POP MUSIC REVIEW : Floyd’s Back, for Better and Worse

“What do you want from me?” went the title refrain of one of the new songs Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour sang Thursday night at Jack Murphy Stadium--the band’s first Southern California concert in six years.

Given a 1994 touring season stocked with famous, middle-aged rock attractions returning for another glorious campaign or another big score (take your pick), it seemed like a fair question to ask.

What do we want from the likes of Pink Floyd, the Eagles, Traffic and the Rolling Stones--bands that can trade successfully on their history even if their new output proves feeble by comparison?

The first thing we should want from veteran superstars is that they be fired up by the idea of making music, whether it’s old or new. We want conviction and passion and delight in the delivery--a sense that our old heroes aren’t just riding the gravy train.

After Pink Floyd sunk the first half an hour of its sold-out show in utter tedium, a different refrain suggested itself: wish you weren’t here. Wish you’d get on with the old stuff instead of force-feeding second-rate recent material. Wish you’d give us something really spectacular to look at, instead of the same old lasers and elaborate haze of lights that every other big-budget tour has (true, nobody else has housed it all under a huge, arched canopy that looks like the top half of a Conestoga wagon).

Sometimes wishing helps. Or at least waiting does.

Eventually, Pink Floyd did play what leader David Gilmour dryly referred to as “tons of old rubbish”: selections from the band’s peak ‘70s era that began with the “Meddle” album and stretched through “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall.”

For the most part, Pink Floyd delivered them with professional aplomb and a bit of spectacle worthy of the band’s reputation. It was nothing revelatory, but it met the minimum requirement of retrospective rock, which is to remind us of the lasting appeal of the music being played.

Gilmour’s voice sounded thinner, lower and rougher than it did when Pink Floyd returned to touring in ’87. But his guitar playing remains a treat with its instantly recognizable balance of lyricism, economy and dramatic tension.

Stage presence was never part of Pink Floyd’s equation--hence all the props, gadgets and lights. (With his black suit, his reserved mien, his full face and his thinning, graying hair, Gilmour has come to resemble Anthony Hopkins playing the butler in “Remains of the Day”--not that most of the 50,000 attendees would know that, given the lack of video screens for close-in viewing.)

With chances virtually nil that Pink Floyd’s technical juggernaut will be reprogrammed by a single note, fans attending the band’s concerts at the Rose Bowl tonight and Sunday need not be in a hurry to get there on time.

Show up half an hour late and you’ll still catch everything that’s worth hearing and seeing. On the visual side, that includes two menacing (but this time not airborne) inflated pigs, the well-conceived, enigmatic video backdrops to songs from “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Wish You Were Here” (with surrealistic allusions to Salvador Dali and Lewis Carroll), and the mirrored ball contraption that rises on a lift in the middle of the stadium, then opens to reveal a crazy diamond of light.

Among the things latecomers will miss is an unforgivably limp show-opening rendition of “Astronomy Domine.” That 1967-vintage Syd Barrett composition deserved better; the first song on Pink Floyd’s first album, it remains, at least on record, a striking psychedelic conception of a strange and chillingly impersonal universe.

Subsequent songs from “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” the 1987 comeback album Pink Floyd released after its acrimonious split with lyricist and conceptualist Roger Waters, and the newly released “The Division Bell” were like the Queen Mary: stately as you could wish, but going nowhere fast. During the first five songs of the set, the biggest cheers were for laser beams shooting over the stadium’s rim.

Waters’ key contribution was to give Pink Floyd’s albums and shows an overarching vision or thematic thrust. With help from outside lyricists, Gilmour and comrades are at least trying on “The Division Bell.” The new album contains a lot of aural wallpaper, but it does hold together loosely as a chronicle of alienation and disappointment.

“High Hopes,” the best of the new songs, fit nicely into a post-intermission stretch of material from “Dark Side” and “Wish You Were Here,” in which the band constructed a continuous mood of elegantly etched world-weariness overlain with mystery.

More than simply re-creating the past, this most-evocative segment of the show suggested that old songs don’t stop meaning something just because they are old.

* BIG PAYDAY: Pink Floyd joins other big-name acts in heating up the summer pop concerts. F9