Who here saw the Roger Waters on bass Pink Floyd?

I enjoyed reading the Led Zep thread about who had actually seen them in their prime. I've seen 3/4 Pink Floyd twice (in 1994 - Division Bell) and 1/4 Pink Floyd three times (1999/2000 In the Flesh tour). Unfortunately, I never got to see the whole band at their peak. Would love to hear about anyone who did and how the shows were. Thanks.

 

I saw them on The Division Bell Tour as well. Awesome show, but it would have been nice to see them "complete". I'll still never forget it

 

I saw one of the shows of The Wall at the Nassau Coliseum, and it was pretty spectacular. Unfortunately the band disappeared behind the wall itself by the end of the first half. But Waters was quite a showman, and Gilmore's solo on Comfortably Numb from the top of the wall, back-lit with an array of spots was a moment I'll never forget.

The spectacle was cool, too. Plane-crash, falling wall, big black pig. What more could you ask for at 17?

L.

 

I saw Roger Waters on his 2000 "In the Flesh" tour. It was amazing, one of the best concerts I have ever seen.

Sadly I missed Pink Floyd on the Division Bell tour. I'd remove my reproductive organs for the ability to travel back in time to see that show.

 

Floyd with Waters

I saw 'em twice; two nights in a row at The Cap Center in Landover MD during the DSOTM tour. This was maybe '75? I could probably find the stub; I have most of them.

The cool thing was that the first night I noticed that not only were none of the seats behind the stage sold but that the entire area was roped off. I found out why when they crashed a rocket ship into those seats at some point during the show. The second night I was looking for it. Frankly I was buzzed enough the first night that I wasn't really sure it happened (Hey man; did you just see that?) so the second night I wanted to make sure.

Something similar happened during the recent McCartney tour. During Live and Let Die there was a monster flash bomb. Really loud and bright. They did it a couple of times. It was cool but I'm not a kid anymore and I want to save the little bit of eyesight and hearing I have left. The second night I covered my ears and looked away when I knew it was coming. A couple of seats away some people spotted me and I could tell by the looks on their faces that they had no clue. Watching their expressions was pretty funny.

Back to Floyd for a second; it's kind of funny but shortly after DSOTM I got to where I stopped listening to them. For example: I have never heard The Wall all the way through and I have seven copies that I can think of off the top of my head (Vinyl, Two MoFi longboxes, Two MoFi shortboxes and Two different Japanese copies). It's not a big thing; I just don't like them that much. Still when I meet people who are really into Floyd, especially younger cats and it comes up that I saw this tour they are usually pretty knocked out.

Peace
Norm

 

I never saw Pink Floyd in their prime. I saw them twice in '87 (Learning to Fly tour) - great tour (Gilmour was amazing, but Roger was definitley missed). I saw Gilmour solo in 1984 - great show, focused mostly on his solo material.

 

Man, that's great that someone here has seen the famous Wall show! Did they ever film that? Bowie and Floyd put on some of the greatest spectacles in rock history, that's for sure.

 

Yes The Wall tour was filmed. Can't remember which dates(s) though.

 

I don't know the dates either, but at least one show in New York was videotaped, I have an nth generation bootleg of that. Then the shows in England were filmed for use in the movie, but never used as they apparently fell short technically. Too dark I think is the commonly cited reason. I believe some of this footage was used in a documentary on the BBC when IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE came out a few years back. I just saw a streaming version of it on the web, but it looked pretty good to me. MTV once showed a brief clip from one of the shows when it did a story on Roger performing THE WALL in Berlin.

 

February 11th, 1980, I saw Pink Floyd perform The Wall at the L.A. Sports Arena. Unfortunately, I was so wasted that night I can't remember a lot of it, but I do remember that IT WAS SPECTACULAR!!!!

Great sound too. They had other people playing with them(Snowy White was one), so it was a fuller sound than you might have expected. THE BEST CONCERT I EVER SAW.

 

April 8, 1975. band opened with three songs I did not know, then played Dark Side all the way through, then encored with Echoes.

Words fail me.

 

I also saw them on The Division Bell Tour at Three Rivers Stadium.
Pinknik, I also have an nth generation bootleg of the Wall I got at a record show years ago, it's the Nassau Coliseum show. I also have a CD copy of it from a different audio source.

 

Soldier Field, Chicago. 1977. Animals Tour, part of the "Super Bowl of Rock" series. The band played all of "Wish You Were Here", followed by all of "Animals", and "Time, and "Money" as encores. Festival seating. We got there at about 1pm, show started at about 8. I was fifteen years old.

Unbelievable experience.

 

Basically same 77 stadium show that was in Rice Stadium except the encores were Money and Us and Them.

 

Here's something Christgau wrote about seeing Floyd in concert. Christgau's not the biggest Floyd fan (not that crazy about Dark Side of the Moon, but liked Meddle, liked Wish You Were Here even more):

I have two excuses for missing most of the first half of Pink Floyd's concert at Madison Square Garden Saturday night. One, it began on time, a shocking breach of supergroup etiquette. Two, in my value system one does not skip a pre-vacation dinner with one's family for a concert at the Garden--not unless the concert features certified titans on the order of the Stones or the Who. No matter how impressive their recent albums, no matter how legendary their 360-degree sound system, one does not expect miracles of Pink Floyd when Led Zeppelin themselves have so rarely managed to magnify their broad gestures into live music that is clear, coherent, and interesting. I mean, Led Zeppelin invented this ****.

When I arrived at around 8:45, the band was already finishing Animals, and the famous 40-foot pig balloon was on the launching pad. Although Columbia's press releases about the expense of this gimmick had offended me, I found that as rock props go, it was fun to look at; other inflatable sculptures earlier in the set, I was told, were even more appropriately kitsch-surreal. And while the music was almost entirely rote--not many groups have the chutzpah to divide a show into two note-for-note whole-album sets--its vividness was surprising. This was the way classical concert music was supposed to work, with the familiar melodies and textures quickened by the nuances and contingencies of a specific performance situation.

After a reasonable intermission, the six musicians--Pink Floyd, never noted for instrumental virtuosity, is touring with two sidemen--returned for Wish You Were Here. But where most rock arena spectaculars spotlight the strutting around ("theatrical" to one extent or another) of a bunch of self-important *******s who are all but invisible from the cheap seats, Pink Floyd's visual focus was the film on the screen behind them, a screen that cost them upward of 3000 seats. (The sound system massed amid the floor-level patrons took up several hundred more.) When someone played a solo or delivered one of the infrequent lyrics, he would get some unobtrusive white; the rest of the time the entire band was masked as much as illuminated by dim all-over hues. This was because we weren't supposed to be watching them. We were supposed to be listening to the music, which may be sophisticated but is hardly complex, and watching the movie.

Filmic diversions are fairly common at rock concerts, but they are rarely diverting. Pink Floyd's was engrossing. Prepared by a London illustrator named Gerald Scarfe, it offered not a single close-up of chest hair. Its only flaw was literalness. I admit that Pink Floyd is probably into a standard humanity-versus-techocracy analysis like the one Scarfe limned in his animations, but since I usually find such ideas simple-minded, I'm grateful that the records are open-ended enough to allow me to insert my own ironies. No such possibilities survived these horror/sci-fi transmogrifications, but after a while I stopped complaining and settled into being entranced. One sequence--in which a diamond dog circled around a camera to snatch a homunculus off a hook that hung right in front of our collective eye--gave me a start I could feel in my stomach an hour later. Pink Floyd used to be considered psychedelic; I wonder how many saw that image on acid.

But although the visuals were essential, the center was aural, and that center was unique. Not that there was anything unusual about its components--Pink Floyd's compositions are if anything more repetitive and more stately than I usually prefer. But its scale was amazing. Rock and roll that succeeds in an arena does so in spite of the format. The Stones or the Who manage to project music that was born in a club to 20,000 people without losing significant detail; bands like Led Zep strip down so that, while the music is "effective," detail is lost. But in Pink Floyd the scale provides the detail. Disastrous echo and feedback are incorporated into the music, controlled by the 360-degree sound system. The first time I heard one of those electronic thunderclaps zooming at me from the back of the hall I felt a start not unlike the one I got from that diamond dog.

And the music meshed. If you're obsessed by humanity-versus-technology, where better to play out your obsessions than in Madison Square Garden in the presence of tons of equipment and 14,500 individual mass men and women? Novelists and poets can mewl till they die of cancer about electronic culture, but they can't ever confront it. Occasionally, a rock group can. Pink Floyd did indeed seem to relish their roles as anonymous technocrats; their concert was frightening, simplistic, reduced to exhilarating--a lot more exhilarating than anything I've seen by certified titans like the Stones and the Who in the past five years. The sci-fi horror and the utopian control balanced into a vision of technocracy that had truth value for me.

And the audience--well, maybe they were sheep, as Animals suggests is a possibility. When they were asked to stop throwing firecrackers they actually did. But maybe that just means that Pink Floyd attracts people smart enough to understand their own best interests.


Village Voice, July 18, 1977

 

Cool review. Thanks guys, these recollections just make me wish all the more, that I was 18 in 1971 instead of 4 or 5 months old. Here's to hoping that Roger's next album is as good as AMUSED TO DEATH, and the following tour is as theatrical as the P&CofHH/RADIO KAOS tours. His "best of" tour in early 2000 are, so far, the best shows I've seen.

 

I was there, too. How could I ever forget? It was VERY wet. Someone broke into my 72 Roadrunner (wish I still had that car) during the show and I had to drive home with a broken driver's window and glass all over the place and it was COLD COLD COLD and my carpet got soaked. I had to pull the carpet and re-jute the driver's side and I think the glass was about $40, which was a lot of money to me back then.

Oh, and Floyd was OK but the stage was pretty dark and you couldn't really see the band. Great show if you like huge screens with a lot of weird pictures on them. Incredible sound system. However, I think the show was geared more towards acid heads and PCP freaks than towards music lovers.

And as far as I'm concerned, "Pink Floyd" ceased to be a band after THE FINAL CUT (or maybe just a little before) and that OTHER "Pink Floyd" is just some kind of dubious copy. I skipped both of their tours, and haven't bought any of their CDs, either. Although I DID like Gilmore's first solo LP.

 

Phoenix 1975...the entire DSOTM and WYWH albums....three hours of spectacular sight and sound...really, the most incredible show - ever.


Phoenix 1978...Animals. They flew the big pink pig around the Veterans Coliseum with its eyes blinking....blew my mind. Sheep and dogs too. Again, a spectacular feast for the senses...wow.


New York 1980. MSG. The Wall. Gilmore's incredible solo. The building of the wall. "This is the United States calling, are we reaching - (click) - hmmm he hung up - is there someone else who is supposed to be there besides your wife?" The schoolmaster and the shrew-wife looming gigantically over the audience...man, oh man.



There's just something about these "art school" guys when they get together...


Ben

 

One of my biggest mistakes in my concert going life was missing the full pink floyd doing the wall. I was still too young to drive and they were playing in LA I lived in Phoenix. I was going to get my sister to take me there was a PHX radio station that had tickets. But my sister just landed a good job and couldnt take the time off. I would have loved to see any of the other shows but was too young.

I did see David Gilmore solo on the About Face tour. Roger Waters on Pros and Cons and the last tour. And Dave's Pink Floyd on Divison and Momentary several times.
The highligt of my Pink Floyd related experences was seeing Roger Waters do The Wall in Berlin I was right in front and center standing at the barricade. Even got to see the full dress rehersal the night before the big show (which by the way went off with none of the technical glitches of the official show.)

 

Saw Floyd in November, 1970, at Pepperland in San Rafael, CA. Pepperland was a Fillmore West-type venue for the Marin County crowd. Don't remember much about the show. It was good and all, but the thing that stands out is at that time PF had just started using a quad sound system. Most of the quad affect was only evident on "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast," which featured sound effects of Alan (I guess) stumbling around the kitchen trying to make breakfast. The sound swirled around the room to great effect. Otherwise it sounded pretty much like any concert from my admittedly flawed spot at the back of the hall.

 

Hi to all, first post.

I have just searched out my concert stubs and have the one in front of me for Pink Floyd. I saw them at Sheffield City Hall on 12 Feb 1972 and they were some band at that point. The City Hall is about a 2000 seater I think.

My memories are that they used quadraphonic sound and performed Dark Side Of The Moon which was before it was released, so my first experience of that was live, which in itself seems incredible now. The light show was on a vertical pillar that moved up and down and I had never seen anything like it at a concert before. The ticket price was 50p and I was way up in the balcony. I remember coming away from that concert knowing I had experienced something very different to ordinary concerts. I can't really compare another band with the Floyd because at that time they were unique in many ways. The only way to describe a Floyd concert then would be to say it was a total visual and audio experience.

On the back of the stub I have noted some of the playlist that night

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
ONE OF THESE DAYS
ECHOES
CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE
SET THE CONTROLS.

I saw a few bands at the City Hall from 1971/73 and have all the stubs which make fascinating reading now

22/6/71 WISHBONE ASH 50p stalls
3/2/72 FREE 85p stalls
10/2/72 WISHBONE ASH 60p grand circle
11/3/72 JETHRO TULL 75p stalls
25/11/72 EMERSON LAKE AND PALMER 80p stalls
2/1/73 LED ZEPPELIN £1 balcony
22/1/73 FOCUS 60p balcony

The major disappointment was that the one band I wanted to see the most (Led Zeppelin) was spoiled due to Planty having laryngitis. They played but I can remember the disappointment more than the concert, Planty did his best but it was a major blow for someone like me who had waited 2 years to see their fav band play live. I do remember not being able to hear properly for two days though.

Great days, I still like listening to all the above bands and just to add that the Led Zep DVD must be the release of the decade never mind year, there is simply no band past or present that can hold a light to them in regard to playing live rock music. I also liked CREAM very much but alas never saw them.

I would like to hear from anyone who actually saw CREAM live if you would post your experiences it would be great.

Great MB by the way.

 

I saw them on the Animals tour in '77 or '78 at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon. Can't remember too much about the show, however, I did take a roll of slide film and they are knocking around here somewhere. I remember that some of the ones of the floating pig turned out well.

Ere

 

Hey: ZEPFAN

Wecome to the fourm.

Post often and enjoy!

Cheers!
Norm

 

Animals tour, 1977 . They did the whole Animals album, then intermission, then all of Wish You Were HEre. Encored with some Dark Side tracks.
Most memorable things were the visuals (even PF couldn't conquer Madison Square Garden's crappy acoustics) -- particularly Gerald Scarfe's scary cartoons during 'Welcome to the MAchine'

The Wall, 1980 -- I wa sin the orchestra seats for this one, but it was even more a 'show' than a musical performance, than the '77 show. And since I'm not a huge fan of the Wall, less interesting to me. I do recall that Andy Warhol was seated a few rows in front of me.