side Two:
Enter the limpwristed fingerpicking songs. Hooray! Goodbye blue sky is beautiful Dave, playing in a fully-developed style we didn't hear on side one.
Q: how many different ways can this man persuasively play his instrument?
A: unknown.
Dave oohs out harmonies like some world-weary Californian dream. A field of pastoral guitar lowers our guard until we hit a chord so minor it'll crawl up inside your head and convince you to put your finger on the trigger. Twice.
As usual, Roger doesn't let the beauty stand overlong. He fucks everything up with Empty spaces, one of the record's stranger moments.
Roger's vocal strategy seems to be: despair first, melody second. Concentrate on the pain and the notes will somehow take care of themselves.
The lyrics drip with acid; a silly backwards "puzzle" adds to the utterly bizarre atmosphere.
Pink's regret at the end of side one about the wall being too high? Not so much anymore. He's now desperate to get back to building. He's still concerned about the wall's size, but now only because he's running out of building materials.
It's hard to know which sounds are made by Rick Wright and which by other synthesizer/organ players, but without them the record would sound more skeletal and threadbare.
Young lust has a frivolous chorus, and it rox. Who can't relate to Pink/Dave's libidinal plight?
As on the Final Cut, Dave ends up looking like The Shallow One, but he's so good who really cares? O the guitars!
Dave asks "Where are all the Good Times?" In a characteristically twisted response, Roger (because it must have been Roger, right?) gives us the nosy operator narrating the infidelitous phonecall. Nothing ends well.
Dave sings to us of pleasure; Roger makes of us witnesses to pain.
Bastard.
We are informed that our hero is the sort of man who has a favorite axe. Which he keeps in the bedroom. In a suitcase. What? Holy hell, get me the fuck out of here!
Some of Roger's bleakest lyrics: love turns grey. People become cold, grow bored of one another and lie about it. And this, we are told, leads to rage.
Several songs on The Wall are broken into two distantly-related halves and One of my turns is a good example.
It's the synthesizers, stupid.
Don't leave me now is another song with the dichotomous form AB, the first of which is psychotic, the second hypnotic. Guess who sings which.
Roger and Dave sing of running, which is a minor theme of the record, receiving it's fullest treatment on side four. There was running on Dark side of the moon also, in Breathe, Time, and the travel sequence.
Don't leave me now is long -- only Mother from side one has been longer. They take their time and it pays off. Pink Floyd are many bands in one, and most of them make bizarre musical/psychological landscapes sound natural.
More oohs. More TVs. More violence. More isolation.
Pink un-asks his earlier question ("Why are you running away?") by informing us that he no longer needs anybody.
He also claims he doesn't need drugs, which given later plot developments makes it hard to take him seriously. Who knows what to believe? I hope he's not lying to us, because I've had it just about up to here -- and I mean it! -- with his nonsense.
What we really learn from Another brick, part the third -- the most muscular entry in the Brick trilogy -- has less to do with Pink's developmental arc than with how Pink Floyd give each version of this song its own architectural variation.
If there were any justice in Roger's universe, Goodbye cruel world, a no frills suicide note, would end the album. The less sadistic among us will not play the second record. Poor Pink has suffered enough.
The rest of us will soldier on...
