Roger Waters rises to new heights in Dallas

Harold, Gerald, his friend Ian and I sat out on the Superpages.com (name, right?) lawn and saw Roger Waters and the band, backup singers and Ian Ritchie on sax. They were terrific. The crowd however was a strange mix of old rockers and new beer drinker rockers. The giant pig balloon was the best part aside from the great musicianship, particularly when it got away and flew off toward downtown Dallas. The down side to this venus is, there's way too much cigarette smoke even for outdoors, and we couldn't catch a breeze to blow it away at all. This used to be the Starplex at Fair Park, and it always seems to draw a funky crowd. The parking lots back way up too after the show. There's no traffic control.

Roger Waters rises to new heights in Dallas
http://startelegram.typepad.com/pop_cultural_district/2008/05/roger-waters-ri.html
May 2, 2008. DALLAS – This is what current and future generations of rock fans will never know. Roger Waters brought an old-fashioned, gaudy spectacle of a stadium show to the Superpages.com Center on Friday night that featured a complete presentation of The Dark Side of the Moon, the legendary album from 1973 by the bass player’s former band, Pink Floyd.

The concert was remarkable in a number of ways --Roger the quality of the music, the scale of it all and the intensity of the audience’s involvement, among others. But it was perhaps most remarkable for how it measured so many things that rock has now lost.

Waters is a prominent member of a dying breed. There are few bands that can justify the expense of putting a show like this one on the road. Friday’s concert, played before a crowd that was very conservatively estimated at 15,000, required the efforts of Waters and a seven-piece band, three back-up singers, a laser light spewing prism-shaped object that descended from above, three video screens displaying miles of video, more spotlights than there are in Hollywood, a blizzard of confetti and an enormous inflated pig -– which may still be floating around out there somewhere, by the way.

Only the most venerated rock ‘n' roll warriors of the 1960s and 1970s can lay that kind of excess on a crowd and be rewarded for it. In the current music industry, where the CD no longer has any value and the audience has been fragmented into near oblivion, few if any bands are ever going to be able to mount these sorts of shows.

And they sure are not going to be doing an entire album, as did Waters and company, since the concept of the album is deader than Latin. In an age where single tracks are downloaded from iTunes, there is no place for something like Dark Side of the Moon. Gone are the days when a particular album offers a snapshot of a particular band or a specific time in our history.

But, Friday night at least, the concept of the album was still alive and well and Waters united with the faithful to celebrate that fact.

The first half of the concert was devoted to a wide mix of Floyd and Waters tunes, including Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Wish You Were Here, Mother, Fletcher Memorial and Leaving Beirut. The playing was outstanding from all quarters, especially saxophonist Ian Ritchie. The vocals were done mostly by committee, probably in an effort to protect the headliner a bit. But Waters, while not always as forceful as might be hoped, was usually able to rise to the occasion. In the concert’s second half, when Moon was gloriously covered from start to finish, the voices on stage did not matter. The crowd sang every word with fervent enthusiasm.

Because, for this crowd, Moon is not just a collection of songs. It is a single, unified musical idea that resonates with them in a personal way. And that is what this concert was ultimately about -– how an artist like Waters and an album like Moon can serve as mileposts in our lives and of our times.

It almost makes you feel sorry or the iPod-YouTube generation.