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alibi_shopThe Wall, stage performance by Music for the Apocalypse and guests - seen on 11/16/19 at The Chapel, San Francisco
The Wall, Pink Floyd (1979)
For me and a lot of people born within about 10 years of me, The Wall was an important piece of culture in ways that weren't necessarily about our taste in music—a fact that tended to annoy older Floyd fans, who weren't shy about reminding us that the earlier albums were cooler. It wasn't exactly due to the story; despite not exactly having a plot in the sense that "rock opera" might imply, it does paint a somewhat specific picture of a guy who is born in the 1940s, grows up fatherless due to World War Two, is emotionally stifled by his mother and verbally abused in an archetypal English boarding school, becomes a massively famous rock star resulting in rock-star ennui, loses his marriage due to mutual infidelity, has a dramatic breakdown in a hotel room while on tour, is propped up with drugs by his manager, and gets so freaked out by the adoration of his fans that he imagines himself leading them on a fascist rampage... and I for one couldn't honestly identify with any of that. But the emotional arc of it—a creeping feeling that you've been going wrong step by step for your whole life and are at risk of never being able to relate to people in any healthy way, for reasons that are partly individual and partly a symptom of the world at large—unfortunately was very relatable. The music definitely helped: it's all over the place, from quiet loveliness to grating discomfort to plain old pop energy, and Roger Waters is a pretty expressive singer who clearly had strong feelings about this material even if he wasn't exactly on the same page as the rest of the band. Once you know how much of a mess the production of this thing was, it's easy to see the messiness of the end result as the kind of partial failure that can happen in any group creative effort—but for a young and confused listener, I think the way it fails to quite fit together actually makes it more compelling: that is, I could tell that whatever this was, it clearly wasn't the way albums are supposed to be (even weird prog-rock albums), it didn't even have the kind of consistent focused unpleasantness that other kinds of angry-young-man music had, and that was part of the feeling I was connecting with.(*)
I was a little apprehensive last week about the prospect of seeing a new "tribute to The Wall" performance with a cover band and some kind of new topical stage show, described like so: "the year is 2025 ... the precipice of Apocalypse ... themes of fascism, war, and the police state; environmental and climate change; immigration and refugee rights; reproductive rights and body autonomy; and technology, depression, and isolation." Did I still like this album in ways that transcended my teenage fucked-upness? Could a cover-band performance of incredibly familiar material convey more than nostalgia? Was a group I knew nothing about capable of addressing such things on stage in a way that wouldn't just drive me up the Wall? The answers are yes, yes, and... maybe?
(* I think another "off" thing about the album that was appealing to me and other American kids was that it was obviously very British, so you knew some of the references were going over your head, which was cool. There's a bit where the evil version of Pink starts calling for various minorities to be rounded up, and then goes on to single out someone for smoking a joint [at a rock concert, in 1979], and then someone "with spots." For many years I thought that was based on the kind of weak joke where someone who insists he's not prejudiced will say something like "I don't care if they're purple or have polka dots." Of course, UK listeners would know he's actually proposing to shoot young people for having acne.)
Here's the easy part: Music for the Apocalypse, whatever else they may be up to the rest of the time (some of the same people were responsible for the Bowie project Church of the Sacred Silversexual), is easily the best cover band I've ever seen. They played pretty close to the familiar sound of the album, but they did it very very well and brought out the energy of these songs to a degree that I'm not even sure the album does for me (maybe just due to being there in person—I never saw Floyd live—and maybe because of the aforementioned chaos and strife when it was recorded). They had the audience in the palm of their hand from the start, and I would've had a hard time making it through the stage show at times if not for the band sounding awesome all of the time. Guest singers Kat Robichaud and Whitney Moses were mostly relegated to being really good backup, but everyone got some good turns and Whitney (of Midtown Social, also a friend) particularly killed me with the mother verses in "Mother", a cynical tearjerker of a song that I'm a total sucker for. I would absolutely go see whatever these people do next.
The stage show is the tough part. In theory I'm all for their approach: mixing drag and political theater, letting it be abstract at some times and topical at others, and definitely not trying to re-enact the movie. It had a good cast—I don't know any of them and am having trouble sorting out who some of them were because I can't find photos, so I'll just say there was some good drag, mostly toward the monster end of the spectrum, and some good physical performance, and everyone was a distinctive presence. There was some interesting use of photo montage. There was a puppet that must've taken some time to make. But it was—to put it mildly—very unevenly conceived and directed, and either it was also very under-rehearsed, or there were just a lot of parts when they weren't sure how to fill the time and left the actors doing a lot of vague stage business. The latter tended to be the parts where it also got painfully literal-minded; it's not that it was too topical, of course it isn't possible or desirable to do something called The Wall in 2019 without bringing up certain issues... but I'm talking about for instance having a generic young protester character appear with a sign saying "RESIST", so the audience cheers, and then some fascist cops (one of whom also happens to be the best dancer) are arresting her and beating her up in slow motion, so the audience boos—except then the audience also cheers because the band just finished a good song (a possibly unintentional mixed-signals effect that happened a few times)—and then the cops and the prisoner just kind of stay there until they're eventually shuffled offstage. Or, a masked drag character who is sort of an embodiment of consumerism and the fashion aspect of The System starts ripping apart her ensemble, and when she takes off the mask, there's a gruesome raw-meat face effect... and then nothing happens, the character is just kind of hanging out. At the point where the album takes a sharp turn into literal references to modern fascism ("In the Flesh"/"Run Like Hell"), the stage imagery became oddly muted and vague: we got the same brownshirt dude and big flag that they had brought out early in the show, but otherwise they mostly just let the songs do the work there. (In what was either an uncharacteristic lack of attention to the sound mix or an uncharacteristic shying away from unpleasant material, they kind of buried the lines from "In the Flesh" that have deliberately shocking slurs in them; anyone who didn't already know the album and listened to it after the show was in for a surprise. But "Run Like Hell" can't help but be really effective and unsettling—its mix of exhilaration and terror is right there in the structure of the music.) As with most bad political theater, I didn't get much sense of someone watching this as it was being created and really thinking about how it would play and feel for an audience, as opposed to just "the idea behind this is cool and righteous, so it'll come across." But it might also be that it just needed more time to find its shape.
The best stuff, for me, was more dreamlike and allusive. There's a character (I'm not sure I could call any of them characters, I don't think this was an attempt to tell a cohesive story about specific allegorical people, but there were at least vaguely allegorical people with specific looks) whose connection to the arc of the album wasn't very clear—sometimes they seemed to be our main guy the fucked-up rock star in his later years, other times they were clearly in charge of The System that our guy grew up with—but their performance was always physically impressive, and their look (kind of a short bald leather-bear with some ominous costume elements but a kind of stumbling vulnerability, and an impassive fishnet face) used garish drag in a way that worked a lot better for me than some of the other caricature styles. They had a dance/mime solo to "Nobody Home", involving climbing and balancing precariously on a shelf unit in the middle of the audience, that temporarily convinced me that this wasn't a song about rock-star ennui at all, that it was really about this odd monster who was one of the secret rulers of the world but had gotten deeply lost—an image that made the album's final line about "some mad bugger's wall", which sort of conveys both pity for and frustration with the main character, feel like it really managed to be about both a lost individual and a lost society. At another point, the same character was lecturing/seducing our guy's mother from inside a cardboard TV, and it became apparent that part of their odd headgear was sort of a bouquet of black rubber gloves, one of which the mother gratefully plucked; nothing more was made of that image, but it was a lovely creepy surprise. At times like those, I was fully on board with this show's somewhat inchoate vision and ambition, and glad that the audience also seemed to be rolling with it pretty well. Maybe that's just because I tend to like dark cryptic things and unusual uses of props, but I really do think that that stuff was also just much better done than the rest.
An aspect of the album that I don't think they quite knew what to do with—or I should say, I'm sure they had it in mind and were trying to push against it with the drag and genderqueer elements, but ultimately it kind of sat there undigested—is that the alienation on display is very strongly from the perspective of an angry straight dude. His mother did him wrong, his wife did him wrong, a groupie is the last straw before his breakdown, when he imagines himself on trial the women are all more or less united against him... and (a detail that I somehow never noticed the oddity of until now, even though it's a great line) the brownshirt army in his dream, while it's out to get all kinds of people, is particularly determined to stop boys from fooling around with girls in the back seats of cars. That all rings true for the character that Waters and Ezrin wrote, but when you're determined to frame his mutual antagonism with the world as having a lot of deep universal meaning, it's pretty jarring to snap back to that very personal bitterness near the end in "The Trial" (the one track that I never liked, and still don't). I'm not sure what a more successful way of reimagining that material would be if you're set on still using the whole text, but I think it would involve at least letting us see that character, or someone like him, a little more clearly at some point; the way they went with the show in general, no such person really exists after the childhood scenes.
There are a lot of good things in both the album and the show I saw, but I ended up feeling like the single best part of both was the title. If you have to pick a single metaphor and try to cram into that metaphor a bunch of ideas about childhood trauma, adult alienation, depression, and toxic mass politics, "wall" is a good choice: you can spend all your time building it, deny people with it, get stuck behind it, and put your victims up against it. It's super obvious but it works, and that was true not only in the album but unfortunately also in 21st century America; I don't think our current leaders would've been nearly as successful in channeling fear and hate into electoral support if they'd kept the same basic message of kicking immigrants to the curb and blocking all social progress, without also having that simple image of one big object that stands for all of those things. The relationship between individual psychological dead-ends and mass violence is fertile ground for clinicians (I haven't read Lifton or Reich for a long time but I think they were clearly on to something), and I think we need more art about it too.
The Wall, Pink Floyd (1979)
For me and a lot of people born within about 10 years of me, The Wall was an important piece of culture in ways that weren't necessarily about our taste in music—a fact that tended to annoy older Floyd fans, who weren't shy about reminding us that the earlier albums were cooler. It wasn't exactly due to the story; despite not exactly having a plot in the sense that "rock opera" might imply, it does paint a somewhat specific picture of a guy who is born in the 1940s, grows up fatherless due to World War Two, is emotionally stifled by his mother and verbally abused in an archetypal English boarding school, becomes a massively famous rock star resulting in rock-star ennui, loses his marriage due to mutual infidelity, has a dramatic breakdown in a hotel room while on tour, is propped up with drugs by his manager, and gets so freaked out by the adoration of his fans that he imagines himself leading them on a fascist rampage... and I for one couldn't honestly identify with any of that. But the emotional arc of it—a creeping feeling that you've been going wrong step by step for your whole life and are at risk of never being able to relate to people in any healthy way, for reasons that are partly individual and partly a symptom of the world at large—unfortunately was very relatable. The music definitely helped: it's all over the place, from quiet loveliness to grating discomfort to plain old pop energy, and Roger Waters is a pretty expressive singer who clearly had strong feelings about this material even if he wasn't exactly on the same page as the rest of the band. Once you know how much of a mess the production of this thing was, it's easy to see the messiness of the end result as the kind of partial failure that can happen in any group creative effort—but for a young and confused listener, I think the way it fails to quite fit together actually makes it more compelling: that is, I could tell that whatever this was, it clearly wasn't the way albums are supposed to be (even weird prog-rock albums), it didn't even have the kind of consistent focused unpleasantness that other kinds of angry-young-man music had, and that was part of the feeling I was connecting with.(*)
I was a little apprehensive last week about the prospect of seeing a new "tribute to The Wall" performance with a cover band and some kind of new topical stage show, described like so: "the year is 2025 ... the precipice of Apocalypse ... themes of fascism, war, and the police state; environmental and climate change; immigration and refugee rights; reproductive rights and body autonomy; and technology, depression, and isolation." Did I still like this album in ways that transcended my teenage fucked-upness? Could a cover-band performance of incredibly familiar material convey more than nostalgia? Was a group I knew nothing about capable of addressing such things on stage in a way that wouldn't just drive me up the Wall? The answers are yes, yes, and... maybe?
(* I think another "off" thing about the album that was appealing to me and other American kids was that it was obviously very British, so you knew some of the references were going over your head, which was cool. There's a bit where the evil version of Pink starts calling for various minorities to be rounded up, and then goes on to single out someone for smoking a joint [at a rock concert, in 1979], and then someone "with spots." For many years I thought that was based on the kind of weak joke where someone who insists he's not prejudiced will say something like "I don't care if they're purple or have polka dots." Of course, UK listeners would know he's actually proposing to shoot young people for having acne.)
Here's the easy part: Music for the Apocalypse, whatever else they may be up to the rest of the time (some of the same people were responsible for the Bowie project Church of the Sacred Silversexual), is easily the best cover band I've ever seen. They played pretty close to the familiar sound of the album, but they did it very very well and brought out the energy of these songs to a degree that I'm not even sure the album does for me (maybe just due to being there in person—I never saw Floyd live—and maybe because of the aforementioned chaos and strife when it was recorded). They had the audience in the palm of their hand from the start, and I would've had a hard time making it through the stage show at times if not for the band sounding awesome all of the time. Guest singers Kat Robichaud and Whitney Moses were mostly relegated to being really good backup, but everyone got some good turns and Whitney (of Midtown Social, also a friend) particularly killed me with the mother verses in "Mother", a cynical tearjerker of a song that I'm a total sucker for. I would absolutely go see whatever these people do next.
The stage show is the tough part. In theory I'm all for their approach: mixing drag and political theater, letting it be abstract at some times and topical at others, and definitely not trying to re-enact the movie. It had a good cast—I don't know any of them and am having trouble sorting out who some of them were because I can't find photos, so I'll just say there was some good drag, mostly toward the monster end of the spectrum, and some good physical performance, and everyone was a distinctive presence. There was some interesting use of photo montage. There was a puppet that must've taken some time to make. But it was—to put it mildly—very unevenly conceived and directed, and either it was also very under-rehearsed, or there were just a lot of parts when they weren't sure how to fill the time and left the actors doing a lot of vague stage business. The latter tended to be the parts where it also got painfully literal-minded; it's not that it was too topical, of course it isn't possible or desirable to do something called The Wall in 2019 without bringing up certain issues... but I'm talking about for instance having a generic young protester character appear with a sign saying "RESIST", so the audience cheers, and then some fascist cops (one of whom also happens to be the best dancer) are arresting her and beating her up in slow motion, so the audience boos—except then the audience also cheers because the band just finished a good song (a possibly unintentional mixed-signals effect that happened a few times)—and then the cops and the prisoner just kind of stay there until they're eventually shuffled offstage. Or, a masked drag character who is sort of an embodiment of consumerism and the fashion aspect of The System starts ripping apart her ensemble, and when she takes off the mask, there's a gruesome raw-meat face effect... and then nothing happens, the character is just kind of hanging out. At the point where the album takes a sharp turn into literal references to modern fascism ("In the Flesh"/"Run Like Hell"), the stage imagery became oddly muted and vague: we got the same brownshirt dude and big flag that they had brought out early in the show, but otherwise they mostly just let the songs do the work there. (In what was either an uncharacteristic lack of attention to the sound mix or an uncharacteristic shying away from unpleasant material, they kind of buried the lines from "In the Flesh" that have deliberately shocking slurs in them; anyone who didn't already know the album and listened to it after the show was in for a surprise. But "Run Like Hell" can't help but be really effective and unsettling—its mix of exhilaration and terror is right there in the structure of the music.) As with most bad political theater, I didn't get much sense of someone watching this as it was being created and really thinking about how it would play and feel for an audience, as opposed to just "the idea behind this is cool and righteous, so it'll come across." But it might also be that it just needed more time to find its shape.
The best stuff, for me, was more dreamlike and allusive. There's a character (I'm not sure I could call any of them characters, I don't think this was an attempt to tell a cohesive story about specific allegorical people, but there were at least vaguely allegorical people with specific looks) whose connection to the arc of the album wasn't very clear—sometimes they seemed to be our main guy the fucked-up rock star in his later years, other times they were clearly in charge of The System that our guy grew up with—but their performance was always physically impressive, and their look (kind of a short bald leather-bear with some ominous costume elements but a kind of stumbling vulnerability, and an impassive fishnet face) used garish drag in a way that worked a lot better for me than some of the other caricature styles. They had a dance/mime solo to "Nobody Home", involving climbing and balancing precariously on a shelf unit in the middle of the audience, that temporarily convinced me that this wasn't a song about rock-star ennui at all, that it was really about this odd monster who was one of the secret rulers of the world but had gotten deeply lost—an image that made the album's final line about "some mad bugger's wall", which sort of conveys both pity for and frustration with the main character, feel like it really managed to be about both a lost individual and a lost society. At another point, the same character was lecturing/seducing our guy's mother from inside a cardboard TV, and it became apparent that part of their odd headgear was sort of a bouquet of black rubber gloves, one of which the mother gratefully plucked; nothing more was made of that image, but it was a lovely creepy surprise. At times like those, I was fully on board with this show's somewhat inchoate vision and ambition, and glad that the audience also seemed to be rolling with it pretty well. Maybe that's just because I tend to like dark cryptic things and unusual uses of props, but I really do think that that stuff was also just much better done than the rest.
An aspect of the album that I don't think they quite knew what to do with—or I should say, I'm sure they had it in mind and were trying to push against it with the drag and genderqueer elements, but ultimately it kind of sat there undigested—is that the alienation on display is very strongly from the perspective of an angry straight dude. His mother did him wrong, his wife did him wrong, a groupie is the last straw before his breakdown, when he imagines himself on trial the women are all more or less united against him... and (a detail that I somehow never noticed the oddity of until now, even though it's a great line) the brownshirt army in his dream, while it's out to get all kinds of people, is particularly determined to stop boys from fooling around with girls in the back seats of cars. That all rings true for the character that Waters and Ezrin wrote, but when you're determined to frame his mutual antagonism with the world as having a lot of deep universal meaning, it's pretty jarring to snap back to that very personal bitterness near the end in "The Trial" (the one track that I never liked, and still don't). I'm not sure what a more successful way of reimagining that material would be if you're set on still using the whole text, but I think it would involve at least letting us see that character, or someone like him, a little more clearly at some point; the way they went with the show in general, no such person really exists after the childhood scenes.
There are a lot of good things in both the album and the show I saw, but I ended up feeling like the single best part of both was the title. If you have to pick a single metaphor and try to cram into that metaphor a bunch of ideas about childhood trauma, adult alienation, depression, and toxic mass politics, "wall" is a good choice: you can spend all your time building it, deny people with it, get stuck behind it, and put your victims up against it. It's super obvious but it works, and that was true not only in the album but unfortunately also in 21st century America; I don't think our current leaders would've been nearly as successful in channeling fear and hate into electoral support if they'd kept the same basic message of kicking immigrants to the curb and blocking all social progress, without also having that simple image of one big object that stands for all of those things. The relationship between individual psychological dead-ends and mass violence is fertile ground for clinicians (I haven't read Lifton or Reich for a long time but I think they were clearly on to something), and I think we need more art about it too.
