February 8, 2025
Relistening to "The Wall" by Pink Floyd
As sunset approaches on this chilly, cloudy day in our nation’s capital city, I’m revisiting a listening to “The Wall” and remembering when it was first released. Full page ads graced the Arts and Entertainment section of the Sunday New York Times with the motto “Pink Floyd has been building up to this.” When I acquired my copy and began to listen to it, I remember my father asking how it was. He showed an interest in what I was listening to. I was all of 16 or 17 years old at the time.
The questions it asks are pertinent and reflected the teenage angst that I was experiencing at the time. My father’s father had died on August 13, 1979 and my grandmother would follow him in May 1980. Although stroke brought on by the dyes used to image her colon cancer, which was successfully treated surgically, was said to have been the cause of her death at the University of Virginia hospital, I think too she had lost the will to live without her husband still on this side of the veil.
It’s now a full 45 years later and I’m listening to the questions being posed in the tune “Mother” - these tunes all became part of the fabric of my being even though this was not my favorite work. It clearly resonated with the general public and forms something of a backdrop to our history. I’m thinking now of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
That event, in 1989, just a decade later, took us all by surprise. A “New World Order” was expected in the coming years and, after a fashion, I suppose we got it. Initially it seemed that the world would become more friendly to us and that we would have a stint of peace and prosperity. That sense was quickly dashed, however, with the invasion of Kuwait that resulted in Gulf War I. Most of my generation who had entered the military would see service there. I’d watch from my perch in Williamsburg, Virginia where I was then working in the Conservation Department, soon to be merged with the Collections Department, which resulted in a change in the structure of my position. That’s a story for another time.
So, I’m listening to “Goodbye, Blue Sky” which recounts the terror of being bombed. We’ve done a lot of that over the course of the first decades of the 21st century and continue to do it to different parts of the world. Can you imagine? I personally cannot.
“Empty Spaces” is playing now. “How should I complete the wall?” and we go into a swagger of “Dirty Woman” and isn’t that the solution that we all rush to as younger people? “Take this rock and roll refugee / Ooo Babe, Set me free!” and on it goes. So relatable, Pink Floyd was at the time. Technically proficient to exceptional in terms of the production and playing. David Gilmour’s metal-tinged solo really bringing the emotion of the tune - the craving - the obsession. It mirrored the experience of life.
Now we get that little bit of telephone operator banter. “Are you feeling OK?” and then a longing “Don’t Leave Me Now” which is an experience that many of us have had in the course of navigating relationships. Life, generally, is a long process of building up and tearing down - followed by the work in which I am now engaged. Stewarding the legacy of my late father is that work and it’s all here at the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC. Ever onward is the only way any of us are going.
Pain in the spirit has been my lot for a while now. I’m working on working on the work but it is very slow right now. My energy is at a low ebb but I am hopeful that with the spring, the sap will rise. I’ve committed to getting the “pile” (as I call the files that need to be inventoried and sorted out from my father’s study) sorted out. More to come then on material to publish behind the “Harrowings” paywall.
All in all, it’s all just bricks in the wall.