Roger Waters “This Is Not A Drill.” We had the incredible opportunity to see Pink Floyd’s Roger Water perform this past week Thursday, July 28th, here in Milwaukee at the Fiserv Forum. My friend Jonathan knows Roger Waters and secured free tickets to the concert: 11th row!

Jonathan is filmmaker and spent close to a year at Standing Rock documenting the protests against big oil’s incursion onto Native land. Waters became involved in the project and has provided financial backing for the film (The Sacred and the Snake, release date forthcoming). It was beyond cool when during the show Roger Waters performed “The Bar” (written during the 2020 lockdown) and used footage from the film; even more thrilling was his thanking of the movie and then calling out Jonathan by name (Jonathan got to go backstage during the intermission, we did not). At the bottom of this post is the YouTube link to the first half of the concert, go to 34:19 for that moment.

The rest of the concert was just beyond anything I’ve ever experienced…and I’ve been to a lot of concerts. It was in the round with a giant wall screen that lifted up off the stage during the first song (“Comfortably Numb“). The drum kit rose up out of the floor and Waters would go down the hidden steps periodically and at the intermission break. The video and lightshow displays were insane – sophisticated, exactly in sync and mega high definition quality. I now have a much better understanding why concert tickets to shows like this cost between $200-$500 for the “cheap seats” (I still wouldn’t actually pay those prices though!).

Waters was energetic, hilarious, foul-mouthed (so many “fucks!” — my favorite was his pre-recorded announcement right before the show started: “If you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people, you might do well to fuck off to the bar right now. Thank you. Please sit back and enjoy the show.“). Besides Jonathan being name-checked, one of my top moments was his performance of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” When that song was a hit in 1980 (it went to #1 in both the US and the UK) and I was about 10 years old; I vividly remember seeing the video for it: the students falling into the meat grinder quite literally gave me nightmares for months. A few years later as a teenager I became mildly obsessed with both the album The Wall and the film, listening and watching both over and over. Here’s a snippet I recorded from the concert:

My other favorite part of the show was “Wish You Were Here.” It’s a special song for a lot lot lot of people, me included. By the end of high school I had moved past just listening to The Wall and branched out into more of Pink Floyd’s catalog and that track is spectacularly beautiful. It is also the one and only song I ever learned how to play on guitar. (I spent the summer after senior year working as a camp counselor in the Wisconsin Northwoods; I brought along my dad’s old acoustic guitar hoping that one of the other counselors would teach me how to play. “Wish You Were Here” was a far as I ever got.) Here’s my clip of it from the show: