"Run, run, run, run."
An aged rocker repeats the line into a microphone, again and again.
Behind him, his band mate slaps out one of rock history's more famous bass riffs.
Meanwhile, a pig-shaped dirigible meanders above the audience, its antics accompanied by the crowd's clapping to the song's tempo and a chromatic, psychedelic light show.
No, it's not still 1981 – it's the Pink Floyd Experience.
The Pink Floyd Experience (or PFX, the group's self-styled abbreviation) is one of the nation's premier Floyd tribute bands. On Tuesday night, the San Diego-based group brought its award-winning, career-encapsulating, Roger Waters-venerating show to the CFA's Mainstage Theater.
The group wasted no time jumping into things, and kicked off the first half of its set with "Shine on You Crazy Diamond (1-5)" in all its 13-minute glory. The fidelity PFX showed the original material was evident – guitar tones and phrasing were nothing short of Gilmore-esque, the vocals had that stilted and half-shouted Roger Waters quality, and the band as a whole tried its damndest to maintain the subtleties found in the studio version while playing live, and succeeded.
Studio fidelity seemed to be the band's modus operandi, at least for the first half of the set: "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" was followed by "Welcome to the Machine," and then "Have a Cigar," and then the rest of 1975's Wish You Were Here, uninterrupted, in its entirety. Fidelity, indeed.
This isn't to say that the entire first half of the set was nothing but an unwaveringly and unthinkingly faithful recapitulation of Floyd's material, however: small embellishments were made here and there. Some of which – like having saxophonist Jesse Malloy play the ending solo of "Wish You Were Here" – were actually quite radical.
"We're going to take a bit of a break, but we're going to be back soon with some more amazing music," said guitarist Zachary Throne after an uninterrupted 45 minutes of mimetic Floyd – the first words said to the audience (aside from lyrics) since the band took the stage.
The second hour of PFX was a lot less rigid than the first. For one, there was no long, nonstop rendition of Animals or Dark Side of the Moon (as cool as that would have been). Rather, the setlist was a collection of Pink Floyd staples with a sampling of B-sides mixed in; everything from "Time" and "Money" to "Set the Controls to the Heart of the Sun" was fair game.
Accompanying the Experience was one of the better light shows to ever grace the Mainstage Theater: "Echoes" and other songs in the group's psychedelic fare were complemented by weaving chromatic lights; "Learning to Fly" by cool blues; "Money" by unnatural greens and bronzes. The lighting walked the fine line of wowing in its own right while not superseding the performed material.
More hit-or-miss were the supporting visualizations each song had. While most tunes' videos took the abstract route – amorphous shapes and pulsating tendrils, à la iTunes visualizer – some looked like music videos made from stock footage and clip art. One particularly egregious example was the visualization of "Money," which featured contrasting scenes of excess and poverty, bills with the motto "root of all evil," and other images whose underlying purpose was to be as heavy-handed as possible.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the Pink Floyd Experience experience was the general tone and atmosphere of the show: rather than the morose self-importance that has characterized everything Roger Waters has been a part of since 1975, the show's tone was relatively feel-good and lighthearted. Occasionally interrupting the Floyd onslaught were short interludes – a stand-alone guitar or bass solo, for instance, or just some generally positive words from one of the band members – while the show itself ended with a sing-along to "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)" accompanied by a decidedly happy-looking and winged Battersea pig.
The Pink Floyd Experience is currently on a national tour. Future dates include shows at Storrs, Conn. and Lynn, Mass.
Email: arts@ubspectrum.com
