The Wall: Then and Now

I don't dislike it, but there was an issue that the band never clarified and RW used it to create another album by a band that "wasn't" any more.

We saw a "preview" of THE WALL in SF and it was 20 minutes longer than what eventually came out some 2 months later. That version was slimmed down so it would fit 2 albums perfectly, rather than have it come up close to 3 albums, which was what it looked like. In the "preview" one, the story around WW2 was much more exposed and shown, which helped make the start of the album cleaner, and eventually led to "another brick in the wall", but all of a sudden, it coming back to Vera Lynn, is a weird stop in the story.

Visually, the original concert was way superior than the redo later. The "quadraphonic" sound was spectacular and gave you the feeling that you were THERE with the sound going all around you and the vignettes clearly defined as to how they were used, and your feeling during the show was ... "you were there!" .... later seeing the RW version, it was a very sad show for me ... not half as good, and the simplification of the original from "being there" to just giving you an "idea", ruined it for me ... this is a subtle thing, but the sound itself being strictly in front of you on the stage left and right, with some small left overs in the back, was the worst design of sound on a show I have ever seen ... basically the girl walked left to right on the stage to look at all those guitars, where before it was like ... you were in the room when she went around next to you! 

This is a serious issue with rock music, and specially RW thinking that folks wouldn't care because they like the show and want to solos and whatever else ... but it was on that day, that I knew that music FEELING was about to die ... that folks would never again see it and feel it, in such a strong context.

Compared to anything these days, it's all crap. And worse, 99 out of 100 great bands, still ignore the quality and beauty of the sound altogether, as if they were important, not the sound that goes off the stage!

I don't know, or have met, anyone else discuss these things with such passion. But to me, the "being there" was not obvious if you did not feel the quality of the real thing ... which was ditched later.

To me, The Wall ... ended up getting lost in cheap versions that I did not enjoy!