Music Matters
Roger Waters' Houston show stacks up against any Pope proclamation
I have been accused of being a pawn to hyperbole on occasion in the past. I get excited about a band and, every once in a while, might be guilty of comparing the historical significance of a performance to ... say ... the passing of Halley's Comet or the naming of a new Pope.
But when I tell you that Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters performance of the album The Wall in its entirety at the Toyota Center might be the most historical musical happening in Houston this year ... I am not exaggerating.
I even got stats to prove it.
First and foremost, The Wallis one of the Holy Grails of rock 'n' roll recordings and sits with Michael Jackson's Thriller and Led Zeppelin IV as one of the top five best-selling albums in the United States of all time (over 23 million copies sold and counting).
Regardless of chart and monetary success, before Waters began his The Wall Live tour in September, the historic Pink Floyd rock opera had only been played 31 times by the band back in 1980-81. After Waters left Pink Floyd in the mid-1980s, neither the remaining members of Pink Floyd nor Waters dared to recreate the monstrous production of guitars, drug-simulated hallucination and paranoid isolationism with the exception of Waters lone star-studded concert in 1990 near the Brandenburg Gate following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That's one performance in 30 years of arguably the most well-known art rock opera of all time highlighted by two of the most recognizable songs in all of rock 'n' roll: "Comfortably Numb" and "Another Brick In The Wall, Part II."
Short of Waters and David Gilmour, the other voice of Pink Floyd who is still leading the band, dropping past grievances and reforming the band to perform this spectacle together, this rendering of The Wall is as good as it gets.
The marching hammers, the evil schoolmaster puppet and The Wall itself have all been taken out of mothballs for this show.
Get there early. Get seated. And get ready to yell, "Hey, teachers. Leave them kids alone!"
It's gonna be historic and that is no lie or exaggeration.
Roger Waters, 8 p.m. Saturday at Toyota Center
Tickets: $55-$199