Photo by Norman Sands

Roger Waters
Fenway Park
Boston, MA
July 1

Roger Waters brought his grand-scale production of the 1979 Pink Floyd rock opera “The Wall” to Fenway Park, home of perhaps the most famous wall in baseball. And it is a testament to the power and fury of his performance that the symbolic wall stage set which stretched across the entire left field section of the stadium, covering the fabled “Green Monster” as well as the bullpen and a portion of the bleachers, took over the park and brought the audience right into the alternate reality Waters is creating with this tour.

It is honestly hard to put into words exactly what Waters accomplished with this two-hour performance of the entire original Wall album plus one new song called “The Ballad of Jean Charles de Menezes” (more on that shortly). Without exaggerating, Waters redefined the scope and depth of what you can accomplish with live rock n roll, delivering an intense multimedia performance that intentionally overwhelmed the audience with the messages that authority is never to be trusted and war does not solve problems.

The show opened with a stage set surrounded by a partially constructed wall covered in graffiti such as “If at first you don’t succeed, call an airstrike,” populated by black-clad stormtroopers waving giant flags adorned with the two-hammer “Wall” symbol. After an impressive fireworks display, the band launched into “In The Flesh?” as the wall became a giant 3-D video screen, displaying a smiling Waters pumping his fists in the air as he approached the stage. But a stormtrooper helped Waters into a long black trenchcoat and sunglasses, and he immediately turned into the snarling fascist alter-ego of the Pink character who is at the center of The Wall.

Before the song was over, there had been another stunning pyrotechnic display, highly realistic sounds of gunfire and bomb explosions thundering through what might be the best sound system ever used in a rock concert, and a replica fighter plane flying into the stage and blowing up. Then the second song started.

“The Thin Ice” began with a photo of Waters’ father, killed during World War II, displayed on a giant screen overhanging the stage, followed by photos of many other people killed in wars and terror attacks. While the evils of warfare and authoritarianism were major subplots of the initial “The Wall” album (Waters’ loss of his father during World War II when he was a baby has been a recurring theme in both his Pink Floyd and solo work), the album’s main focus was on alienation and the devastating impact of fame.

However, for the live performance Waters brought the antiwar, antiauthority message front and center. Images and names of those killed in violent acts were displayed both on the wall and the screen behind the stage throughout the night. Actual footage of the mistaken killing of two Iraqi journalists by a US helicopter strike was also shown, and Waters worked a new song dedicated to Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian national shot and killed in 2005 after being mistaken for a terrorist by British authorities, during the reprise of “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2.” Waters then dedicated the song to all the victims of “state terror” throughout the world.

The audience was clearly receptive to Waters’ vision and message. The loudest applause of the night came during the song “Mother,” when almost everyone in the crowd shouted “No” in response to the line “Mother should I trust the government,” which was immediately followed by the display of the words “No fucking way” on the wall, a pause of a few seconds between each word to accentuate the warning. The next song, “Goodbye Blue Sky,” featured chilling animation of bombers dropping bloody red dollar signs, religious and political symbols and corporate logos on the helpless population below.

Waters did not leave the alienation aspect of The Wall out of the performance. The wall was gradually built up during the first set, and after a short intermission the second set began with the stage completely obscured from view behind a fully constructed wall. The wall opened during the song “Nobody’s Home” to show Waters serenading the crowd from a lonely hotel suite, and footage of Jerry Hall prancing around from the 1982 feature film version of The Wall played across the wall during the groupie anthem “Young Lust.”

I have only described a small amount of the special features and effects that were on display throughout the night. Others included giant animatronic puppets of figures familiar to fans of the film, as well as a huge pig that hovered over the crowd during the show-closing reprise of “In The Flesh?” that also included a trenchcoat-clad Waters firing a (fake) machine gun into the crowd. The show ended on an optimistic note with the wall exploding in another huge pyrotechnic display, and the entire 11-piece band singing the bittersweet “Outside the Wall” as an encore.

The entire band did a phenomenal job, including veteran guitarist G.E. Smith, backup vocalist Robbie Wyckoff, who handled David Gilmour’s high harmonies perfectly, and guitarist Dave Kilminster, who admirably did the near-impossible task of filling in for Gilmour’s legendary guitar solo during “Comfortably Numb” while perched high above the crowd on top of the fully constructed wall.

It is hard to imagine anybody but Waters, who has publicly said he will not stage any more mass-scale productions once this tour ends, putting on this kind of thought-provoking spectacle. That is a shame, but it also reflects how truly special this performance was. Even the best concerts usually leave your mind in a fairly short time, but I expect to be thinking about The Wall for a while.