Originally posted by radiO
....and oh yeah, Pink Floyd is good too. saw the Division Bell tour, best show i ever saw. i love animals and dark side, but the wall (even though over played) is simply the best. it is much more than an album....
I saw the Division Bell tour at Soldier Field in Chicago in the summer of '94.
Unbelievable. Not just a concert - it was an experience.
For instance:
Their stage was set up with this large half-circle backdrop. Kinda like if you took a sphere (a ball) and cut it into fourths. The half circle arched over their heads and then also behind them. On both sides (left and right) of the semi-spherical backdrop, mounted high near the top, there were these two large pods that looked like giant eggs with large openings in the front.
Before the show started, we kept wondering what they were for.
As the show began, lasers and such were shooting out of them over the crowd (we were down on the floor in the 52nd row) so it became an afterthought that they were an oddly shaped platform for the light show and pyrotechnics.
Wrong.
In the middle of the set, the played "Time" from
Dark Side of the Moon." It was just awesome. Now, as the song was winding down, imagine that you are listening to the album - because that's how they kept playing. Started rolling right into "Great Gig in the Sky."
As Gilmour rolled the final phrase of "Time" (
"...to hear the softly spoken magic spell") the entire stadium went dark except for this soft green glow on the spherical backdrop. And the crowd went nuts (obviously).
Through the din of the audience, you could here the starting of the soft piano intro for
Gig. Then the female vocalist started to hum the opening bars, and the crowd started to quickly quiet down. Silence was in the crowd by the time they were in the last few bars of that soft intro. Still the only lighting was the soft greeen glow behind the set.
Then, as Mason kicked those two hard drum beats to jump into the more chaotic portion of
The Gig, all hell broke loose.
Every stage light and spotlight popped on brightly. Fireworks and pyrotechnics exploded up into the air above the set. Lasers sprayed out of the pods and everywhere else all over the crowd. It was stunning. And as the female vocalist started wailing the tune, a pair of large white spikes started to emerge from the two pods.
As she kept screaming and wailing, the spikes kept growing. Then a pair of glowing red eyes lit up behind the spikes in the blackness of the pod openings. It became quickly apparent they were not spikes at all - they were
tusks. A large snout emerged, with huge fangs, and a pair of *very* large, highly detailed boars with glowing red eyes inflated and emerged from the pods, and began slowly drifting out over us. They kinda slowly pitched from side to side as they slowly moved out over the crowd and white smoke and lasers just poured out of the pods they just left.
The woman kept wailing, there were a pair of very menacing looking boars the size of four Greyhound buses stacked together floating overhead, fireworks, and complete sensory mayhem.
I thought I was going to need a fresh pair of underwear.
Part of me is still in that stadium somewhere.
Un-freaking-believable.
