Pink Floyd demanded a certain quality of sound. They wanted their amps stacked high, not just on stage, where they were so broad and tall and forbidding that they looked like a barricade in the Paris Commune. They also wanted amp clusters at three highly elevated points around the stadium, and I spent the morning lugging huge blocks of wood and circuitry up and up and up the stairs of the decayed old bowl.

There was one other assignment: a parachute-like white silken canopy roof that Pink Floyd required over the stage. It took about six hours to get the thing up and in position. We were told that this was the first use of the canopy and Pink’s guys were unsteady. They had some blueprints, but those turned out not to be of much use. Eventually the roof did rise and inflate, with American know-how applied. Such know-how involved a lot of spontaneous knot-tying and strategic rope tangling.

Pink Floyd went on at about 10 that night and the amp clusters that we’d expended all that servile sweat to build didn’t work  people had sat on them, kicked them or cut the cords. So Pink made its noise, the towers stayed mute, the mob flicked on lighters at the end and then we spent three hours breaking the amps down and loading the truck. We refused to go after the speakers all the way up the stadium steps and, after some sharp words, Pink’s guys had to scramble up and retrieve them.

There was, for the record, almost always tension between the roadies and the stage crew. One time, at a show by (if memory serves) Queen, their five roadies got into a brawl with a dozen of our stage crew guys; then the house security, mostly Jersey bikers and black-belt karate devotees, heard the noise and jumped in. The roadies held on for a while, but finally they saw it was a lost cause. One of them grabbed a case of champagne from the truck cab and opened a bottle and passed it around  all became drunk and happy.

Pink’s road manager wanted the inflatable canopy brought down gently, then folded and packed securely in its wooden boxes. The problem was that the thing was full of helium and no one knew where the release valve was; we’d also secured it to the stage with so many knots of such foolish intricacy that their disentanglement would have given a gang of sailors pause. Everyone was tired. Those once intoxicated were no longer. It was 4 a.m. and time to go home.