The two albums Roger Waters said “completely changed everything”
Love him or loathe him, the musical excellence of Roger Waters can scarcely be denied. After all, the Pink Floyd songwriter has been responsible for some of the most iconic records of the 20th century in releases like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. With Floyd, Waters helped to redefine the progressive rock era and blaze a trail for countless future artists in the process. There are no two ways about it; the world of rock and pop music would look very different today without the pioneering influences of Roger Waters and his band.
One of the many things that Pink Floyd are credited with is a revolutionary attitude towards album construction. In the early days of rock and pop, albums and LPs were simply a collection of ten or so songs that weren’t commercially viable to release as singles, but these attitudes began to change during the 1960s. Even with early records like Piper At the Gates of Dawn, a masterpiece of the Syd Barrett era, Floyd began to think about using albums to tell complex overarching stories, creating a sonic narrative throughout the track listing.
This process would later be employed to greater effect on the band’s most commercially successful work, most notably The Dark Side of the Moon, which is one of the most renowned concept records of all time. They might have mastered the medium, but Pink Floyd were certainly not the first group to experiment with the idea of a concept album. During the rock and pop boom of the 1960s, two iconic bands were instrumental in developing this revolutionary new idea.
As most of you can likely guess, it was The Beatles who first popularised the concept album during their psychedelic period. The 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a particular highlight for the band, and it had an undeniable influence on Pink Floyd and Roger Waters. “I remember when it came out,” Waters recalled on the Howard Stern Show in 2012, “Pulling the Zephyr Ford into a layby and listening to the whole thing, just sitting there with my mouth hanging open going ‘Wow, this is so complete and accomplished and whatever”.
The songwriter continued in his account of hearing Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time, sharing, “But it also was more than that. It had a ton of ideas and a ton of narrative in it. I feel more than any other record, it was the record that gave me and my generation permission to branch out and do whatever we want to”. Perhaps the only other record that could be given such a moniker is The Beach Boys’ seminal album Pet Sounds, another favourite of Waters.
“Along with Sgt. Pepper,” Waters once shared, “Pet Sounds completely changed everything about records for me”. The two albums were among the first ‘concept’ records to make a lasting impact in the pop and rock charts, opening the eyes of a new generation of songwriters. All of a sudden, it seemed as though an album itself could tell a story rather than merely being a vehicle for a collection of songs.
Pink Floyd took this idea, spearheaded by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and ran with it. Without those early influences on Waters, it seems unlikely that essential albums like Dark Side of the Moon would ever be recorded, let alone approved by record label executives.
