God, these last ones are like pulling teeth.

Everyone knows the story. On tour for Animals in 1978, an exasperated Roger Waters spits in the face of a fan at the Montreal show as the fan attempts to climb on stage. Horrified both with himself and with the fan’s adulating reaction, Rog begins developing a new project that will allow him to both build a literal wall on stage to isolate himself from the limelight and explore the metaphorical walls he’s put around his heart that make him feel like he needs to, drawing on the traumas of his childhood and the unresolvable grief of Syd’s breakdown and ouster from the band. The other band members choose it as their next album over his other idea, which will later go on to become The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, his least execrable solo album (if you don’t count The Final Cut), and rock history is made. Recording is rough, the tour is worse, a cocaine-addled Rick Wright is fired from the band only to be hired back on as a touring musician and be the only member of Pink Floyd to not lose their shirts on the tour. The movie follows, and The Final Cut, and Roger grows more and more cantankerous and controlling and tries to break up the band before spending the next forty years being rock and roll’s worst uncle.

Was it worth it? Goddamn fucking right it was. 1979’s the Wall is probably my single favorite piece of art in the world, and certainly my favorite rock and roll album of all time. On this very website I’ve described it as the most important piece of antifascist art of the entire post-World War 2 period (Though I think it’s been surpassed since I said that.) So why is it sitting at #3? Why haven’t I given it pride of place? Is it the Roger of it all? Is it the messy elements of its presentation, problems the movie only manages to exacerbate? Is it the fact that I don’t believe the album represents the best version of the Wall, let alone the best possible version?

It’s probably all three of those. Waters’s toxicity has become too great nowadays for me to truly ignore, especially in this deeply personal project of his, and that taints it a little. I love the movie, and especially Bob Geldof’s weird, compelling performance as the protagonist, but… the movie honestly kind of sucks. I understand why Rog was mad about it. But it’s mainly the third. The Wall is not best experienced as a movie or as an album. It is best experienced in its live form. The original, money-hemorrhaging 1980-81 tour and its thunderously successful 2011-2014 revival, are an experience unlike anything else in rock, unlike anything else in theater. Seeing it in Denver with my father 15 years ago, I found my faith. Nothing has been the same for me since that night, even if nothing else is the same in my life now as then except my love for the Wall.

How, then, should you experience The Wall if you haven’t already? The original tour was filmed, with the notion of using footage in the movie, but that official footage has never been released, and the bootlegs out there look about as rough as you would expect a concert bootleg from 1980 to (a live album exists but is intermittently available, as Roger controls the rights to The Wall and The Final Cut.) The star-studded 1989 show on the very ruins of the Berlin wall, as well as the Paris show of the 2010s solo tour, are available in both audio and video formats (though I don’t think the former has ever been on DVD or blu-ray.) Through them you can perhaps get a sense of the sheer grandeur of the Wall as a live project. But you probably shouldn’t give that rotten, angry, antisemitic old tankie your money. Find another way to watch it. There’s an opera that uses the lyrics as its libretto set to new music by Julien Bilodeau, but to my knowledge there is no recording of it, either audio or video. There’s also a stage musical, something Roger Waters worked on for many years but abandoned… but the musical is not his. It was a project by a university student and fan who, miraculously, managed to get Waters’s permission to not only produce it but to film it for posterity. It’s on Youtube, or it used to be, and if you can track it down it’s something pretty special. (You can track it down, the channel name is Xanabananadu and I’ll link the video in the comments.) I don’t know if that should be your first exposure to the Wall, probably the album is the most accessible to a newcomer. But it’s the most interesting way, I think.

So after all that, let’s talk highlights. Obviously I’m of the opinion that you should hear the entire album, but we can talk about it anyway. I’m not going to recommend you the songs from this album everyone knows. You’ve heard Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, you’ve heard Young Lust and Hey You and Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell. Even if you don’t like rock, you’ve probably heard several of those. You don’t need me to tell you those songs rock.

So let’s talk my favorite album tracks, instead. Don’t miss “The Thin Ice”, which introduces Gilmour at his most honeyed and tuneful as the protagonist’s grieving, emotionally-incestuous mother and Waters as the materialistic pressure of society; “What Shall We Do Now?”, a song truncated into nothingness on the album but featured in all subsequent adaptations accompanied by an animated sequence that is one of the highlights of the entire project; “Is There Anybody Out There?”, whose gentle classical guitar underscores the ponderous enormity of the protagonist’s decision to cut himself off from his humanity and its followup “Nobody Home”, an almost Great American Songbook-esque piano ballad in which the protagonist takes stock of himself and what he’s left behind; and “The Show Must Go On”, the moment when a personal tragedy begins to escalate into real harm, written with the intent of having the Beach Boys do guest vocals on it (though scheduling didn’t work out, except for Bruce Johnston.)