Thursday, March 13, 2014

Different Shades Of Pink

I was flipping around the channels the other night when I landed on our local PBS station. They were showing "Brit Floyd - Live At Red Rocks." There were a lot of reasons for me to take a few moments out of my evening to watch, and not because I had any particular need to donate to the endless beg-a-thon that seems to be going on during every broadcasting day. I was watching because I love the venue. Having spent a good portion of my youth warming those wood benches wedged between two mammoth outcroppings of sandstone, watching performances by everyone from Steve Martin to Talking Heads, it was like a little slice of home. I never saw Pink Floyd play there. I saw Roger Waters solo tour in Denver. This tribute band from England may be the closest thing to Pink on Red.
Soon, I wasn't watching. I was just listening. Sonically, the band was all but indistinguishable from the original. With no lasers on the ceiling to distract me, I found myself drifting back to my high school years: lights off, headphones on, listening to every sound. I remembered my senior year in high school when every gathering of my friends included a somewhat ritualistic playing of all four sides of "The Wall." Somehow, invariably, a friend of mine would find his way into my bedroom by the end of side three, where he would take some young thing to share mild indiscretions during "Comfortably Numb."
It wasn't until I was much older that I considered just how tragic a choice this was for a make out song. Sure, it was over six minutes long which made it ideal in some respects, but "Comfortably Numb?"
Relax.
I'll need some information first.
Just the basic facts.
Can you show me where it hurts? 

Kind of cold. Kind of distant. And it's only now, after a couple years of not getting a Christmas card from my buddy and his happy family that I found out that he was no longer with his happy family. According to his wife, now ex, he had "made some bad choices." I wondered if one of those choices was his high school make out song. That's when I changed the channel.

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