Dear Friends,
As you will read below, Pink Floyd is on my brain today. I’ve been thinking a lot about what an important part of my life The Wall was back in the mid-80s. I’m not going to go much further because the paragraphs to come will dive into some of it, but I will probably revisit before all is said and done.
*****
Yesterday was a day. Work was okay, I suppose, and the easy time I’ve been having with my homeroom class is now disrupted by my afternoon class of ELL students. A bunch of them are kids that don’t give a fuck about learning.
One of the students is the little sister of a boy I had two years ago. They were fresh off the boat from Cuba and I’m pretty sure I wrote about him. She’s been in our school for 2 ½ years and still claims to not be able to do a whole lot with English when it comes to school.
I’m not buying it.
I hate that I feel this way, but I think she is in with the “I’m going to fake it to get out of doing any real work in school” crowd. Those kids drive me nuts. What a waste of a good brain. They don’t seem to realize that we see them speaking English really well when they want to talk to another student but ask them to do some school work and then it is, “I don’t speak English.”
I’ve got about six or seven of these kids now every afternoon for an hour. The expectation is that I will work some miracles with them, too. They will end up thinking I am a mean teacher, but that’s okay. Accountability is the only way. They will learn.
*****
I graduated from 8th grade in May of 1983. One of the things I remember the most about that last year of grade school was listening to “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” a lot that year. This was mainly because the film version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall came out the summer before. As a graduating class, we really wanted “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” to be our class theme song, but our school administration shot that down.
I got really into the record that year, though. My dad had it on vinyl and I listened whenever I could listen to it. As a story, it is probably one of the most depressing records you could listen to if you’re a rock and roll fan. Roger Waters did an amazing job with the lyrics and combining it with the visuals from the film, it cemented itself into my brain as the ultimate take down of being a rich and famous rock star.
Just listen to “Nobody Home.” It’s like the polar opposite of Joe Walsh’s epic, “Life’s Been Good.” This is just one piece of The Wall, of course. There is bombast and sadness, biting satire and crippling levels of isolation and despair. The Wall is a wild ride.
The idea of writing about this one came to me recently as I thought about my friend, Cassie. She died about a decade ago of brain cancer. It was crushing and I still think of her often. I have so many good memories of spending time with her.
One of those moments came during my junior year of high school. Cassie, Dorothy, Zack (I think), and I went to ASU and saw Pink Floyd’s – The Wall in the old student union. We dropped acid, of course, as that was something we did in those days when watching this movie.
Thinking about it now, it’s almost like we wanted to see how much our brains could endure. The film is not funny, but it is extremely visual. Gerald Scarfe’s animation was frightening, to say the least, but also visually intense and with a headful of LSD, you saw a lot of things in there.
I don’t know how many times I watched The Wall under the influence of psychedelics as a teenager, but there is certainly something there worth exploring. We didn’t know much about LSD as a way to treat things like depression and PTSD at the time, in fact, we were told that it you took enough, you would go crazy.
As I look back, I was always trying to go crazy back then. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I knew inherently that a lot of the mental illness that permeated the lives of some people I am distantly related to had skipped making its way to my life. I’m thankful for that, obviously, but part of me wondered back in those days why I couldn’t be more interesting.
Maybe being crazy was a way to be interesting.
The thing about The Wall is that it really is about being crazy. “In The Flesh,” for example in the second version, has this huge swell in the beginning where David Gilmour’s guitar just kind of explodes. You can feel this shift in mood perfectly, even if you’re sober as a judge. It’s pretty brilliant in how it manipulates the senses. Then “Run Like Hell” kicks in. More manipulation and one of the coolest parts of the record, too. That guitar part is also, as the kids say, “fire.”
There is so much cool stuff on The Wall. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time but revisiting it this week has been pretty spectacular. It brought a lot of things back, that’s for sure. I might even have to watch the film.
Back to 1986, though. When the group of us walked out of the little theatre in the ASU student union, campus was alive to our eyes and ears. As we walked, we noticed there were these places where an outline of a body had been spray painted on the sidewalks. If I remember correctly, it was some form of protest or another that was happening.
At one point, Cassie laid down and Dot took a picture of her. Maybe KJ was there, I can’t remember exactly, and if so, she probably took the picture. Either way, this struck all of us as so funny. I kind of fell in love with Cassie even more that night because she was just wild and crazy and would do anything. I was way too much of a rule follower to make light of the protest in that way.
It didn’t stop me from laughing, though. Goddamn I miss her. This world was a better place when she was here. Pink Floyd even sounded better with her in the world.
*****
See you tomorrow.
well, Ai, what is this?
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