A Stop Sign at the end of a Decadent Decade

I spent the summer of 1979 on a picnic table in the backyard of my semi-rural Indiana home drawing white brick walls for hours on notebook paper. I think I may have gotten to the sullen teenager phase a bit early, since I was not yet eight years old. Responding to punks in England and the disco drones in the states who finally knocked Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” out of the popular consciousness, Roger Waters foreshadowed the impending rise of right-wing politics under Reagan and Thatcher with a mocking militaristic rock opera. The finished product represented the pinnacle of the group’s output and, simultaneously, their implosion.