I guess the Pandemic caused me to miss the 30th anniversary of Roger Waters performing the Wall in Berlin as promised. So I caught this year’s after seeing a post up on the Internet. I would say this was one of the craziest live music experiences I’ve ever had. The fact that I had an actual ticket, mailed to a travel agent in Greenville, SC, helps make the whole thing feel more real.
I still have that program, along with the t-shirt (XL, doubt I’ll ever wear it again) and the paper mask hand-out they gave us to hold up at a point in the show. In good timing, I just visited back East and got to pull out my memorabilia from the show. My mom has always kept articles for me to read, so one of these photos has the clippings she took from the two local newspapers (both AP reports, but one was longer than the other).
I recently bought a used CD of the show, but must admit I haven’t watched the video in a while. After finding this link below, I got sucked into the amazing spectacle once again and watched it all the way through. This version of “Mother” is the go-to version I always listen to when the ear worm hits. And it is still quite powerful to hear the masses roar when the staged wall comes down.
After posting the stub on Facebook, I decided to write out the adventure that started when the Post Office delivered my subscription copy to Rolling Stone. Once the travel agent made that phone call to NYC (or it could have been London), everything worked out and we lived to tell the tale. I’ve lost touch with Virginia, the person I knew who, prior to this Berlin weekend, let me crash under her sink in a small dorm room in Innsbruck. I am glad she and her friend (cannot remember much about her) had the patience of a mountain to get through that crazy weekend!
This very lucky adventure all started with a subscription to Rolling Stone, where I read a short article about this concert. I knew someone from college who would be in Innsbruck, and she and a friend were down to go. I had no idea how to work out a way to get to the show, and that puzzle piece was found when my mom suggested I talk to a travel agent she knew. I think his name was Richard Young. He was a “let’s make it happen” person, so got on the phone with a ticket broker and literally lied his way into getting me 3 tickets for the event. He booked a hotel room in Berlin, early enough to get one of the last rooms available (1000s were sleeping in the parks and train stations the night of the concert). He even got us train tickets with reserved seats (the train was packed to the ceiling when it arrived in Berlin). I knew this show was going to be insane, so we got there early and grabbed a spot by a sound tower. Good thinking, since most of the crowd got pushed around on and off during the now free-for-all show. That was about 200,000 people! The two people with me were not used to going to shows, but understood the “do not move so we can go to the toilet and find the tower to get back together.” The sea of pushing scared them, but folks around us were so nice and helped protect them. The show was an insane spectacle, complete with a full marching band and dozens of “drones” building the wall. When the wall came down, the joy of the masses was powerful. We were exhausted afterwards and had to catch a train back to Innsbruck very early the coming morning. We walked over 100s of people sleeping in the train station to get to our train. We slept well that day back in quiet Innsbruck!