Even among the most acclaimed albums ever recorded, not a single one is perfect. That goes more so for the releases of what I call the “heroic age of the album,” which enjoyed its zenith around the late seventies. Not coincidentally, 1979 was the year that Pink Floyd put out The Wall, a rock opera whose sprawl across two discs deals with themes ranging from the bombings of the Second World War to drug dependency to fascist impulses to the isolation of superstardom. This ambition was repaid: The Wall soon became the best-selling double album of all time, despite having been received with at least a measure of ambivalence over the grandness, or perhaps grandiosity, of the scale of its production and the tone of its narrative.
Yet those few prepared to call The Wall an artistic failure must nevertheless acknowledge how much impressive work it really does contain. Of its popularly appreciated achievements, perhaps the most memorable is David Gilmour’s guitar solo, or rather the guitar solos, on “Comfortably Numb,” a song about being medically revived from a substance-induced stupor moments before giving a concert.
They certainly stuck in my own head in seventh grade, when my music teacher assigned our class term paper analyzing the album, and kept popping back into it over the subsequent decades. “His playing is so lyrical,” says YouTuber David Hartley in his new video about the making of “Comfortably Numb.” “The way he plays each note is in a way that you can almost sing it, and the way he uses phrases is so simple, and so beautiful.”
These solos were recorded in a context of less-than-smooth sailing for the Floyd: as we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, “Comfortably Numb” was the product of another argument punctuating the long-fraying partnership between Gilmour and lead singer Roger Waters, for whom The Wall was a way of rendering his own life experiences and perceptions in musical form. But as sometimes happens, conflict — in this case, between two competing and starkly different concepts of the song, whose evolution Hartley explains with demo recordings and interview clips — produced a greater result than any one artist’s vision. It all arrives at what Hartley calls “possibly the greatest guitar solo of all time,” which closes out side three, and indeed the most fruitful era of Gilmour and Waters’ collaboration. Even those who can’t take The Wall too seriously have to admit that life isn’t necessarily easy for a rock star, much less for two of them in the same studio.
Related content:
The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Part Series
Oxford Scientist Explains the Physics of Playing Electric Guitar Solos
David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Comfortably Numb” Live (2006)
The Evolution of the Rock Guitar Solo: 28 Solos, Spanning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Minutes
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
