Last night Roger Waters performed his first of five scheduled Southern California tour dates at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Waters is currently touring in celebration of the 30th year anniversary of the original release of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Accompanying him is a full band and various tremendous stage props used throughout the performance, creating a one-of-a-kind, spectacular, intricate experience. Photos by Lindsey Best

Setlist:
First half:
1 ) In The Flesh?
2 ) The Thin Ice
3 ) Another Brick In The Wall Part 1
4 ) The Happiest Days Of Our Lives
5 ) Another Brick In The Wall Part 2
6 ) Mother
7 ) Goodbye Blue Sky
8 ) Empty Spaces
9 ) Back To The Wall
10 ) Young Lust
11 ) One Of My Turns
12 ) Don’t Leave Me
13 ) Another Brick In The Wall part 3
14 ) Goodbye Cruel World
___
Second half:
15 ) Hey You
16 ) Is There Anybody Out There?
17 ) Nobody Home
18 ) Vera
19 ) Bring The Boys Back Home
20 ) Comfortably Numb
21 ) The Show Must Go On
22 ) In The Flesh
23 ) Run Like Hell
24 ) Waiting For The Worms
25 ) Stop
26 ) The Trial
27 ) Outside The Wall

[View with PicLens]

Roger Waters plays two more shows at  Staples Center, November 30th + December 5th, then Honda Center in Anaheim on December 13th + December 14th

To promote the tour, Waters’ street team (I guess promoters would be more accurate) have been painting an Eisenhower quote about peace all over walls in major metropolitan areas. But they chose the wrong wall in L.A. recently: They painted over the Elliott Smith memorial wall, a section of concrete that Smith’s fans have been using as a makeshift memorial since his death.

“It was absolutely an accident,” Waters said. “I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed (the team) to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.” [Read More]

Eminence Front and Hula Hoops: Having no choice, I’ll own being the guy who looks like Sting standing in the back of L.A. rock venues scribbling on fragments of actual paper. I don’t mind the work and only tourists take the actual cat before their faces as the for-reals-dawg Gordon Sumner of two decades ago. Thus does my faith in human intelligence dim a little every year at Coachella, the giant music and art festival held annually in remote and dusty Indio. It was my fourth time covering the event and first for L.A. RECORD, a publication I’m happy to report needs zero introduction among the rock cognoscenti swamped inside the variegated mass of bikers, geezers, ravekids, hucksters, b-boyz, flygirls, mainstream families and, yes, tourists; with every twentieth of the latter pointing a tentative digit at my face and mouthing “Aren’t you…” under the all-obliterating sonic uproar. Such hopeful gawkerati also spotted Paris Hilton in the crowd this year, along with Jared Leto, Alicia Silverstone, David Hasselhoff, Reese Witherspoon, Keenan Ivory Wayans and more sweating with the commonality at this Great American Rockshow. Bitsy, my driver and plus-one, has a pleasant form of celebrity as the bomb-ass chick whose hula-hoop workout on the roof of her building in the Hollywood flats draws hundreds of daily spectators, with necks craning from as far as the Roosevelt Hotel. Her hips and hoop carved us a path this past weekend through a mob made agreeable, even buttery, by some of the best music likely ever played in Riverside County.

Time Waits For One Man: The weather on Friday was excellent, so Felix Da Housecat’s set at the Sahara was packed to overflow with ravers and my driver drew the first of many crowds with her hooping. At the big stage, the Airborne Toxic Event disappointed, seeming to wilt a bit in their dark clothes, but the Black Keys turned in a rousing gutbucket-rock set done in the grand manner, channeling the first-wave festival eminences like Deep Purple and the Who. Going next, Franz Ferdinand hit the mark completely, turning in a polished and ferocious performance that rocked many a skeptical veteran of the Glaswegians’ mainstage outings in previous years. The crowd at mainstage next came to grips with Morrissey, with the celebrated (if tubby) romantic opening for headliner Paul McCartney. Alas, we were far away at the Gobi (throwing down to heroic dancefloor sets by Bug and Peanut Butter Wolf) when Moz threw his celebrated bitchfit, storming offstage in the middle of his performance, his still-fetching nose sickened by the smell of frying burgers. Leaving a whirling Bitsy with our cool-as-fuck campmates, I met my friend Kirsten at the Do Lab’s rocking misting station, and we dallied at Silversun Pickups’ triumphant star turn on the Outdoor Stage. I’ve followed these local prodigies from their earliest appearences and they laid into the audience with new songs off Swoon, a long-awaited sophomore album fitting punky rhythms, sheets of decorative noise and an adroit four-fingered salute to Iron Butterfly into the band’s established sound. Guitarist Brian Auber bitched wittily about the Cute Beatle, as the rest of Friday night began shutting down and we drifted to the mainstage for the Act We’ve Known For All These Years.

Anon roared the profound nonsense of “Jet” and a spry and slender sexagenarian named Sir Paul McCartney went on a 33-song stomp though one of the premier music catalogs of the twentieth century. The set incorporated songs by John and George along with a few surprises and a long trawl through his 1970s and ‘80s Wings albums. From the square of way upfront where we stood, it looked like a big chunk of Macca’s present-day fanbase is composed of tender-looking indie-pop kids and these imps were as blown away as any of the hard-bitten journos who raved of Friday’s finale. Like the peachfuzztone young ‘uns prostrate before Roger Waters at last year’s festival, they’d come to see someone (correctly) regarded as one of the Immortals and a still-vibrant presence in their own rock ‘n’ roll lives. Sir Paul outlasted everything else on the lot, going on almost an hour past the 1 AM closing. Looking at beginnings of the second-highest take in festival history, organizers wisely decided the $1000-a-minute the city of Indio charges for after-curfew music was the merest bagatelle.

We Are the Night: The hour was well advanced by the time we made it out to the Polo Grounds on for Saturday’s bop-til-you-drop. Drive-By Truckers were shivering to a bravura conclusion with a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” at the Outdoor as Michael Franti & Spearhead (who were playing late-night desert gatherings of Burners just a few years back) were vibing tribally from the big stage. Passing the Mojave stage on our way to dance to the Bloody Beetroots DJ set at the Sahara, I saw a tiny Henry Rollins deep within, belaboring a milling fringe of onlookers like the village atheist. As the sun went down, longtime Coachella vets Thievery Corporation did a rousing beat-heavy set on the mainstage, heavy with their patented thundering harmonics and bracing agitprop. I left the din with a lovely campmate named Kat to check out Booker T. & the DBTs, with members of Drive-By Truckers backing organist Booker T. Jones, venerable anchor of 1960s soul giant Stax Records, in a welter of raw Dixie funk. Our by-then swollen party skipped Turbonegro and passed on M.I.A. for the dance-dance immolation incinerating the Sahara for the rest of the night. I heard about the Killers’ less-than-adequate mainstage turn at soured secondhand and felt glad to have trusted my social instincts, as first mash-up kings Crookers then a DJ set by the Chemical Brothers then a balls-out performance by MSTRKRFT slammed beats into a writhing mob of friendlies, with Chem Bros. lifting an already bliss-dosed, e-sodden, candy-flipped-out mob into the stratosphere with a robot-chant of “Some chemicals are good/Some chemicals are bad.” True dat, but the bad were mainly rotten vibes emitted by a pushy wedge of aristos pitching random helots out of the way a few feet from my group. Online sources credit Paris Hilton and her entourage with the brief disturbance, but from what I saw, the culprits could’ve been any clutch of overdressed Hollywood Boulevard shitheels. It was just like a night in the L.A. underground, minus the sketchy nabes and a chance of being mugged.

Feedback Apocalypse: We’d raged hard the night before and the sun was well along its path before Bitsy and I struck camp Sunday afternoon and loaded out for the festival. Staying since Thursday night at a campground by the Salton Sea with a group of sexy party-hardy Burners had the great advantage of dead calm at night, broken every few hours by the symphonic Doppler roar of a Union Pacific freight train high-balling by. Jointly feeling heat exhaustion and sleep deprivation while singly spacing out from individualized drug intake, we tootled the three-dozen miles to Indio on an overheated engine, arriving just in time to miss Perry Ferrell’s now-traditional Sunday DJ slot at the Sahara. We got our groove on briefly with Plump DJs, before gliding past hundreds of exhausted attendees for whom a hooping hottie and some mutant looking like Sting held no interest. We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. I can’t imagine how the Horrors could hear even themselves going off at the Gobi many hundreds of yards away. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties. The crowd, thus blitzed and shit-hammered, was easy mop-up for the Cure, since even the dirgiest of their album tracks sound like 1910 Fruitgum Company by comparison. Bitsy was limp with exhaustion, but these Byronic proto-goths are her favorite-ever band and she was soon slicing circles through the audience with her hoop. I let her decide when she’d had enough and escorted her out when she did, leaving the headliners to what observers described as a power-trawl through B-sides and obscurities that went on until approximately 1:30 a.m. when organizers pulled the plug and the band did two more numbers in the dark. About 70 minutes later, I was standing in front of my crib in Boyle Heights, watching Bitsy’s taillights fade up the street. On my desk was a notice that the cheerful folks at the Lugo Station post office had my ticket to Burning Man 2009. Bon temps roulez, motherfuckos.

—Ron Garmon

Swervedriver “Last Train To Satansville”

Swervedriver collided ‘Sister Ray’ into Ennio Morricone and released four full-lengths before breaking up after an unfair share of debilitating circumstance. They will be reuniting (with Adam Franklin, Jim Hartridge, Jez Hindmarsh and Steve George) this Sunday at Coachella, and will also be playing L.A. at the end of May. Adam Franklin speaks now from his home in England.

Was the decision to reunite actually made over pints in a pub?
Pretty much—I was in the states again and Jimmy had called, and had mentioned it. It would periodically get mentioned, and this time around it seemed like everyone was up for it. So we met up, sat down, and decided what we wanted to do.
What did you want to do?
See what happens, really—there’s never been that much of a career sensibility to this band. I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll bands should have that outlook, though it can be a career. The reasons we broke up in the first place was because we weren’t really enjoying it. This time around—it’s ten years on, and the people who saw us ten years ago would love to see us again, and a bunch of people have sprung up in the interim—it could be a good time!
Did your old drummer Graham really leave that first tour in Niagara Falls by saying he was gonna get a sandwich and then never coming back?
That has a basis in fact—maybe the story’s become slightly exaggerated. We were at the border waiting to go into Canada, and waiting for our papers to be handed in, and he said he was going to go out and get a sandwich. And he didn’t reappear. And Canadian immigration came in and said, ‘One of your party has defected.’ We found him wandering in no man’s land—he didn’t want to get back on the bus, so we left him at the border and left him money to get where he needed to go. A week into the tour and the drummer had left.
Did that prepare you for further inconveniences?
You’d think so. We managed to not miss any shows on that tour.
Is it true that you and Jim are so psychically linked that you’ll be playing complimentary guitar parts in completely different rooms?
I think that came from a song on Mezcal Head—the way we ended up doing it, Jez was in one room, I’m in one room and Jim was in a third room playing guitar. That might be from Jez hearing me on the right hand headphone and Jim on the other, and us playing off each other in different rooms. But we must have rehearsed the song in a room all together at some point! What’s always been good about Swervedriver—we can intertwine those guitar lines, but live we realize we can’t play them that conveniently, so we swap parts around. And when we get together, it’s like—‘Who actually plays that solo?’
Do you finish each other’s sentences, too?
The rhythm section had a nickname for us—‘the man with two brains.’ And we came back calling them the ‘prog-rock brothers.’ They’d be playing some prog-rock monstrosity in the back of the bus.
What’s your own favorite prog-rock monstrosity?
Oh, that wouldn’t be me—that’s them! I could be misquoting Jez, but I think he’s quite a big fan of Phil Collins. Sort of the early Genesis.
What’s the best record you ever borrowed from your brother?
He was always very up on the kind of late-‘60s psychedelic punk stuff—13th Floor Elevators, Chocolate Watch Band, all those Pebbles albums and the U.K. equivalent—Chocolate Soup for Diabetics. It was definitely outside the mainstream of what I would have heard otherwise. I guess the mainstream for a 14-year-old kid then was Echo and the Bunnymen, and then you find out the Bunnymen were influenced by the Elevators. So my brother’s record collection was a big influence for sure.
What does he do now?
He DJs an online radio show—he used to do it in London, but now he has all the gear at home, so he just sits in his bedroom. It’s just like being back in his bedroom ages ago!
So the entire world is now his little brother.
Exactly.
Are there any other hidden sounds in the songs besides the Harley on ‘Last Train To Satansville’?
There’s a lyric in ‘Satansville’ about ‘my drink’ or ‘having a drink,’ and you hear the clink of glasses. We were quite into the sort of subsonic things you’re not quite aware you’re hearing—I can’t remember if it’s ‘Duress’ or ‘Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn’ but there was a sound we used a lot of church bells at a certain point. All at a level you couldn’t make out what you’re hearing, but you’re definitely aware of it. Pianos and things—sitar on ‘Lose That Feeling’—I think that’s the great thing about having the studio different from the live things. The bits of sound hidden under the mix.
What do you think of the idea that Swervedriver didn’t sell records because everyone who liked you was in the industry and getting them for free anyway?
I haven’t heard that one! That’s sort of the same story for every band. In some ways, Swervedriver could be seen as a musician’s band. But I think it’s a myth when people say Swervedriver were the unluckiest band in the world. I think there are plenty less fortunate. Everything we recorded did get released eventually—plenty of bands did records and the label said ‘not good enough, more vocals, less guitar,’ or there were bands that had people standing over their shoulders telling them how to mix. We never had anything like that. And it’s not like there’s a hidden album we can’t get released.
What’s the rarest release? Is there anything you don’t have?
The biggest thing that sucks is that back catalog isn’t out there because of signing with a major. If you sign a stupid contract to get the music out there, at some point you might get bitten in the ass later on. Which kind of happened now.
How are you deciding what to put in the set?
If anything, getting back together after ten years encourages you to streamline everything—‘We don’t really need to play THAT song!’ There are enough good songs to play that if you start making a list, you fill up the time allotment quickly. We aren’t gonna go play all obscure b-sides—but there are songs we never played back in the day, like album tracks that only ever got a few outings. ‘Why didn’t we play that very often? That’s a great song!’ There’s some we probably haven’t played for fifteen or twenty years.
What song have you missed the most?
The first that come to mind are probably ‘Birds’ from the third album and ‘Sandblasted’ from the first—those two are in the pocket! It’s great to play those again.
What was the last song of the last Swervedriver set?
I’m not sure—I remember the last but one, we played ‘Mustang Ford.’ I wanted to play that at the last show but the moment passed by. It may have been ‘Duress’ or ‘Kill The Superheroes.’ I’m not sure if anyone has the set list from the last show.
You have your song ‘Ramonesland’—what would ‘Swervedriverland’ be?
The thing about ‘Ramonesland’—the song is almost Leonard Cohen-y, and the guy in the song finds himself in a Cohen mood, but wants to be in Ramonesland! People expect it to be a punk rock end to the album—it confuses them! I guess Swervedriverland would be like the earlier driving songs.
Like the desert in the movie Duel?
That’s a big influence on the mood of the songs—I don’t know how we settled on that. There’s a great Butthole Surfers track on Hairway To Steven that has this psychedelic Latin American skies thing going on. It’s cool taking the imagery of those early songs—there’s more to it than driving a car in the desert. ‘Son Of Mustang Ford’ is all about wanting to escape things—about boredom, really, kids not enjoying the small town they’re living in, and wanting something else, and not knowing exactly what it is. As a band, one time someone lent us their Mustant, and the four of us drove around in it. Like I was telling someone before—the writer from L.A. WEEKLY—the first time we drove through Arizona, we were playing Kraftwerk’s Transeurope Express. I don’t know if we were trying to be perverse! Things I remember—driving into Berlin, and as we drove past the Brandenburg Gate, ‘Star Spangled Banner’ by Jimi Hendrix came on. And driving in Belfast past barbed wire and 18-year-old British soldiers—we had one of those CDs like the recording of ‘Good Vibrations,’ and that was playing as we were basically driving around a war zone. It’s always good to throw those things on their head a little. All music can sound great in all kinds of situations. Like ‘60s Indian pop music while driving around London.
How did you get free dental work from playing in Swervedriver?
You heard about that one? I was playing a show in Hamilton, Ontario, and a guy said, ‘Hey, Adam, can I interest you in a drink? And by the way, I’m actually a dentist, so if you ever want any dental work for free for all the music over the years, give me a call!’ I said thanks, but didn’t think I’d ever take it up. And then a few months later, I was eating my dinner and felt my tooth getting a bit weird, so thought maybe I’d get that dental work done. I was living in the states then and I didn’t have insurance, so I flew up to Buffalo and he picked me up and sorted out my teeth. As it turns out, there were a whole bunch of guys following us around then—all in dental school, and the guy who sort of runs our web page is one of them. So all these dental students were back in the day listening to this music with harsh searing guitar sounds.
Because they loved that dental drill?
Exactly. There’s something in that!

SWERVEDRIVER WITH ROGER WATERS, LOVE AND ROCKETS, SPIRITUALIZED, MURS AND MANY MORE ON SUN., APRIL 27, AT COACHELLA AT THE EMPIRE POLO FIELD, 81-800 AVE. 51, INDIO. 5 PM / $90-$269 / ALL AGES. COACHELLA.COM. VISIT SWERVEDRIVER AT SWERVEDRIVER.COM.