It’s All Hallows Eve in Los Angeles, where the City of Angels is blessed to have guitarist David Gilmour in town for one more night here at the Hollywood Bowl. The psychedelic rock legend is back at the classic venue for the first time in eight years, playing four shows in Los Angeles with this three-night run at the Bowl following one show at the new Intuit Dome. The Hollywood Bowl is clearly one of Gilmour’s favorite places to play, considering that Rome, London, and New York City are the only other cities on the 2024 tour schedule.
The Bowl is a unique venue with the combination of its history, its grandeur, the excellent sightlines, and the splendid sound. The venue’s design also lends itself well to the laser light show and psychedelia that the Pink Floyd guitarist is known for bringing along on the road. Carrying on at age 78 with these tour dates supporting a solid new album in 2024’s Luck and Strange, Gilmour is one of the last men standing from the original classic rock era that changed pop culture forever in the 1960s and 1970s.
As in 2016, fans are coming in from all over since Los Angeles and New York are the only American cities Gilmour is performing in this year. The weather is warm and sunny in the afternoon, making it a nice day to hike in the Hollywood hills and/or visit the Griffith Observatory. But the temperature cools significantly after sunset, lending a more fitting chilly Halloween vibe to the show this Thursday evening.
The title track from Luck and Strange is featured at the show’s beginning with a bluesy psychedelia that recalls vintage 1970s Pink Floyd. The studio version even features an electric piano part recorded by Pink Floyd bandmate Richard Wright in 2007, before he passed on in 2008. The album again features lyrics written mainly by Gilmour’s novelist wife, Polly Samson, continuing a long-time family affair dating back to Floyd’s 1994 Division Bell album. “Polly and I are a team,” Gilmour said in a promo clip posted on Instagram. “We’ve been writing songs together for over 30 years now. We are very much in sync with each other in what we want to do, and this album is the result of that reaching a firmer, better point in that process.”
David Gilmour sets the flux capacitor for 1973 early in the set with a crowd-pleasing trio of “Speak to Me”, “Breath (In the Air)”, and “Time” from Dark Side of the Moon, easily one of the most enduring and influential albums in music history. These songs will have many listeners flashing back to their high school days, with the album being one of the most universal teenage rites of passage in America. As rows of animated clocks pass by on the video screen behind the band, the audience is immersed in the classic existential psychedelia of a song that is one of the key touchstones in rock history.
When Gilmour sings, “The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you’re older, Shorter of breath and one day closer to death, Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time,” the lyrics resonate with an increased poignancy for some in the audience in the wake of legendary Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh having just passed away on 25 October at age 84. Like Gilmour, Lesh was one of the most influential trailblazers of the psychedelic rock counterculture, and his departure from the planet has felt like a tremor in the Force.
“Time” thus has some attendees flashing back to seeing Furthur at the Los Angeles Greek Theater in October 2011, when the Grateful Dead side project from Lesh and Bob Weir performed the song into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” in a show that honored the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who had just passed away. ”Time” thereby hits very heavily this week, though there’s a counterpoint with Gilmour still here to rock out on the classic tune.
The Dark Side of the Moon segment leads to “Fat Old Sun” from 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, with David Gilmour on acoustic guitar for a shimmering performance of a classic deep cut. A giant image of a glimmering orange sun appears on the screen behind Gilmour, and the band really clicks when he picks up an electric guitar and tears it up over the sweet groove. There’s also a deep organ solo that boosts the song’s vintage vibe for a peak moment in the set.
The instrumental “Marooned” from The Division Bell features that classic distant reverb psychedelia from Gilmour, with each phrase shining with his unique tone and feel that have inspired countless guitarists. This pairs well with “A Single Spark” from Luck and Strange, as Gilmour sings, “Bittersweet the night’s embrace, I’m thankful and afraid, So pray to keep things rolling, I’ve only good intentions” before another gorgeous guitar solo filled with bittersweet phrasing and that ever sweet bluesy tone.
Gilmour’s Jedi master-level tone and phrasing on the acoustic guitar are on display again on the smash hit “Wish You Were Here”. There are few other songs in classic rock history that can conjure this level of audience singalong, and there’s a sweet piano solo to boost the vibe, too.
It’s near the end of the first set when David Gilmour proudly introduces daughter Romany Gilmour, who stars on harp and vocals on the melancholy “Between Two Points” from Luck and Strange. Seeing David Gilmour perform with his 22-year-old daughter conjures a heartwarming sense of passing the torch to the next generation (similar to how Phil Lesh frequently performed with his son Grahame Lesh as a guitarist/vocalist in Phil Lesh & Friends over the past 12 years.) The set concludes with “High Hopes” from The Division Bell, which feels a bit anticlimactic due to the somber tone that contradicts the song’s title. But there’s another soaring guitar solo from Gilmour and a whole second set to come.
The second set opens in grand fashion with a dazzling laser light display behind “Sorrow” from 1987’s Momentary Lapse of Reason, which brought the Pink Floyd stadium experience to a new generation of fans. There’s some genuine sonic grandeur here as Gilmour tears it up in the solo section. Romany Gilmour shines again on “The Piper’s Call”, harmonizing with dad on the vocals about a piper and a fixer who will trade your soul for favors. There’s some crunchy blues power as the band rocks the outro section with a sonic clarity that really rings out.
“The Great Gig in the Sky” is another peak moment of seminal psychedelia, a Dark Side song written by Rick Wright that states defiance of any fear of dying. The group’s female vocalists star here with Romany Gilmour joining three other talented ladies on a passionate performance that takes the song to a higher level. This leads thematically into “A Boat Lies Waiting”, a poignant song that Gilmour and Samson wrote for Wright on 2015’s Rattle That Lock album.
Gilmour introduces “Coming Back to Life” from The Division Bell as a song he wrote about and for his wife Polly. It’s a gem of a tune that starts in Gilmour’s familiar sort of reflective melancholy way before it pivots into an upbeat, triumphant mode that captures the glory of love’s spiritual salvation. “Dark and Velvet Nights“ from the new album seems to carry the theme forward as another upbeat tune where Gilmour sings some of the best lyrics of 2024 to open the song with “I didn’t think that this could be, All that unto death do we, ‘Til you managed the lock and magicked the key, After a night of hard drinking and ecstasy…”
The theme of a married couple dealing with aging and looming mortality is further illuminated on the set-closing “Scattered”, with lyrics including “These days slowing down / A whole life in a glance / The clearest light shines in the darkness / Still shining on me / And we’re still doing this dance.” Gilmour delivers some soaring fretwork on the guitar solo section, which seems to tease a progression similar to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”. This feels like a preview when the ultra classic song follows as the show’s climactic encore.
The spectacular laser light display reappears for “Comfortably Numb” from 1979’s The Wall, another of those cultural touchstone songs from Pink Floyd that has influenced so many music fans in their adolescence as they first experience how drugs and alcohol can indeed numb the emotional pain of this world gone mad. Watching the surrealist 1982 film version of The Wall on acid in high school or college was another of those universal rites of passage for Gen-Xers. Whether it remains so for millennials and Gen-Z is an intriguing question. But witnessing David Gilmour shred the song’s epic guitar solo under the laser beams here at the Hollywood Bowl undoubtedly remains one of the most electrifying experiences in live music in 2024.
It’s been a fabulous show, though one song conspicuous in its absence for those who caught Gilmour at the Bowl in 2016 is The Wall’s “Run Like Hell”. It’s not that the song itself is necessarily as essential as other Floyd classics. Still, the uniquely tailored psychedelic light show that took place here in 2016 was perhaps the most spectacular multi-dimensional display the Hollywood Bowl has ever seen. However, choosing to leave it behind is apparently part of the aging process that Gilmour and Samson focused on with Luck and Strange. “There are songs from the past that I no longer feel comfortable singing,” Gilmour told Mojo magazine earlier this year. “I love ‘Run Like Hell’. I loved the music I created for it, but all that (sings) ‘You’d better run, run, run…’ I now find that all rather, I don’t know… a bit terrifying and violent.”
Such sentiment is certainly understandable in a year in which a genuine fascist has been allowed to escape justice for attempting to overthrow American democracy on 6 January 2021 and run for President again. It seems the world would be better off if perhaps more American voters had taken LSD while viewing the film version of The Wall, with its inherent admonitions against fascist authoritarianism and neo-Nazis. Pink Floyd tried to warn us.
