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Linda Falkenstein in "Isthmus - The Daily Page" --Madison Wisconsin. 

"I'm not sure why there should be something thrilling about seeing a giant inflatable radio-controlled pig emerge from the back stage of Overture Hall and then float out, almost beatifically, over the crowd, hovering in front of the elegant balconies, but there is. Or maybe "thrilling" is the wrong word. It's kind of cool. At the same time, you feel kind of silly for thinking, "Cool, here comes the giant pig."

Enjoying The Pink Floyd Experience -- essentially an elaborate tribute band -- could be seen as a guilty pleasure. Which is too bad, because the music is completely deserving of being called thrilling ?- much more so than the pig, or the light show.

While watching the show at Overture Hall Friday night (Jan. 18), as Floyd's ominous, rumbling, reverbing, thwacketing bass lines filled the hall (and they really did fill it), it occurred to me that this is music that is meant to be performed. It's music that can't be contained in an iPod or properly conveyed via earbuds. It is music that wants to be heard, seen and felt, preferably through the balls of your feet and up through your spinal cord. And so the amplified sound of helicopter blades whanging and the world's loudest cash register ka-chinging are not merely overkill; they're as much a part of the texture of the performance as the cannons are part of the 1812 Overture.

If the most authentic kind of rock and roll experience is, say, catching a pre-Nevermind Nirvana at an O?Cayz Corral, then this is manufactured... but if rock is, like the rest of entertainment, a spectrum of choices, then The Pink Floyd Experience is more like going to see The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra perform Mozart: "The Pink Floyd Experience performed selections from Pink Floyd's The Wall, Wish You Were Here, The Dark Side of the Moon, and other works." The band's performance of Dark Side in its entirety underlines that.

Overture Hall as a venue underlines it too, makes it more "music being performed" rather than "a rock concert" ?- an event where you can't see, the sound sucks, people stand the whole time, and security guards keep dragging the dancers out of the aisles and telling you not to stand on your chair. (Of course, there's also a kind of participatory frenzy at a great rock concert that really can be transforming.)

No danger of that here. Everybody sat nicely. Everyone could see. It was comfortable. It's a tradeoff. And it's a tradeoff that the crowd, largely in their 40s and 50s, seemed ready to make. Many had their teenage kids in tow, and while you would hate for them to think that is is what a rock concert is, they'll figure it out soon enough.

Bass player Gus Beaudoin and saxophonist Jesse Molloy were standouts, but the whole band was nearly flawless. A few years back, another group, "the Australian Pink Floyd," played the Overture Center and brought along three female backup singers who really kicked Dark Side of the Moon up a notch, but PFX made do with the sax.

The songs were the hits ?- from "Have a Cigar" to "Sheep" to "Comfortably Numb" -- save for an early song, "Astronomy Domine," that the band played as a tribute to founding Floyd member Syd Barrett, who died last year.

And Overture Hall was packed. Long live Pink Floyd"

Yeah, but they're just a tribute so they're just copying the masters and they can't be any good because they're not called Dave and Roger and nobody else should ever play it again and blah blah blah blah .......

Tribute tests musicians' 'Meddle'

(by ANDREW S. HUGHES)

Tom Quinn needs to get his wall fixed, and it'll take more than just another brick to do it.

"We had a physical wall about a year and a half ago," the guitarist says by telephone from Chicago on a day off from The Pink Floyd Experience's current tour, which stops Friday at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center. "It broke down. I guess we crashed it a few too many times. It's going through some surgery. We're rebuilding the wall. That's the only element that's not with us right now."

Otherwise, Quinn's tribute to Pink Floyd re-creates the major elements of the legendary British progressive-rock band's innovative stage and lighting shows. Marching hammers, plane crashes, "Light Bulb Man" and, of course, a 12-foot-long flying pig make up some of the show's visual elements, while quadraphonic surround-sound pumps out the music and such sound effects as the clocks on "Time" and the cash registers on "Money."


Quinn formed The Pink Floyd Experience in San Diego in 1994 and presented its show locally until 2003, when Annerin Productions signed the group and put The Pink Floyd Experience on tour with multimillion-dollar production values.

"At the core is the band, of course, and the object of the band is to pull off Pink Floyd's music so that when you close your eyes, you hear what you remember from the CDs at home," Quinn says. "That's the core, but the idea is to merge the music with technology in a small theater so that you have surround-sound and visual effects and take it out of the big stadiums that Pink Floyd was playing."

The six musicians in the show perform songs from Pink Floyd's earliest days in the '60s -- "(Syd Barrett) is not forgotten," he says -- to the band's last studio album, 1994's "The Division Bell," although if you ask for something from "Ummagumma" or "Atom Heart Mother," you'll stump them.

"The lyrics -- fear of death, war, coming of age -- they speak to generations today," Quinn says and cites a statistic from Rolling Stone that says approximately one-third of all classic rock CD sales in the last decade were to people in the teens and 20s. "Timeless lyrics with the sonic soundscapes, a one-two punch."

In 1973, Pink Floyd released "The Dark Side of the Moon" and Quinn bought his first guitar. Whether "Dark Side" caused Quinn to start playing guitar isn't clear, but Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour has been his favorite guitarist and inspiration from the beginning of his playing days.

"I was studying his tone and his tour rig so that I could be more like David," he says of Gilmour. "I spent no small amount of time honing that so that I could replicate his tonal palette. ... His fingers are notoriously slow, and his tones are just awe-inspiring."

Quinn puts Gilmour alongside Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana as one of rock's guitarists with an immediately identifiable and individual style and sound.

"Weeping, like a crying of sorts, the type of emotion that Eric Clapton put on 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' (Clapton, not George Harrison, plays lead guitar on that Beatles song)," he says of what Gilmour's style sounds like. "There's so much heartache and emotion that he puts into it, and it makes people weep."

Although Pink Floyd's music isn't difficult "on paper," Quinn says it's difficult to get that feeling right.

"It's not slowness for the sake of being slow," he says. "He plays with such conviction that you don't pay attention to the frequency of his notes. ... The hardest part lies in playing that slowly and fulfilling the listener's need to feel what he's playing. When you force a musician to slow down, it exposes lack of heart, and you better have it to play this music."

Quinn, 51, also does some session work when he's home in San Diego and writes and records songs of his own, too, but The Pink Floyd Experience obviously exposes him to his widest audience, which satisfies him.

"The passion we have for the music, I think that's what separates us from other tributes out there," he says. "Beyond the technical aspect of the show, what I'm really proud of is the heart that we put into it. I couldn't be doing another tribute. ... I take it seriously and wear my heart on my sleeve."

The Pink Floyd Experience will perform at 8 p.m. Friday at the Mendel Center, Lake Michigan College, 2755 E. Napier Ave., Benton Harbor. Tickets are $30. For more information, call (269) 927-1221.