THE ONE WE SHOULD HAVE DONE

I may be covering the Wall, but my favorite Pink Floyd record may well be 1977's "Animals." This album, and the subsequent tour ("Pink Floyd In the Flesh") was one of the first (and biggest) bricks in the Wall, after all. It was on the last date of this tour, in Montreal, that Roger Waters found himself focusing his wrath on a particular fan in the front row. In the end, Rog spat on him, and it was just a matter of time before there was a wall between the Floyd and their audience.

The album itself is great. Bookended by two simple acoustic numbers ("Pigs on the Wing," parts 1 and 2), the band rips through only three songs-"Dogs," "Pigs," and "Sheep." An easy way to characterize the three types of people in Roger's world (at least at the time of this record). I'm sure he would have placed himself in the Dogs category, and his audience in with the Sheep. The politicians are the Pigs, and he even gives a little shoutout to Mary Whitehouse, who for thirty years was a public morals campaigner in England. She rose to national attention with her "Clean Up TV Act of 1964," and is immortalized here as a "house proud town mouse" who's "trying to keep our feelings off the street." Think of her as the British Tipper Gore. Roger certainly did.

The 23rd Psalm is parodied in "Sheep," and if you don't have a copy of the lyrics, here they are (as read through a vocoder on the record they're a bit hard to decipher)...

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives he releaseth my soul
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places
He converteth me to lamb cutlets.
For Lo, He hath great power and great hunger
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
through quiet reflection and great dedication,
master the art of karate
Lo, we shall rise up
and then we'll make the buggers eyes water.

That's poetry.

In the end, the sheep do rise up, killing the dogs, but the last verse of the song swing things back around....

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home, and do as you're told
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

So maybe it's just a parable, told from one dog to another.

Are you a dog, a pig, or a sheep? If you'd met Roger Waters in 1977, he could've told you. For now, it's a great album, played by a band that was barely a band, at the height of their powers. Only two years later they'd build the Wall.