November 30, 1979: Pink Floyd Release "The Wall"

Left to right: Roger Waters, Nick Mason

David Gilmour and Rick Wright

November 30, 1979: British "progressive rock" band Pink Floyd release their concept album The Wall. It exceeds their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, a concept album about mental illness and greed, as their signature work.

(Alecia Moore, the singer known as Pink, was born a few weeks before The Wall was released. Although she has written some deeply emotional songs, she has never suggested that Pink Floyd has been an influence on her work.)

Given that it was released in the year when an election put a Conservative Party government led by right-wing icon Margaret Thatcher into power in the band's home country of Great Britain, a fan hearing this album for the first time could be excused for thinking it's about Thatcher's policies and the effects they were already having. In fact, the source of the album's themes of alienation and hopelessness predated that election by 2 years.

In 1977, touring for their album In the Flesh, bass guitarist and singer-songwriter Roger Waters began to feel that the audience was not listening. The band was now big enough to play multipurpose sports stadiums, where some fans were sitting so far away, Waters though they couldn't see the band. This was before rock concerts began to use giant video screens. He said, "It became a social event rather than a more controlled and ordinary relationship between musicians and an audience." In July 1977, on the tour's final date, at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, a group of noisy and excited fans near the stage irritated Waters so much that he spat on one of them. Rock fans expected that from punk groups like the Sex PIstols, but not from Pink Floyd.

The Wall is a rock opera that explores abandonment and isolation, symbolized by a wall. The songs create an approximate storyline of events in the life of the protagonist, Pink, a character based on a combination of Waters himself and original band member Syd Barrett, who had to be phased out in 1968 due to his advancing mental illness. 

Waters' father was killed while fighting in World War II, so that was written into the protagonist's story, so that it was where he starts to build a metaphorical wall around himself, resulting in the song "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1." His teachers are physically and verbally abusive, and that inspires the most famous lines in the entire Floyd canon, from "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2," which hit Number 1 in America in March 1980:

We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave them kids alone.

Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall!
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall!

He grows up to become a rock star, and gets married, but, while he's on the road, he cheats on his wife, and she cheats on him. With "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3," his wall is complete: No feelings reach him, and no people reach him. He quickly realizes that this was a mistake, leading to the song "Hey You." He becomes catatonic, and his handlers have to give him a drug to make him stageworthy. This leads to the song "Comfortably Numb," is based on Waters' taking an injection of a muscle relaxant to fight the effects of hepatitis during the aforementioned tour.

But the drug makes him hallucinate that he's a fascist dictator, telling ethnic minorities to "Run Like Hell." He puts himself on trial, and his "inner judge" orders him to tear down the wall, where he finally rejoins the outside world.

Backing vocalists included Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys and Toni Tennille of The Captain & Tennille. Jazz drummer Joe Porcaro played instead of Nick Mason on "Bring the Boys Back Home," and his son Jeff Porcaro, one of rock's top session drummers in the 1970s, played them on "Mother." The kids singing on "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" were the Chorus of Islington Green School in North London, now named City of London Academy Islington.

The album was a huge success, and launched a new tour. On that tour, as the band played, a wall was gradually built between them and the audience, until it reached a height of 40 feet. The tour was not a big success, losing £400,000 -- almost $1 million then, and about $3.37 million in 2022 money. The bandmembers were getting sick of each other: Waters and lead guitarist David Gilmour were barely on speaking terms, and keyboardist Rick Wright left afterward. Waters left for a solo career in 1985.

Pink Floyd occasionally reunited until Wright died in 2008. Those reunions never included Barrett, who became a recluse, gaining income by selling paintings, and died in 2006. As of November 30, 2022, Waters is 79, Mason is 78, and Gilmour is 76.

I can't stand Pink Floyd. In the 1980s, I had a girlfriend who was the youngest of 3 sisters, and the middle sister played The Wall over and over again. I found it depressing as hell, and I was already pretty depressed. What I didn't know at the time was that the sisters (there were 3 of them) were watching their parents' marriage dissolve, and the middle sister took it the hardest. All 3 eventually recovered, but, unlike some other bands I didn't like at that age, including AC/DC and Judas Priest, I never came around to liking Pink Floyd.

A little more than a year after the album came out, Ronald Reagan was elected President, and cut spending on education so much that it seemed like he really did believe we didn't "need no education." And Thatcher governed like she agreed. The result was a generation that, in both countries, bought the conservative movement's lies. Gee, thanks, Roger Waters.

UPDATE: It took me until 2024 to think of this, but the 1970s were Schrödinger's Decade. There was too much overwrought music, and, at the same time, not enough of it.

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November 30, 1979 was a Friday. Baseball was out of season.  Football was in midweek. There were 9 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Boston Celtics, 100-97 at the Boston Garden.

* The New Jersey Nets beat the Denver Nuggets, 127-118 at the Rutgers Athletic Center (now the Jersey Mike's Arena) in Piscataway, New Jersey. Mike Newlin scored 39 points for the Nets.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the San Diego Clippers, 104-101 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Indiana Pacers beat the Washington Bullets, 99-91 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Atlanta Hawks, 106-95 at The Summit in Houston. (The arena has since been converted into the Central Campus of the Lakewood Church, Dr. Joel Osteen's "megachurch.")

* The San Antonio Spurs beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 107-100 at the HemisFair Arena in San Antonio.

* The Seattle SuperSonics beat the Kansas City Kings, 107-102 in overtime at the Kemper Arena (now the Hy-Vee Arena) in Kansas City. Gus Williams scored 37 for the defending NBA Champion Sonics.

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 107-100 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* The Utah Jazz beat the Golden State Warriors, 112-104 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. Adrian Dantley scored 39 points.

And there were 3 games in the NHL:

* The Hartford Whalers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 7-5 at the Springfield Civic Center (now the MassMutual Center) in Springfield, Massachusetts, 26 miles north of their usual home, the Hartford Civic Center (now the XL Center) in Hartford, Connecticut, which was being rebuilt after snow caved in the roof in 1978.

Mark Howe scored 2 goals, the 214th and 215th of his major league career (if you count the World Hockey Association, from whence the Whalers came, as a major league; and his father, 51-year-old Gordie Howe, scored 1, the 969th of his career, his 795th in NHL play.

* The Edmonton Oilers beat the New York Islanders, 5-3 at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. Wayne Gretzky scored "only" 1 goal for the Oilers, while Duane Sutter scored 2 for the Isles.

* And the Chicago Black Hawks and the Vancouver Canucks played to a tie, 1-1 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.