Pinkies on the Wing

By JAY COCKS

The Wall boosts the Floyd through the roof

Almost a decade ago, Pink Floyd played a 2 1/2-hr. concert on the shores of the Crystal Palace pond in London. To enhance their trippy riffs and overweening crescendos, the Pinkies brought on a 50-ft. inflatable octopus and detonated a fireworks display. By the time of the first encore, all the fish in the lake had died, victims of the band's cosmic boom and crushing decibels.

In the intervening years, the body count has dwindled. Pink Floyd still machine-tools the kind of head-shop Muzak that they helped pioneer during the first shocks of the '60s psychedelic movement and that, with considerable refining and embellishment, they shaped into 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon, one of the largest and longest sellers in rock history. The Dark Side of the Moon has sold 6 1/2 million copies in the U.S. since its release, has been on the charts for 299 weeks and recently rose from the nether regions to occupy a respectable place in the middle ground.

This late burst of activity is directly traceable to the surprise success of the new Pink Floyd album, The Wall, which has become the country's No. 1 album and which shows few signs of giving way to the competition. This is all the more remarkable because the two Floyd albums between The Moon and The Wall achieved only modest success. There was every reason to believe that the Floyd had gone under, sunk beneath the collective weight of their cosmic speculations and primal ruminations. The resurgence represented by The Wall and by the Pinkies' current concert tour, which is touching down only in New York City and Los Angeles, is a reminder that the only commercial constant in pop music is unpredictability.

Bass Player Roger Waters, who writes most of the band's music, has tempered his lyric tantrums somewhat for the new album and has worked up some melodies that are rather more lulling and insinuating than anything Floyd freaks are used to. Spacy and seductive and full of high-tech sound stunts, The Wall has a kind of smothering sonic energy that can be traced to The Dark Side of the Moon and even past that, to the band's early days on the psychedelic front lines. To fans, this continuity must be just as reassuring as the trendiness Waters has grafted onto his lyrics, which are a kind of libretto for Me-decade narcissism. Says Tom Morrera, disc jockey at New York City's pacesetting WNEW-FM: "The Floyd are not as spacy as they used to be. They're doing art for art's sake, and you don't have to be high to get it. They'll take you on a trip anyway." Travelers who may not want to sign on for this particular voyage may find themselves more in agreement with a vice president at a rival record label who speculated, not without wistfulness, that the Pinkies "make perfect music for the age of the computer game."

The Wall is a lavish, four-sided dredge job on the angst of the successful rocker, his flirtations with suicide and losing bouts with self-pity, his assorted betrayals by parents, teachers and wives and his uneasy relationship with his audience, which is alternately exhorted, cajoled and mocked. None of the dynamic exaltation of the Who and their fans for the Pinkies. To Waters, the audience is just another barrier, another obstacle to his exquisitely indelicate communion with his inner being. "So ya/ Thought ya/ Might like to go to the show," he sneers at some hapless fan.

Is something eluding you

sunshine?

... If you 'd like to find out what's

behind these cold eyes

You'll just have to claw your way

through the

Disguise.

Sunshine might just as well try tunneling out of Sing Sing with a soup spoon. Every avenue of Waters' psyche ends up against a wall, a towering edifice whose bricks have been mixed from the clay of emotional trauma, vocational frustration and, apparently, brain damage. Absent fathers, smothering mothers, sadistic schoolmasters, insistent fans and faithless spouses: "All in all you were all just bricks in the wall."

Urging caution on "the thin ice of modern life," Waters' lyrical ankles do a lot of wobbling before he is indicted, some 75 minutes into the record, on charges of fecklessness, savagery and numbness. The presiding magistrate, a worm, sentences the singer to "be exposed before/ Your peers/ Tear down the wall." Lysergic Sturm und Drang like this has a direct kind of kindergarten appeal, especially if it is orchestrated like a cross between a Broadway overture and a band concert on the starship Enterprise. It is likely, indeed, that The Wall is succeeding more for the sonic sauna of its melodies than the depth of its lyrics. It is a record being attended to rather than absorbed, listened to rather than heard.

And watched. The Pinkies on-stage are as carefully rehearsed as the Rockettes. Says Saxman Dick Parry, who has backed them up, "They've got everything down exactly. Onstage with Floyd there's no spontaneity at all. They've got little pieces of tape everywhere, and if you stand in the wrong place they go crazy." The Pinkies' new stage show is an extravagantly literal representation of the album, including a smoking bomber with an 18-ft. wingspan that buzzes the audience on a guy wire and huge floats representing the song's major characters, among them a 30-ft. mom who inflates to appropriately daunting proportions with the throw of a toggle switch. There is also, of course, a wall, soaring 30 ft. above the stage, spanning 210 ft. at the top. At the start of the show, roadies--rechristened "wallies" for the occasion--start stacking 340 cardboard bricks until, at intermission, the wall stands completed. During the second half, a few strategic ruptures appear through which Waters and his fellow Pinkies--Keyboard Player Rick Wright, Drummer Nick Mason and Guitarist Dave Gilmour--can be glimpsed doing their stuff.

The inevitable apocalypse occurs on cue. The wall crumbles, bending on its collapsible support columns and bringing a storm of harmless rubble down around the Floyd. "Outside the wall," Waters sings, "the bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand." The Pinkies would presumably find such company untidy, in the first case, or unflattering, in the second. As Waters pipes band and back-up musicians offstage with his clarinet, one recalls with renewed interest the fate of The Godfather's Luca Brasi, who was sent to sleep with the fishes. --Jay Cocks

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