Roger Waters has hit a towering home run.
The former frontman for Pink Floyd has taken The Wall Live Tour -- already a massive commercial and critical success on the arena circuit -- and supersized it to fit baseball stadiums. Yet, it's not just bigger -- it's also better.
The show that fans witnessed on Friday night at AT&T Park was even more powerful, dramatic and thrilling than what was seen back in December 2010, when Waters brought the highly theatrical tour -- based on Pink Floyd's multiplatinum 1979 double-album "The Wall" -- to Oracle Arena in Oakland and HP Pavilion in San Jose.
This San Francisco outing was the first stadium show on Waters' 2012 North American tour, which mixes arena dates (using the smaller-scale production elements) and stadium gigs, mainly at Major League Baseball parks, including Yankee Stadium in New York, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston.
The star of the show truly shines in a stadium setting. But I'm not talking about Waters -- although he's quite good -- but rather the "Wall" itself.
Surprised? You really shouldn't be. Just take a second to ponder the appeal of this tour, and why thousands of fans could easily justify paying top dollar for tickets, which in San Francisco ran as high as $255. Then realize that some of these fans had been waiting more than 30 years to see "The Wall" performed live onstage, having heard all the stories of Pink Floyd's 1980 tour in support of the album, which touched down in only two American cities, Los Angeles and Uniondale, NY.
The main draw isn't the music or the musicians, although both certainly factor into the equation, but rather the whole concept. "The Wall" is, after all, arguably the greatest concept album in rock history. And it's certainly the most popular, having been certified 23 times platinum, enough to make it the third best-selling album of all time in the U.S.
Fans were looking for that concept to be fleshed out onstage, in a way that would meet or exceed what they'd long envisioned in their mind, and that was accomplished as the enormous Wall was physically constructed onstage.
Brick by brick, the Wall was steadily built before our very eyes on a stage in center field. It stretched some 500 feet wide, running nearly from foul pole to foul pole, and stood approximately 40 feet high. The 20,000-square-foot structure — which is twice the size of the Wall built in arenas -- truly serves as a massive metaphor for self-imposed isolation, with bricks slamming into place with each new wound of the psyche.
The concert was broken into two sets, just like the two-disc "The Wall" itself. The first set is dedicated to building the towering structure, as vocalist-bassist Waters -- or, more accurately, his character "Pink" -- relates all the worldly pains that directly translate to bricks in the Wall. And there has been much pain -- from growing up without a father ("Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)") to dealing with menacing teachers ("Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)") to a failing marriage ("Don't Leave Me Now").
The second set is Pink's so-called life behind the Wall, where he's completely disconnected from reality and in danger of going insane. The visual elements in this segment are breathtaking, ranging from the crystal-clear images shown on the Wall -- reportedly the largest projection screen in touring history -- to the iconic flying pig, which soared a bit too close to the crowd and nearly ended up as bacon.
Pink eventually decides to rejoin the real world, which leads to the dramatic conclusion -- "Tear down the wall!"
And then it came tumbling down, to the ecstatic cheers of thousands of fans.
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