Bells of Division

There was a time in my life that you might say I was slightly “obsessed” with (The) Pink Floyd. Along with Rush and Led Zeppelin at the time, there was not much else I listened to, as well as reading interviews and trying to “figure out” certain lyrics. Forget the Stones and the Beatles, for me it was all about Pink Floyd who were really taking music to a different level of experimentation with such albums/soundtracks as Mettle, More, Obscured by the Clouds, Animals, Ummagumma, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and so on.

Pink Floyd did not really break onto the “public” scene until the LPs Wish you Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, which led then to The Wall, which ultimately was their demise for some time due to the internal rift of the band. Though it had been brewing for years between Roger Waters and everyone else in the band, championed on the other side by David Gilmour, who had replaced Syd Barrett after his complete mental and physical breakdown. For one, as a result of coming in later into the band, for Waters, Gilmour remained the “new guy,” something he apparently never let him live down.

When I was first really into Floyd (around 8^th grade, easy to remember as our Vice Principal was named Floyd J. and he was wont to wear a pink blazer at times…too easy mark), I thought it was all about Waters and that the others were merely musicians who supported his genius. However, over the years, that began to change, slowly at first, then ultimately quite a turnaround.

The more interviews I read, then later saw during documentaries and whatnot, the more irritating Waters became and the better Gilmour came off as the “silent partner,” without whom Waters would not be such the genius. This is further apparent when you check out their respective solo careers when Pink Floyd first split. Aside from some brilliant work on The Final Cut, Waters has not really produced much of anything worth mentioning. However, Gilmour’s solo album is great and then when he re-formed the band without Waters, inviting back Nick Mason on drums and Rick Wright on keyboards (whom Waters had “fired” without the consent of the rest of the band), they produced some very good music. Meanwhile, Waters continued whining about how he was “Pink Floyd,” ironically bringing the warning of “Have a Cigar” to life about mistaking the fact that there is no “Pink” (not, of course, referring to the current Pink).

What for me, though, was the final cut was seeing Gilmour at the helm for the “Learning to Fly” tour in 1987-88. My friend Nevin and I were sitting in our dorm room and we heard the announcer on the radio (when people still listened just to the radio…) describing the scene about the Pink Floyd show downtown. He was literally at a loss of words to describe the tension and the stage set-up, and this was an hour before the show! So, Nevin and I looked at each other and basically not even having to say it, jumped up and ran to my car, not caring that we had no tickets and less than an hour to get through concert traffic in downtown Dallas. We were going to see Pink Floyd. (This scene was repeated some years later in Freiburg, Germany driving down to Bern, Switzerland within two hours to see them again.)

So, we are driving down and the traffic looks impossible, but we were so close, not turning back now. And, the scalpers then began to become desperate as the show was about to begin. One came up to us offering 4^th Row, Floor seats at an insanely low price. Was he swindling us? Not sure, didn’t care. We bought them, found a parking place five minutes before the show was to start, ran to the door, handing the Security our tickets, waiting to see if we would get in, or get busted for counterfeit tickets. He looked at them, and moved aside, saying “Enjoy the show…” We were in.

Those next 3 hours (yes, it was a 3-hour concert!) were mind-blowing and without a doubt to this day perhaps the most amazing spectacle I had ever seen. What also happened was that Gilmour won me over for good. It is difficult to describe, in fact, I won’t even try, a Pink Floyd concert, as the radio announcer also found out. It is the greatest assault on the senses that can be comparable to walking down a street in downtown Madurai.

And yet, there were Gilmour, Mason, and Wright with a very large supporting band, having the time of their lives. Gilmour was wearing a white t-shirt and jeans and was the most relaxed person in the arena, and he never stopped smiling, knowing that Pink Floyd was back as this was one of the first concerts in over a decade for them. When the spotlight went to Wright for the first time, the crowd went nuts. Nobody missed Waters, who throughout the entirety of the tour gave interview after interview saying that was not Pink Floyd. Well, he was not Pink...

Recently, a friend of mine said he saw a documentary on the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which I am pretty sure I saw the same one, and he commented on how annoying Waters is in comparison to Gilmour and the others. He does speak of them as if they really were quite inferior to him.

Now, the backstory. All of Pink Floyd members went to Cambridge University, which is where I am currently writing this post in a coffee shop called “Indigo.” As you may well know, Cambridge is one of the finest Universities in the world, so the fact that all of them went here, and knew each other at the time, makes it pretty hard to swallow Waters’ bitter pill that he had a leg up on the others. They were just more modest as it has come to pass.

The follow-up LP to A Momentary Lapse of Reason (the Learning to Fly tour impetus) is The Division Bell. Here, the gloves come off, and the three other Cambridge fellows give Waters the knock-out punch, even using a boxing metaphor in one song, and Rick Wright is given the spotlight again to basically tell Waters to go f**k himself. This was after nearly two decades of silence and it is quite hard to feeling sorry for Waters for all of the acid he had spewed over the years. The final song, “High Hopes,” co-written by Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson, goes back to the hallowed halls of Cambridge, with haunting lyrics and music, and suggests that perhaps here along the Backs and along the River Cam, this is where it all went wrong.

Though this was not in the first concert I saw, I did see this song live years later, and it literally gave me a chill up my spine, and solidified Gilmour as the final voice of Pink Floyd. He moved on. Waters did not. The fight was over.