The 1979 Pink Floyd song Roger Waters had big issues with: “Not moving at all”
Every artist usually has a tough time revisiting some of their old songs. It’s easy if a track has a handful of mistakes that you have to fix, but there are just as many times when it’s hard to even hear yourself trying to express your feelings through a little piece of wood with strings on it.
Roger Waters had already started to have less of a problem expressing himself during Pink Floyd’s 1970s period, but he admitted that his first listen to ‘Comfortably Numb’ left a lot to be desired.
What makes the story particularly fascinating is that the song would go on to become one of Pink Floyd’s most celebrated recordings. The very elements that frustrated Waters ultimately helped create the tension and atmosphere that listeners continue to admire.
If the prog giants were going to make a rock opera, Waters would ensure it was done right. They had already made sweeping concepts about the dangers of the music industry and big business, so The Wall would be Waters’ perfect model to tell the story of a jaded rock star losing his mind.
While many Floyd fans could easily compare this song to the experience the group dealt with with Syd Barrett, there’s actually a lot more on this album that’s biographical about Waters than even he wants to admit. Barrett never got to see the heights of stardom like this, and Waters probably used many of those lyric sheets as his own form of therapy to get away from the millions of fans.
That is, at the expense of his bandmates. Because when you look at what’s going on in the rock opera, Waters really is the star of the show and uses the rest of the group as sidemen throughout every track. David Gilmour still knew what he wanted to hear, though, and the makings of ‘Comfortably Numb’ actually came about through a shelved song from his solo album.
After presenting it as an possible idea, Waters added his strange voice into the mix to tell the story of Pink getting filled with drugs so that he has enough energy to make it onstage that night. It’s supposed to be grandiose and theatrical, but what Waters saw was a hot mess waiting to happen.
Once the demo made it to Gilmour, Waters ended up having to compromise his vision for what he considered was a lifeless mix, telling Uncut, “Dave said he thought the track was sloppy, or something, and he wanted to recut the drums, the bass, this, that and the other. I listened to it, and I hated it. It had suddenly become, for me, very wooden, just not moving at all. I went: ‘No, the way it was, was great. This is bad’. He was: ‘No, the way it was, was terrible. This is great’. So the song ended up with 4 bars of his and 4 bars of mine… the whole track is like that.”
Although both sides actually have a point, the fans lucked out by getting both mixes of the track on the final disc. Since the whole song is about someone going in and out of consciousness and getting a euphoric high from the drugs being pumped into them, that uneasiness practically paints the picture of someone barely hanging onto their nervous system as they come to their senses.
This was the kind of drama that a good rock opera should have, but Waters somehow thought that having 90% creative control wasn’t quite enough. He needed to have a clearer vision the next time around, and The Final Cut ended up being the version of The Wall with none of the exciting parts. Say what you want about the mix of ‘Comfortably Numb’, but at least that kind of compromise actually led to something transcendent.
It serves as a reminder that some of the greatest moments in rock music emerge not from total agreement but from creative friction. In the case of ‘Comfortably Numb’, the clash between Waters and Gilmour produced a song that neither could have created alone.
