All photos by Christopher Garcia Valle.
Pigs flew—and plenty of other amazing things happened at the Roger Waters show last night. The former Pink Floyd bassist’s “Us and Them” tour, in support of his first studio album in 25 years, set up shop in Portland’s Moda Center, offering a master class in arena-rock spectacle. With the aid of some jaw-dropping theatrical and video effects, combined with Waters’ surprising spryness and more than a little updated political context, the alternatingly bilious and solipsistic songs from his old band’s bong-friendly catalog were turned bracingly new. (A handful of new songs fit in seamlessly.)
Much of it had to do with Waters’ cracking band, and Waters himself took a backseat musically, saying little to the crowd and acting as cheerleader as the young hotshots did most of the work of replicating those ’70s Floyd albums, from the slow-building thrash of “One of These Days” to the broken-clockwork of “Money.” The band featured Father John Misty producer Jonathan Wilson tackling the David Gilmour vocal parts (and playing rhythm guitar), as well as Lucius’ twin-bewigged Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe on backing vocals—the pair also took the lead for “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and Laessig leapt for a sustained high note at tail end of the show’s emotional climax, The Wall’s “Bring the Boys Back Home.” Earlier, a crew of local teens from School of Rock Portland and the Justin Matz Drum School came out in orange jumpsuits for “Another Brick in the Wall,” shedding the jumpsuits in the final verse for black T-shirts that said “RESIST.”
That message—duplicated on the state-of-the-art video screens behind the stage—could have been the mission statement of the performance, which also included desecrated images of Donald Trump, drone footage of war zones, and gorgeously shot film from director/designer Sean Evans. For the show’s second half, a row of screens extended across the floor of the Moda Center and bisected the room lengthwise, while above them, the Battersea Power Station smokestacks—familiar to Floyd fans from the front cover of Animals—popped out, jack-in-the-box-like, and began emitting fog.
Stagecraft trickery notwithstanding, that 1977 album-length twist on George Orwell provided the most overtly theatrical—and powerful—moments of the show, with a runthrough of the epic “Dogs” interrupted by a nightmarish dinner party in which band members and stagehands donned animal masks and sat around a table. It was followed by “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” now a scabrous anti-Trump screed; an inflatable pig with his face on the side slowly made its way around the arena. Waters, who last came to Portland with a full staging of 1979’s double album The Wall, seems to have the Animals album and tour at the front of his mind this go-round—Gerald Scarfe’s terrifying animation for “Welcome to the Machine” from Pink Floyd’s 1977 tour was dusted off and projected overhead as the band replicated the track’s industrial sounds.
Not all of the special effects went off without a hitch. Waters reprised the last couple minutes of Dark Side of the Moon’s “Eclipse” when a (pretty nifty) laser pyramid effect didn’t come off the first time through. But otherwise the show was full evidence that antiquated progressive rock theatrics and Waters’ up-to-date message of social justice can make for a powerful cocktail. Johnny Rotten famously wore an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt at the dawn of the punk era, signaling the receding relevance of all dinosaur rock bands. But last night proved that those 10-minute space jams—with Waters’ darkly incisive lyrics to the fore—still have things for us to chew on, four decades later. Never has “Comfortably Numb” sounded so unsettling.
