Thirty years ago, Pink Floyd put up The Wall and took it around the world, presenting it as an allegory for the way Roger Waters felt about the band's seeming detachment from its demanding fans. Since then, one man's acute disdain set to music has turned into a three-decades-old global love affair with a conceptual album featuring themes that continue to be relevant to this day.
My introduction to Pink Floyd came several years back on a fine spring day in Mississippi, when a kid named Stevie I knew from school but had never really hung around, was passing by on his bicycle. He stopped and we started chatting about something or another that basically involved him getting into some kind of trouble. That's what I remember most about Stevie — he smoked with the other bad kids in the woods by the football field and was always getting into some kind of trouble.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2010.