Tear down the wall!

Ryan and I went to see Roger Waters perform “The Wall” at Wrigley Field Friday night, and it was pretty amazing. The stage was enormous, and the wall they constructed covered the entire outfield, from foul pole to foul pole. It was over 3 stories high, and it served as a giant projection screen for much of the show, too.

If you’ve ever seen this production, or even just know the songs from this Pink Floyd double-album, you know “The Wall” is rife with anti-government, anti-politics, anti-establishment overtones. So there were plenty of hammers, a giant fascist pig floating around the stadium at one point, a video tribute to fallen soldiers from all eras projected on the massive wall, a model bomber plane that crashed into the wall in flames, an opening montage of fireworks, and a general f*** the man sentiment throughout the concert.

Ryan is a HUGE Pink Floyd fan, and although I’m not nearly as big a fan as he is, I do know most of the songs from the album. In particular though, my favorites from this show were Waters’ duet with himself from a 1980 show singing “Mother”, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (the one with, “hey, teacher! leave those kids alone!”), and “Comfortably Numb”. You know, all the songs non-Pink Floyd fans know.

I must admit, the huge tribute to all the fallen soldiers was extremely moving, especially since they projected a number of civilians too. It began with his father, who was a British Army pilot shot down in World War II and included a ton of children from today’s conflicts. It literally brought me to tears.

The show ended with the wall coming down amid chants of “Tear down the wall!” as the giant floating pig covered in fascist slogans that I mentioned above was grabbed by the crowd and ripped to shreds. It was a pretty amazing spectacle.

Unfortunately, the awesomeness was marred by one huge lowlight. Our seats were excellent – front row directly behind the Cubs dugout, first 2 seats on the aisle, almost dead center of the stage. Basically as close as you could get to being on the field without paying the extra $100+. But apparently the entire rest of our section had dubbed these as “no standing” seats.

Now, riddle me this – when have you ever gone to a concert, let alone in an outdoor venue and seeing PINK FLOYD, and not stood at any point in the show? Yeah, me neither. NEVER.

Someone in at least each of the handful of rows behind us at some point yelled at Ryan to sit down. And to his credit, he kept his cool pretty well for almost the entire show. He was extremely accommodating, trying to either sit on the back of his chair so as not to be up so high, seeing if standing in the aisle instead would work (it didn’t), or simply just sitting back down after a minute.

He was even proactive, knowing this was going to get ugly if they didn’t shut up, and asked the usher 1) if we were, in fact, allowed to stand in those seats (of course we were!), and 2) if we could be moved because of all the complaining. The usher was very understanding, told us that we could definitely stand in our seats, came down and even told the people behind us so (too bad that didn’t shut them up), but was unfortunately unable to move us at intermission.

The worst offenders were this group of 3 women directly behind us. They obviously were neither Roger Waters nor Pink Floyd fans, and had to look the band up on Google on their phones at intermission. Huh?? Why are you sitting in such great seats then? At one point, the chick in the middle reached around and shined the camera flash on her phone right in Ryan’s face. WHO DOES THAT??

Finally with about 10 minutes left in the show we simply left our seats. We moved over about 2 sections, where EVERYONE was standing, and watched the remainder from there, in seats not nearly as good as the ones FOR WHICH WE PAID. As we were walking up the aisle to move, the crowd of course thought we were being kicked out and shouted at us to “enjoy the rest of the show you asshole”, and one guy from a few rows back even threw his beer at Ryan. WHAT?!?!?

Sorry for all the caps, but my god, people. How about some maturity? You are grown-ass men! And yes, I know Ryan was finally shouting back at the end, but come on. I can’t disagree with him at all – we were in no way in the wrong, we had to stand to see the stage over the crowd of people on the field, and we weren’t even standing the whole time, only during the climactic songs when Waters urged the crowd to get into it himself.

You know I hate confrontation, so my route was to simply ignore the heckling, and it seemed to work. No one said anything to me directly. Granted, I never once turned around to look at who the heckler was or said one word back to anybody, and I did try to keep Ryan from doing so. But finally he’d had enough and I couldn’t do anything about it. I saw neither the phone flash nor beer being thrown since I was trying to be as oblivious as possible and simply watch the show, and maybe it’s better that I missed those antics. I think I would’ve flipped out on those douchebags if I had witnessed such childish, ridiculous behavior. As the only 100% sober person there, I can say without bias that everyone was just being stupid.

We did get to see the end of the show from the other seats and didn’t have to miss anything, but still. Talk about a horrible way to end an otherwise spectacular concert. I felt particularly bad for Ryan since I knew how much he was looking forward to this and Pink Floyd is his all-time favorite band, but fortunately he said it didn’t ruin his entire weekend, just that little piece of the show. Overall he was still definitely glad we went. Good.

So sorry Wrigley fans, but your concertgoers are some of the worst, most obnoxious people I’ve ever been around. This experience has definitely soured me on ever going back there. At least the rest of the weekend was fantastic – we spent the remainder at my mom and stepdad’s house, enjoyed some delicious smoked pork from the inaugural run of their new smoker/grill, soaked up as much sun as we could stand before it got too hot, and watched Della run around playing with everything in sight.

Summer is here, my friends. And I say bring it on! Just not at Wrigley!