Pink Floyd’s highly anticipated double album “The Wall” turned out to be a defining moment and one of the iconic artistic musical projects in rock and roll history. Unbelievably the US leg of “The Wall” tour consisted of five nights at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island and sseven nights in Los Angelos.; that is it. In the Nassau Coliseum parking lot before my first of two nights I was lucky enough to attend, we met a pair of guys who took the railroad from Canada without tickets to see Pink Floyd in the flesh. We had our tickets to the hopefully sold out show, but someone we knew made a connection with a ticket taker at the Coliseum entrance who agreed to let us in for fifty bucks a piece. We sold our pair of tickets to our new Canadian friends for $100 each, a lot of money for a concert in 1980, who also agreed to sneak our beers into the venue in their backpacks. We entered the Coliseum and immediately sought out the Canadians to retrieve the beers. We located them and the beers sitting in what had been our seats, and somehow ended up staying in the empty seats next to them for the show all night.

No one knew what to expect and the anticipation was palpable. It all seems somewhat common place now but the quadrophonic sound, props, animation projected on a white wall being constructed before our eyes was amazing. Any thoughts of “greatest hits” being played after “The Wall” album was performed in its entirety were blown to bits when the wall came down leaving the stage in rubble. Superlatives do not do the event justice; it was extraordinary, unforgettable and never truly equaled over time. One of the great concerts of all time that “Rust Never Sleeps” and other rock performances of the time to new heights not seen before. Duplicated, replicated but never surpassed, Pink Floyd climbed to the top of the arena rock mountain and cemented their legendary status for all time.

This is Not a Drill

Rock on!

GQ