Roger Waters is about to launch a tour where a 36-foot-high wall will rise up each night between him and his fans — and right now, you wouldn’t blame him for wishing the thing was a bit more portable. The former Pink Floyd leader has just ducked his still-gangly six-foot-three-inch frame into a town car for a ride to a midtown Manhattan restaurant, and it is immediately clear that the driver is way too excited to see him. Waters braces himself. “Been a fan all my life, man,” says the driver, a baseball-capped, middle-aged dude named Fred, with a broad New York accent. ” ‘Wish You Were Here’ — I was backpacking in Europe when I got turned on to it. I was like, ‘This is the best album evvuh!’ It must be an unbelievable feeling to know what an impact you made on my generation.”
“Normally, we don’t know until we get in your car,” Waters replies in his crisply British tones, buckling his seat belt. As usual, it’s hard to read his chilly blue-gray eyes — color-coordinated these days with his longish, silvery hair and professorial beard — but it seems he’s decided to be amused. It helps that Waters just shared an excellent bottle of Montrachet, in celebration of the end of a long workday: After driving into Manhattan this morning from his house in the Hamptons, he endured a biceps, triceps and abdominal core workout (“It nearly kills me, but I need to get a little stronger”), sang scales with the vocal coach who’s been helping him reclaim the high notes of his youth, met with a stylist to select stage clothes in various shades of black (rejecting one pair of leather boots as “very Bruce” and another as “too Pete Townshend”) and spent hours in a downtown production studio, making minute tweaks to lighting and digital animation.
He’s been working at this pace since January, determined to perfect the first real touring version of what he considers the defining work of his career, the 30-million-copy-selling The Wall — the 1979 tale of an alienated rock star named Pink whose biography bears a distinct resemblance to his own. Pink Floyd’s original live version — with its giant puppets, synchronized graphics and that wall, constructed brick by brick, then knocked down at the show’s climax — set a standard for every rock spectacle that followed, from Steel Wheels to Zoo TV. But it hit a mere four cities worldwide, with months passing between each block of shows. No footage was officially released from the performances, so they’ve become a dimly recalled legend — except for Gerald Scarfe’s surreal animation, which also appeared in 1982′s film version.
The shows lost money at every date — tickets were around $12 — and the band was falling apart. “They were getting to the point where they couldn’t stand the sight of each other,” says Mark Fisher, the architect who built both the 1980 and 2010 versions of the tour (and also worked on the “spaceship” stage for U2′s 360û Tour). “It was all too convenient that they got to declare that the whole thing was a turkey and way too expensive and walk away from it on those grounds.”
Lighting director Marc Brickman, who also worked on the new show, was brought in just before the beginning of the original performances. “It was just mind-blowing — I was speechless,” says Brickman. “It was mounting opera at a rock & roll show. In 1980, you couldn’t even dream of that show.” For Waters, the idea behind arena theatrics was simple: “You can’t ask people to go to the circus and just have fleas in the middle — you’ve got to have elephants and tigers.”
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