Roger Waters' "The Wall" at Nassau Coliseum, Oct. 13, 2010

When the tickets went on sale last spring, I admit I wasn't sure whether to bother. I'd been disappointed by Roger Waters' 2006 tour which featured him singing his "Dark Side of the Moon" parts in front of a staggeringly professional, precise, and unremarkable backing band.

But "The Wall" was fantastic. The music was loud, angry and crystal clear. The current production downplays the personal, Freudian-psychological aspects of the album and its original tour, and ragefully indicts politics, mass media and corporate discourse. The animation behind "Goodbye Blue Sky" featured bombers dropping bombs in the shape of crosses, hammer-and-sickles, crescents, dollar signs, Shell-Oil symbols and six-pointed stars. (The typically reactive ADL has criticized the animation. I wrote that clueless organization yet another angry letter. That'll show 'em.)

"Young Lust" was transformed from a story of a stoned rock star with a prostitute in his hotel room, into a portrait of a global population with its senses drowned in sexual imagery to the point of numbness. Throughout the intermission, and at various points in the show (notably during "Bring the Boys Back Home"), the Wall itself became a mosaic of identity cards of real-life murder victims of war and terrorism, whose names, photos and dates were submitted to Roger Waters' web site by fans from around the world. They included World War I victims, World War II victims, 9-11 fatalities, terrorist victims from Palestine, war victims from Iraq, civilian victims from Iraq, political victims from Iran, and many others. (The first such card to appear was that of Eric Fletcher Waters, killed at Anzio, Italy in 1944.)

The fascist-rally portion of the show was genuinely frightening. (I visited Hitler's micro city of rally grounds at Nuremberg a few years ago, and I can say that Waters' projected images brought to mind perfectly the perversion of Roman imperial grandeur and the swallowing of individual identity that those grounds still express.) The show created a unity out of the tragedies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and out of the forces that crush human life and feeling throughout that time: political power, ideological fanaticism, corporate greed, and the three when they are in combination.

After the show, as we shuffled out towards the parking lot, packed in with the rest of the crowd, I caught a glimpse of one of the t-shirts on sale at the merchandise booth. It featured the familiar pair of crossed hammers from The Wall film. Underneath the hammers, in white block letters, were the words TRUST US.