How the US Army Helped Pink Floyd: Exclusive Interview

As Pink Floyd prepared for their first tour after a bitter split with Roger Waters, they got some help from an unexpected source: the U.S. Army.

The British progressive rock legends had long been known for pushing technology to its limits. Once again, as they were in the planning stages for the tour for 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason, they sought to up their game significantly. “Pink Floyd’s always about doing the next best thing,” music industry veteran Paul Rappaport detailed in a recent interview on the UCR Podcast that you can listen to below. “In the beginning, everybody had lasers. They were green lasers. Then Pink Floyd realized they could get red lasers. Other people copy you, so now you need something else. Marc Brickman, their lighting designer, finds out that there’s a gold laser, but it’s dangerous and the only people that have it is the U.S. Army.”

“He goes to have a meeting with the Army and says, ‘We’re Pink Floyd, we heard about these gold lasers.’ They replied, ‘Oh yes, we have the gold lasers, they’re very dangerous though. These are not your typical lasers. You could hurt people with them, they’re weapons,'” he continues. “They told [Brickman], ‘We’ll rent you these lasers, but you need to take a U.S. Army representative with you to every show. He has to doublecheck all of the mirrors, all of the points where they’re going to be shot — otherwise, it’s going to be dangerous [and] we’re responsible.’

READ MORE: How Pink Floyd’s ‘Momentary Lapse’ Album Cover Got Revamped

“This is stuff that only Pink Floyd gets into, these guys are in a rare air, trust me,” Rappaport explains. “[Brickman] says, ‘Fine, we’ll make that deal.’ He’s got to call [Pink Floyd manager Steve] O’Rourke and go, ‘Guess what? Open your pocketbook!’ So they got the gold lasers. But then, the Army guy says to Brickman, ‘Listen, we’re experimenting with negative ions, in the air. You guys play stadiums, if you want, we can do this thing for you where over the stadium, we suck out all of ions in a fast pace and it will make a giant explosion. Do you want that?’ Brickman’s knees are knocking and he goes, ‘Well, that sounds a little bit dangerous for the fans. Maybe I’ll just take the dangerous gold lasers and leave the next big dangerous thing to you guys.'”

Watch Pink Floyd Perform ‘Us and Them’ in 1988

How Pink Floyd Paid for the ‘Momentary Lapse’ Tour

By the time Pink Floyd was ready to hit the road with the tour for A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which began officially on September 9, 1987, they’d crafted a truly groundbreaking experience for the fans who would see it. Naturally, as the collaboration with the U.S. Army foreshadowed, it would be an expensive outing. As drummer Nick Mason details in his memoir, Inside Out a Personal History of Pink Floyd, though corporate tour sponsorships were becoming more common, there were no interested takers standing at the door. So that left Mason and David Gilmour on the hook to finance the upfront costs of the outing (reportedly $55 million dollars).

Luckily, Mason had an ace with four tires in his back pocket in the form of his 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. He’d bought the car in the late ’70s for 38 thousand pounds, which would be about 50 thousand dollars these days. In recent years, the automobile (which remains part of his collection) now sits at a value of more than 40 million dollars. Calling it “a prized possession” and an “old family friend,” the Ferrari came in handy. “Because the car market had recently gone berserk, with this model at the top of the madness — one car reputedly sold at the time for $14 million — I had little trouble in financing my half of the tour costs,” he wrote.

While they were able to execute the idea of the different colored lasers — including the gold one — as Mason remembered, there were other brainstorms that were binned before the band hit the road — or in one case, abandoned as the trek was in progress. “Icarus, an airborne figure, sprang forth in ‘Learning to Fly‘ and flittered across the stage,” he recalled. “[It] never quite worked, looking like oversized washing on a line. The most ambitious idea, a flying saucer that could be operated via radio control to hover over the venue — offering a supernatural display of lights and effects never before seen — eventually was nothing more than a fantasy that was unrealistic on many levels. “To carry sufficient power for the proposed lighting rig would have been about the same size, cost and approximately as safe as the Graf Zeppelin,” he lamented.

Still, what they were able to pull off was quite impressive. When the tour for A Momentary Lapse of Reason ended in the summer of 1989, it had grossed more than 135 million. With seven legs and nearly 200 shows, the band performed its first concerts in the Soviet Union, Norway, Spain and New Zealand. They also returned to Australia and Japan for the first time since 1972. Their gamble to find out whether there could be a Pink Floyd without Roger Waters paid off and the experience of what he witnessed is something that is still amazing to Rappaport. “When you work with these guys, they take you to places…I wound up doing things with Pink Floyd that in a million years, I never thought I’d be doing.”

Gliders Over Hollywood: Airships, Airplay, And The Art Of Rock Promotion is the new memoir that collects stories from Rappaport’s incredible 33-year run at Columbia Records, where he eventually rose to be their Senior Vice President of Promotion. There were adventures with Journey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, the Rolling Stones and numerous others. “I wanted people to get to know the Bob Dylan I knew,” he says. “I wanted to capture the times and the artists in a way that most people wouldn’t know.”

Listen to Paul Rappaport on the ‘UCR Podcast’

Watch Pink Floyd Perform ‘Learning to Fly’ in 1988