I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Album #: 87
Album Title: The Wall
Artist: Pink Floyd
Genre: Progressive Rock, Art Rock, Rock
Recorded: Six Studios - London, Nice, New York, Los Angeles, Correns, Hollywood
Released: November, 1979
My age at release: 14
How familiar was I with it before this week: Very Well
Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #129 - dropping 42 spots
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Comfortably Numb
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| My first high school - recently demolished. |
Mr. Buchanan had agreed to give me rides to band practice on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Looking back, that arrangement feels almost impossible to imagine today. A teacher travelling with a student alone in his car would likely trigger a lengthy chain of policies, permissions, and concerns. In 1979, however, nobody thought twice about it. We lived less than 200 metres apart and were heading to the same place. It was a practical arrangement, it was convenient, and it was simply how things worked. The 1970s feel like the Wild West compared to the carefully supervised world we live in now. |
| My family home and Mr. Buchanan's. Gone are the orchards. |
Most Thursdays, I was grateful for the ride. On this particular evening, though, I found myself hoping Mr. Buchanan would be late…maybe, if I was lucky, he would be sick and cancel band practice altogether.
For several days, the radio station WRIF 101 out of Detroit had been building anticipation for the release of a massive new album. In those pre-internet days, radio stations were masters of suspense. There were no music websites, no social media leaks, no YouTube preview videos, and certainly no AI assistants ready to tell you everything you wanted to know. If a major album was about to drop, radio stations became the gatekeepers of information, and they knew exactly how to keep listeners hooked.Every few hours, WRIF would drop another clue…A huge band…their first album in years…a double album…containing more than 80 minutes of new music…an epic work unlike anything you have heard! |
| WRIF DJ Arthur Penhallow (1970s and 80s) |
The station promised that on Thursday night they would play the entire first side of the album. For a music-obsessed teenager, this was a Super Bowl-level event. I was glued to the radio, relishing every detail the DJ delivered leading up to the big reveal.
Truth be told, the identity of the mystery band wasn't really a secret. Around Kingsville District High School’s cigarette senate, older, cooler rockers who convened in the smoking pit and on the school bus had already confidently predicted what was coming: A new record from Pink Floyd. The band’s new single, Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), was already in heavy rotation on the rock stations. The rebellious chorus of "We don't need no education" was blasting from car stereos, portable radios and the voices of students all over Essex County. The song had worked its way so deeply into teen-age culture that I had scribbled those words across the front of my “Trapper Keeper” binder while a math teacher was trying, unsuccessfully, to provide exactly the education the song was protesting. (After more than 30 years of trying to engage students in lessons, I owe Mr. Lee an apology…it really was my fault I struggled in his math class). |
| Trapper Keeper Binder - a high school staple in the late 70s/early 80s |
As 6.30 approached, I stood by the front window, stealing glances out to the road while the radio continued humming in the background. The DJ's voice rose with excitement as airtime for Side One drew closer. The anticipation was riveting and every commercial felt like a red light on an abandoned road.I knew this would be the talk of the school on Friday morning and that every teenager from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Leamington, Ontario, was tuned in…Then I saw headlights. Reliable Mr. Buchanan was stupidly on time.
I grabbed my saxophone case, pulled on my coat, and headed out into the cold November night. The DJ’s voice disappeared as I slammed the front door and aimed for the passenger seat. On most nights, I was delighted to go and make music. That night, however, it felt like I was driving away from history. It was the first night the public would hear Pink Floyd's eleventh studio record, The Wall. |
Pink Floyd (Wall Era) (l-r) Richard Wright, David Gilmore, Nick
Mason and Roger Waters. |
I would hear The Wall in its entirety within a few days. A couple of my friends (or their older brothers) bought copies as soon as the record hit the stores, and I spent more than one weekend afternoon sitting cross-legged on someone’s bedroom floor as the album slowly turned on a stereo system that also occupied a place near the top of my teen-age wish list. |
| Gatefold interior of The Wall album. |
We would study Gerald Scarfe's unsettling artwork on the inner gatefold, pore over the lyric sheets tucked inside the sleeves, and try to make sense of a story that felt far more complicated and mysterious than the disco hits and straightforward rock and roll bangers that dominated the charts that autumn. The Wall wasn't the sort of album you simply played. It was a conceptual journey ripe for exploring.
The record eventually found its way into my own collection, although not until a year later when the family moved to London, Ontario, and I finally had my first turntable…an inexpensive Candle 590X which I purchased from the now-defunct Consumers Distributing Catalogue store in the autumn of 1980. |
| Candle 590X Turntable - inexpensive and sounded it. |
Forty dollars of babysitting money vanished in a single transaction, but for the first time I had a turntable of my own. To a teenager who measured wealth in albums rather than dollars, it felt like a sound financial decision. In fact, I was chuffed at how far I had advanced in my musical acquisitions. |
Consumers Distributing Catalogue Store - A Canadian fixture
frm 1957 - 1996 |
Pink Floyd’s The Wall appeared under the Christmas tree that year (1980) courtesy of my mom. At the time, she was working part-time at an Eaton’s department store demonstrating the latest miracle of modern technology: microwave ovens. |
Hotpoint Microwaves - along with Toshiba,
these were the models my mother was promoting. |
In the weeks leading up to Santa’s arrival, she asked "the young men" in the record department to help with my gift selection. Rather than trying to guess what a teen-age music fanatic might want, she trusted the experts behind the counter. (Pro move mom)
To their credit, they assembled a remarkably strong starter kit for a 15-year-old with expanding musical tastes:
Looking back, I have to admire their work. They spanned American country rock, new wave, British rock royalty, and one of the most ambitious concept albums ever recorded. Forty-five years later, I'd still call that a pretty good haul for one Christmas morning. Every artist “mom selected” became featured multiple times on 2012’s The 500 list. (Thank you, unknown Eaton’s Department Store Dudes!!) |
| One of the Eaton;s stores in London featured in a 1960s postcard. |
By 1983, I had begun treating "We don't need no education" less as a song lyric and more as a rough draft for my academic future. A year earlier, the movie version of The Wall was released in theatres and it had an even greater impact on my education than the album itself. I was in Grade 13, (later called O.A.C. for Ontario Academic Credits) -- a uniquely Ontario fifth year of high school that existed until 2003. For many students, Grade 13 provided an extra year to prepare for university. For me, it briefly became an opportunity to perfect the art of napping, movie watching and Pop Tart & Tea consumption.  |
| Vintage 1980s Pop Tart package. |
A high school friend once described his Grade 11 as "the best two years of my life." At the time I laughed at the joke. Then I proceeded to spend roughly two and a half years in Grade 13, accumulating enough credits to graduate and, much to my parents’ relief, qualify for university.
My extended learning curve was my own fault. However, I did have friends who were willing accomplices…in particular, my chum Steve Mackison. |
Steve was my roommate, a decade later, in 1993, pictured here
with my future wife, Angela. |
Steve was the first person I knew who owned a VCR. That may not sound especially impressive today, but in the early 1980s owning a video cassette player instantly transformed your home into a destination. Through an uncle whose sources remained somewhat mysterious, Steve also had access to an impressive and ever-changing collection of movies. Titles like Body Heat, Death Wish II, and Scarface circulated through his living room long before many of us were old enough to watch them legitimately..jpg) |
| Movie poster for Body Heat. |
More importantly for this story, he also acquired a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall movie Released on video that year and starring Bob Geldof as the troubled rock star Pink, the film transformed Roger Waters' sprawling concept album into a surreal visual experience filled with Gerald Scarfe's nightmarish animation, powerful symbolism, and imagery that could be interpreted, debated, and over-analyzed for hours…and we sure did, as Steve's house soon became the campus for an unofficial educational institution we dubbed Mackison 101. |
| Bob Geldof as Pink in the film version of The Wall. |
The schedule was flexible, but I do remember the autumn of 1984 when I attended first-period English because the teacher, Ms. Howse, was an extraordinary educator who redirected my rebellious and often unfocused teen-age self with patience, enthusiasm and a genuine passion for literature. However, after English, I would wander over to Steve's place during a second period spare. His parents, the kind and loving Babs and Wally, left for work early and returned late. The house was quiet, unsupervised, and home to one of the most comfortable pieces of furniture in my universe: a gigantic white sectional couch that could induce unconsciousness within minutes. |
| White, sectional sofa, similar in style to the Mackison's. |
Many mornings I would arrive intending to stay for an hour. Instead, I would wake up sometime near lunch, enjoy tea, eat a couple of Pop-Tarts, and settle in for whatever movie Steve was screening that day. Class schedules gradually lost their grip under such conditions.
The Wall became a particular favourite and to say I watched the film, at least in part, a hundred times is probably an understatement. I knew it the way I knew Monty Python sketches as a pre-teen and the Ontario Grade 7 math curriculum now. |
| The Wall, movie poster. |
Looking back, repeated viewings probably taught me quite a bit. I absorbed lessons about symbolism, metaphor, visual storytelling, alienation, grief, and the dangers of building psychological walls between ourselves and other people. I even learned about the perils of fascism and the defense of the Anzio Beachhead, which was part of the Allied Forces Italian Campaign in World War II. It was during this battle that principal songwriter for The Wall, Roger Waters, had lost his father…an event he wrote for the only song in the movie that is not on the original album, When The Tigers Broke Free. |
| Single for When The Tigers Broke Free - Pink Floyd. |
However, what I did not absorb, unfortunately, were the lessons being taught in the classes I was missing. University entrance applications, regrettably, weren’t asking prospective students to interpret the symbolism of "marching hammers" or the satirical sentiment intended in showing robotic British school children falling like lemmings into meat grinders in the film. That’s too bad…I would have earned a scholarship. |
| Screen capture from an animated sequence in The Wall film. |
Eventually, I made one of the smarter decisions of my teen years and transferred to another London high school, H.B Beal. The move wasn't motivated by academics alone, but it put some distance between me and the daily temptations of friends, including sessions of Mackison 101. By the time I began making friends at Beal, I had already developed better habits and found myself focused on something that had seemed optional for a while: passing courses.  |
| H.B. Beal Secondary School in London, Ontario. |
The result was a string of strong marks and successful completion of the remaining credits I needed for university admission. In the end, I escaped Grade 13 with both an education and a diploma. Whether The Wall helped or hindered that process probably depends on how I frame it. I still believe I am a better thinker and writer because of that record.
In retrospect, this Ontario teen “did need an education”. Thankfully, I found teachers willing to provide one (Tip of the hat to Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Lee, Ms. Howse and many others). I also owe a debt of thanks to Roger Waters, Pink Floyd and Mackison 101. Those experiences made me who I am today and I love the memories I created at a time in my life when I needed the friends I had and the music we listened to, including The Wall.
Things worked out fine for Steve too. He also graduated from Mackison 101, got into University and is currently The Venerable Steven Mackison, incumbent of the Church of the Redeemer in Toronto.
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