Tear Down the Wall

After a successful Christmas for me and the wife, the year starts all over again.  A little closer every day until Moving Day, and the possibilities are endless.  And with all the changes going on at my store, it looks like I will be ending my Publix career on a high note.  Our new Store Manager came in to start with us last week, and so far this guy is a hit.  He's been doing everything possible to make the employees at my store feel like they are actually part of a team, and not just us working for him.  On top of that, he's been taking the initiative to help out just about every department in my store, working side by side, doing the down-and-dirty work that the rest of us do.  That's a little thing I'd like to call leading by example.  Seems to me that he's in the mindset of "I won't have my employees do something that I won't do myself."  Something that our previous Store Manager was unwilling to do.  She didn't care about any of us at all, even going so far as to tell our new Grocery Manager that she didn't care that my department was shorthanded.  In my opinion, our previous manager had no business running a beat-up, mom and pop, hole in the wall gas station, let alone a grocery store that's part of a multimillion dollar company.  So, to my new store manager, welcome.  It's good to have you aboard.  Moving along with said changes, it appears that our Division Manager is gone as well, and that is even better.  In the time that he has run this division, he has unjustly fired or demoted several people I've had the pleasure to work with or know.  Every time he has come to my store to "visit," he's threatened the jobs of several workers, very good workers, and pretty much just threw his weight around just because he could.  He always did everything he could to make my department's job as unnecessarily difficult as possible.  He was a bully, a piece of garbage, and I cannot be happier that he's gone.

Instead of a Second Chance CD of the Week this time around, I give to you...

2nd Chance Concert of the Week
Roger Waters
The Wall: Live in Berlin 1990 
 
A couple weeks ago I was able to pick up a DVD copy of Roger Waters' "The Wall: Live in Berlin 1990" concert.  I had seen the show for the first time about ten years ago, and I forgot how much that show gets to me.  It took place at the former site of the Berlin Wall, almost a year after it came down, and is a performance, from beginning to end, of the classic Pink Floyd album "The Wall."  I've reviewed that album before, and when you get down to the meaning of the 1979 album, you know how close it hits me.  This performance featured guest performance by several of the most popular bands and artists from the time period, such as Cyndi Lauper, Scorpions, Joni Mitchell, Bryan Adams, and Sinead O'Connor.  In front of the crowd of over 350,000 Germans, The Wall was made from a simple concept album to a full-on rock opera.  It's only appropriate that German natives the Scorpions opened the show with the album's opening track "In the Flesh?" With every subsequent song played on the album, a wall is being constructed little by little, representing the metaphorical "wall" being built around him by the main character of the original album representing the several tragedies in his life.  The entire performance is accompanied by the Rundfunk Orchestra & Choir, The Band, and the Scorpions themselves.  The emotion induced by many of these performances are sometimes staggering.  Most notably, during Sinead O'Connor's rendition of "Mother."  No matter how many times I hear it, no matter how many times I see it, once the guitar solo kicks in, the tears are flowing.  Same goes for the concert's closing song, "The Tide is Turning," sung in part by every previous performer on the show.  Some of my favorite performances shown here are "Another Brick in the Wall, part 3" sung by Roger Waters, "Young Lust," by Bryan Adams, "Hey You" by Paul Carrack from Mike + the Mechanics, and "Waiting for the Worms," by Scorpions and Waters, where Waters is dressed up like a dictator at a rock show.  He was showing how the main character of The Wall was so deluded at that point that he thought he was a fascist dictator and not a rock star.  And I cannot forget "The Trial," performed by Tim Curry, Marianne Faithful, Ute Lemper, Thomas Dolby, and Albert Finney.  The whole production ends with, appropriately, the "wall" on the stage tumbling down.  An interesting note on Bryan Adams though.  On the subject of "Young Lust," Roger Waters originally wanted Rod Stewart to sing on it, but finally settled with Adams, admitting that he felt Adams did a better job on the song than Stewart would have.  This concert, hell, the original Pink Floyd album itself, is essential for any true music fan.  I can't stress that enough.  See?  I'm not ALL about metal, you know?  In any event, next blog I'll go back to reviewing a favorite album.

Miller