That Time Roger Waters Played "The Wall" Where Berlin’s Once Stood

31 years ago tonight, Mr. Roger Waters made good on a promise.

Thank fuck he did, too, for that oath begot one of the best rock concerts ever performed, and it’s one that warrants a revisit.

It wasn’t eight years before the fall of Berlin’s infamous wall — one that had split Germany into a two-state tug-of-war called “communism vs. democracy” — when the former Pink Floyd bassist swore he’d never play that seminal double album we all know until that damn wall fell.

So when Germans started taking the thing apart on the night of November 9, 1989, Waters knew what he had to do.

A street juggler takes his act to the top of the Berlin Wall.

Image: Yann Forget (Wikimedia Commons); November 16, 1989

Here’s the coolest part: The event was promoted as a fundraiser for the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, an initiative spearheaded by late British bomber pilot legend, Leonard Cheshire. Waters’ father, Eric Fletcher Waters, had served during World War II and he died in Nazi-occupied Italy in 1944.

Waters was five-months-old at the time, and never having met his old man meant he had an emotional stake in the whole thing.

"I was very angry," Waters said in a 2013 Guardian interview. "Because he was missing in action, presumed killed, until quite recently I expected him to come home."

It was that same thematic sense of abandonment that lies central within 1979’s The Wall, Pink Floyd’s 11th studio album and perhaps one of the greatest rock operas ever written.

Pink Floyd’s co-founder had some help that night in Berlin, with the likes of Joni Mitchell, The Band’s Garth Hudson and even Van Morrison doing their part in the name of ending war (the latter nails his version of “Comfortably Numb,” if you haven’t seen it.)

For the full concert in its entire glory, fire up that Sonos then play that video up top.

Have fun.

Talk about trips.

Image: Frank Dumont (Wikimedia Commons)