Roger Waters

The last utterance in this 72-minute opus is 1984 , and Waters' thought-provoking, sonically ambitious album owes an immense debt to that great dystopian novel. Like George Orwell, Waters envisions a society in which endless war, incessant video and a fanatical civil religion enforce conformity.

Back in 2000, the L.A. producer/musical gadfly Jon Brion pitched a TV pilot to VH1. "The Jon Brion Show" was pegged as a kind of neo-variety show with guest musicians (a familiar format to anyone who knows his Largo roundtables). Director Paul Thomas Anderson even lent his hand to the pilot. The network declined to pick it up, but Anderson on Thursday posted a video with a note on his YouTube channel: " I tore up the floorboards at H.Q. the other day  and came up with this little number on VHS.  She holds up well.

Johnny Rotten had it all wrong, defacing that Pink Floyd T-shirt he spitefully wore, as if the Floyd itself represented the pathetic apotheosis of all the bloated bourgeoisie pigs on the wing he had it in for. Didn't he know enough to see that "The Dark Side of the Moon" was, in fact, the very first punk album? Well, actually, not to stretch an analogy too far, it wasn't. Not even close, really. Still, as mega-mega-platinum bestsellers go, 1973's "Dark Side" was really the end of the innocence--the ideal bridge of sighs between psychedelia's recessive rambling and punk's roaring cynicism, the timely stopgap between altered states of consciousness and social conscience, the missing link between the private madness of sidelined Floyd founder Syd Barrett and the public insanities of the Watergate era. But then, as now, among the assorted critics, Rottens and other appointed change agents of intelligentsia, the misunderstood "Dark Side" had a bad rap. Of course, underrated may sound like an odd way to characterize the most enduringly commercially popular rock album of all time: "Dark Side" broke the Billboard chart longevity records by staying on for 12 straight years, has sold about 25 million copies worldwide--a figure likely to increase substantially with a special repackaging of a digital remastering of the album that has just been released to Capitol-ize on the album's 20th anniversary.

Top 10 worldwide concert tours Band name?$XX millions Bon Jovi, 201.1 (gross millions) AC/DC, 177.0 U2, 160.9 Lady Gaga, 133.6 Metallica, 110.1 Michael Bublé, 104.2 "Walking With Dinosaurs," 104.1 Paul McCartney, 93.0 Eagles, 92.3 Roger Waters, 89.5

As we close the book on 2012, which among other things included the ambitious yearlong multifaceted salute to Woody Guthrie on the 100 th anniversary of his birth, Pop & Hiss will take a page from America's most celebrated folk singer and songwriter. Two pages, actually, that contain 33 new year's resolutions that Guthrie concocted just as the year 1942 was about to begin. They range from whimsical (No. 3: “Wash teeth if any”) to serious (No. 27: “Help win war - Beat fascism”)

“We don't need no” ... renovation. A flat in London's Highgate area, where Pink Floyd's original members hung out in the '60s, is up for sale at about $1.92 million. The “as is” property was owned by light-show pioneer Mike Leonard until his death this year. Bass player and vocalist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason moved into the flat in 1963 and by the time the English rock group was founded in 1965, every member of the original Pink Floyd is believed to have lived there at some time.