AUBURN HILLS — The last time Roger Waters came to the Palace, during October of 2010, he built a wall.
Kind of hard to top, no?
Truth be told, the Pink Floyd co-founders Us + Them Tour doesn’t necessarily better the spectacle that was The Wall Live all those years ago. But on Wednesday night, Aug. 2, it certainly added another jaw-dropping chapter to the Waters’ and Floyd’s legacy for immersive visual spectacle and conceptual grandeur, mesmerizing the Palace crowd throughout the course of the two-hour and 10-minute (plus intermission) show.
Spending most of the night celebrating Pink Floyd, and 1973’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” album in particular, Waters and his nine-piece band let things sneak up on the audience, too. The hour-long first half was, by Waters’ standards, austere, a massive rear-stage video screen providing the pizazz as the group worked its way through a mixture of Floyd favorites — including a ferocious “One Of These Days,” “Welcome To The Machine” and “Wish You Were Here” — along with a selection of material for Waters’ politically pointed new album “Is This The Life We Really Want?”
The harbinger of what was to come, however, came during “Another Brick In The Wall (Part III)” as Waters and company were joined by a dozen area youths who — with no rehearsal time since the band’s arrival was delayed by weather — mimed and danced along to the chorus, dropping their orange inmate-style jumpsuits to reveal black Resist T-shirts.
The show’s second half, meanwhile, was as lavish as the first was spare, and even more unapologetically provocative. Using a line of video screens stretching the length of Palace floor, recreating London’s Battersea Power Station used for the cover of the 1977 album “Animals” as the group played a pair of its songs, “Dogs” and the epic “Pigs (Three Different Ones).” Both set the tone for a virulently anti-Trump political treatise that extended deep into the set, using sataristic animations and news images labeling him a “Charade” and, of course, the flying inflatable pig that flew through the Palace, this time emblazoned protest messages. The “Dark Side” tracks “Money,” “Us And Them” and the new “Smell The Roses” continued the theme with even more visual effects and overwhelming, if not total, approval from the Palace crowd.
But Waters and company managed to top even that with “Brain Damage/Eclipse,” which culminated with a “Dark Side” pyramid made of lasers shimmering over the front portion of the arena floor and an inflatable moon flying over the crowd. An encore of “Comfortably Numb” — with more lasers, confetti, Davey Kilminster’s killer interpretation of David Gilmour’s trademark guitar solo and Waters walking through the pit, pressing flesh with the fans — was the proverbial icing on an audio-visual treat. Waters’ politics, whether related to the U.S., his homeland of Britain or the Middle East, may rile many, but he proved on Wednesday that his knack for putting on a memorable show is irreproachable.
Review Courtesy Of Gary Graff
Capacity 23,000+
The Palace of Auburn Hills, commonly referred to as The Palace, is a sports and entertainment venue in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Michigan. The arena opened in 1988 and is the home of the Detroit Pistons of the National Basketball Association (NBA). It was the home of the Detroit Shock of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League, the Detroit Safari of the Continental Indoor Soccer League, and the Detroit Fury of the Arena Football League.
The Palace was built with 180 luxury suites, considered an exorbitant number when it opened, but it has consistently managed to lease virtually all of them. In December 2005, the Palace added five underground luxury suites, each containing 450 square feet (42 m2) of space and renting for $450,000 per year. Eight more luxury suites, also located below arena level, were opened in February 2006. They range in size from 800 to 1,200 square feet (74 to 111 m2) and rent for $350,000 annually. The architectural design of the Palace, including its multiple tiers of luxury suites, has been used as the basis for many other professional sports arenas in North America since its construction
(Thanks to Robert Perry for sending in the ticket scans)
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