Sunday, September 30, 2007

The Pink Floyd Experience


Generations of writers have struggled to describe the magic of watching a live Pink Floyd performance. Likewise, generations of bands have struggled even more to reproduce that magic playing Pink Floyd covers. Thursday night at the Peoria Civic Center, another eclectic band of artists went down trying to achieve this heroic feat.

But this isn't a music review. It's a recollection of the 'experience' - of how I spent my college days listening to so much of this band, never thinking I'd even come close to a live performance, and then suddenly it comes upon me. Albeit second hand. Albeit in a sit down theater. Albeit in the midst of Americans come together to watch the works of a British band, raising their Bud Lites every so often to ask for an encore.

A day after the concert, I pardoned myself for going in with visions of 'grand', 'phenomenal', 'cosmic'. The experience wasn't that. The screen responsible for spinning out psychedelia was the size of a quarter. It was almost heartening that it was pushed way back on the stage, so you didn't have to bother with it after some initial enthusiasm. The vocals and stringwork was the work of true disciples, but the sound wasn't up to scratch. And for the priciest ticket, we had to satisfy ourselves with a very crappy angle.

So, I do sound like I hated the experience. No. I just had to get those regulation complaints out of the way. You tend to cut people a lot of slack who say they 'perform' Pink Floyd. And this band on Thursday wasn't a ragtag bunch of mafioso pulled together to rip people off. Maybe the riverfront was a better venue for the event, and you believe this until you visit the Experience website when you realize that a sit-down event was planned for "intimacy".

I'm grateful to the Civic Center that it brought this experience to town while I was still here. I'm grateful to this band because they performed like devotees. They played Brain Damage too. I feel like calling a college buddy and telling him, "Now, listen you f*&%face, I've been to a Pink Floyd show, OK." That'll take care of those bastards. Or, at least, it would have once upon a time.

I can't close this piece without a word of praise for Siddhant. At the start of the show, I was prepared to forfeit it all if he felt uneasy. I was prepared to walk out with him, and let him have his brand of entertainment - running from one end of the corridor to the other, and running back. But this boy stayed. For the full two hours. He clapped too when he felt like it.

Maybe it was the experience.
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