Tag: concerts

Please forgive the indulgence, but this will be a long post. This started out as an email exchange with David Bush of the Comfortably Numb Community (wywh1975.com) and I thought it might be good to commit it to posterity here.

I had the misfortune of being born many years too late and in the wrong place to have been a Pink Floyd fan from the beginning: those early shows with Syd Barrett at London’s UFO Club, The Dark Side of the Moon, the 1977 show in Montreal with Roger’s infamous loogie, The Wall tour in 1980, Roger’s meltdown and falling out, etc. My Pink Floyd origin story begins in Jacksonville, Florida in the early 1990s where I was a high school student who was finally beginning to explore music beyond the usual Top 40 stuff being played on WAPE-FM.

As a typical GenX suburban mall rat, I spent lots of time browsing the CDs and cassettes in the local music stores. Vinyl hadn’t yet made its big comeback, and online streaming was still years away. There was one album that kept catching my eye, a fat double CD with a strange photo of a man wearing a suit covered with light bulbs on the cover. It was hard to miss among all the others, but with it being an expensive double album and me being a perpetually broke high school student, the price tag always seemed just a bit steep for my budget.

Around the same time, back when MTV was still a thing and still played music videos, the concert video of “Comfortably Numb” was getting a decent amount of play. Before I even knew the lyrics or its context within The Wall, something in my undeveloped brain knew this was a special song.

Then one day when I must’ve had some extra money in my wallet, I finally gave in to my curiosity and bought Delicate Sound of Thunder, which became my gateway drug to Pink Floyd fandom. The live version of “Comfortably Numb” on that album is still my favorite, making it arguably my all-time favorite track of any album ever released. I’m pretty sure A Momentary Lapse of Reason was the next Floyd album I purchased, since it was the newest studio album at the time.

Each of my high school friends seemed to have one or two bands they really loved. My best friend Kevin was huge into Queensrÿche and The Police, another friend was a big Led Zeppelin fan, and a few of us loved Rush and saw them in concert in 1992 or so. A small subgroup of our circle was really into They Might Be Giants, and there was another subgroup who always wore black and were really into Depeche Mode and The Cure years before they became household names. (We gave our “alternative” friends shit for that, but it’s only in retrospect that we now know they were way ahead of their time, both in terms of musical taste as well as existential angst.) My friend Cat got really into the Dave Matthews Band, which would come back to intersect my life in a big way many years later.

My friend Ed was already a huge Pink Floyd fan. When I told him of my new purchases, he acted as if I’d just found Jesus, and immediately directed me to buy The Dark Side of the Moon, of course. Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall all followed thereafter, and I was hooked. Wolfson High School’s class of 1993 now had two Pink Floyd fanatics.

Most of my friends headed off to college after graduation, but I didn’t have the grades or the money for it, so I reluctantly tagged along with my family when my dad got stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center about an hour or so north of Chicago. I got a job at a Target store in nearby Gurnee and started taking night classes at the local community college. As much as I loved Pink Floyd, there was still a lot of the band’s earlier Syd Barrett-era material that I had yet to discover. This would cause me a great deal of embarrassment soon enough.

In the spring of 1994, The Division Bell was released and a North American concert tour announced soon thereafter. As soon as tickets went on sale, I went to the local Carson Pirie Scott department store in Waukegan and got in line. The Soldier Field show in Chicago on July 12th had sold out in about five seconds, as expected, but I was able to get tickets for the July 3rd show up in Madison, Wisconsin. One of my co-workers and I drove up to Madison for the show. We had nosebleed seats for that one, but it was still an amazing experience.

Here’s my first confession: I was expecting Pink Floyd to open the show with “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” like on the Delicate Sound of Thunder album, as it’s the perfect concert opener. But they opened with “Astronomy Domine” instead, which I wasn’t yet familiar with. I turned to my friend and wondered aloud if this was an opening band. The guy in front of me overheard me and turned around and glared at me as if I had just said the stupidest thing in the history of the English language. I immediately realized my mistake and felt about six inches tall. My memories of that show are a blur, but I still remember that guy’s incredulous glare piercing through my soul.
 
A few days later, I was driving around somewhere in Chicago’s northern suburbs the night before the Soldier Field show, still a bit bummed that I wasn’t able to get tickets for it. I had my radio set to WLUP-FM, as usual, and Danny Bonaduce was the DJ for the evening time slot. After playing “Keep Talking” from the new album, he announced that an additional block of tickets for tomorrow’s show would go on sale at 8:00 the next morning. I set my alarm and blew off work that day, emptied my meager savings account from an ATM, and was third in line at Rose Records in Vernon Hills. I was able to snag a ticket for $75, which I thought was an outrageous price at the time, but I knew it would be worth it.

 
I took the train into the city and wandered around downtown Chicago for a few hours before heading over to the venue. I guarded the ticket in my wallet as if it was a newborn baby.

While waiting for the gates to open at Soldier Field, a violent thunderstorm came through and pounded the city, with torrential rain, multiple close lightning strikes, and maybe even some hail and tornado sirens. A bunch of us took shelter under a big semi-trailer outside the stadium during the worst of it. We were convinced the show would get canceled, but fortunately the storm let up just before the gates opened. If you listen to the bootleg recording of that show, you can hear David Gilmour make a sarcastic reference to Chicago’s lovely weather before “Comfortably Numb”.
 
While standing in line waiting to get inside, I somehow got pulled into a conversation some guys were having about various mind-altering drugs they’ve used. At this point in my life, I was about the squarest person on earth and had barely even smoked a cigarette or drank alcohol, so I didn’t have much to contribute. I half-jokingly asked if any of them had licked one of those hallucinogenic toads from the South American jungle. One guy responded, “Oh yeah, man! A buddy of mine had one of those frogs at his apartment in Calumet City and invited everybody over. The frog died after like a week because we kept licking it, but what a fucking trip, man!”

 
On that note, the gates opened and we went into the venue. My spot was in Section F, Row 19, Seat 11, stage center-right, maybe about 50-80 feet from the stage. This time I knew about “Astronomy Domine” and didn’t make a total ass of myself again. A light rain continued to fall throughout the show, which made the lights and lasers all the more spectacular. Needless to say, it was an amazing show, and it set impossible expectations for every concert I’ve ever attended since then. I carried the ticket stub in my wallet for years, and I now have it framed with a poster from the show that I was able to find on eBay many years later. I’d give my left nut to re-live those three hours again. The setlist was the same as the Madison show. The only downside was that the very next tour date, in Detroit, was when Pink Floyd began playing The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for the second set.
 
Here’s my second confession: After that show… not much happened concert-wise for the next couple decades except for the occasional bar band that a friend happened to be playing in. I never stopped loving the Floyd, but my musical tastes expanded to include techno, alt-rock, new age, and other stuff. And in my defense, not much was happening in the Pink Floyd cinematic universe either, at least as far as I knew. The 1994 tour would be their last. The classic lineup with Roger, David, Nick, and Rick appeared on the same stage together for the last time in 2005 for a short set at Live Aid. Syd passed away the following year, and Rick passed away two years later. The Endless River was released in 2014, and Roger would occasionally get his name in the news for saying something stupid within range of a live microphone. Each event was barely more than a blip on my radar screen. I was too busy getting my ass kicked by life to go to many concerts. College, grad school, a rapid succession of long-distance moves, and getting settled into my career also meant that concert tickets were a luxury that I thought I couldn’t afford.

Unlike my embarrassing faux pas in Madison, the only person from whom I need to beg forgiveness for those lost years is myself.

You are young and life is long
There’s always time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

I’m now a somewhat-successful architect with a mortgage and a six-figure student loan balance, but I’m finally at a point where I have some room in my budget and some occasional free time. After moving to Seattle in 2016, I managed to catch Roger’s Us + Them concert up the road in Vancouver, BC in 2017. Then there was a global pandemic that kicked me into a midlife crisis and compelled me to move back to Chicago in 2022, which turned out to be a complete disaster: I ran screaming back to Seattle two months later. I learned the hard way that Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home again.

In the summer of 2022 and with my head still spinning from the whole Chicago debacle, my old high school friend Cat flew in from Cleveland and invited me to go with her to the annual “Labor Dave” weekend at The Gorge amphitheater, which involved camping at the venue for three nights of Dave Matthews Band shows, with a different set each night. I wasn’t a DMB fan by any stretch — in fact, I’m pretty sure I hated them — but I was desperate for any distraction from the trauma of the previous few months.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Dave Matthews Band puts on a killer live show, and Labor Dave weekend has now become an annual thing for me. And somewhere along the way, I started attending other concerts: King Crimson, Simple Minds, M83, The Psychedelic Furs, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo & The Bunnymen, etc.

I’m actually not sure exactly how or when I rediscovered my love of Pink Floyd, but several things happened within the past few years to put them back on my radar screen: David Gilmour released his Luck and Strange solo album, I purchased and read Nick Mason’s memoir Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, and I saw Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII at my local IMAX theater.  Around the same time, I started following Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, et al on social media and started making a point to catch Pink Floyd tribute bands whenever possible.

I’m now back in the fold and trying to make up for lost time, while kicking myself for all the stuff I missed while wandering in the desert: I probably could’ve driven to Detroit back in 1994 to see them perform The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, but I didn’t. I certainly could’ve seen a few of Gilmour’s solo shows and more of Roger’s, but I didn’t. I would’ve flown to London and stood in Hyde Park for hours to see the four of them on the same stage together for the last time at Live Aid in 2005, but I didn’t. I could’ve flown down to Los Angeles and checked out the Their Mortal Remains exhibition, but I didn’t. I was living five blocks away when Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets band performed at Seattle’s Moore Theater, and I missed that as well. Now the Floyd’s remaining members are in their 80s and unlikely to tour again.

Adulthood and knowing the band’s history have given me a much deeper appreciation for Pink Floyd’s music: Songs like “Time” and “Comfortably Numb” hit much deeper now that I’ve had 50+ years of life, heartbreak, mental health struggles, and regrets under my belt. I’ve always loved “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Wish You Were Here”, but knowing the band’s history with Syd now makes those songs much more poignant. The latter was always a sad, beautiful song, and now it cuts to the bone. “Comfortably Numb” is still my favorite Floyd song, and the last verse now absolutely shatters me whenever I hear it:

When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb

The life lesson here is to go see those shows while you still can. Last weekend I was in Colorado for two nights of Brit Floyd at Red Rocks. No tribute band is ever a substitute for the real thing, of course, but just being in a venue with other people who love the same music is reason enough to go. I’ve made lots of stupid decisions in my life, but I’ve never regretted buying a concert ticket.