Roger Waters on The Rolling Stones’ brilliance: “I just think their shows are a joke”
Everything that Roger Waters has done has been based around creating a spectacle onstage. While Pink Floyd could have been set for life just by locking themselves away in the studio and making timeless works of art, would they really have scaled to the heights of rock gender if they just stood there onstage and played the songs? Roger Waters always had dreams that were bigger than that, but The Rolling Stones was the one band that tested his limits of what a stage set was about.
Granted, The Stones could have easily had no backdrop behind them and just a handful of amplifiers, but they still sound incredible in their prime. Regardless of what The Beatles had been doing a few years before, The Stones were the kind of band that showed the dark side of rock and roll, practically writing the handbook for what every rock and roll bad boy needed to look like.
Once the band started using more instruments on their records, there came a point where you needed more than just five guys onstage. It didn’t matter if a song like ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ sounded great on its own. If it didn’t have a choir or at least a few other musicians filling out the sound, it would just end up coming across like some kid in their basement hammering away at a couple of chords.
The Stones may have captured a feeling, but Waters wanted to make a statement that kids would remember once they walked out of the gig. Even though Pink Floyd was seen as one of the more overblown modern acts when the punk movement hit, Waters was still looking out for the little guy by making sweeping comments about society on albums like Animals.
Then again, The Wall was one of the most extravagant stages ever made that Elton John would have probably told him to tone it down. Whereas most acts tried to tell sweeping stories through their music, this became a theatre piece first and a rock concert second half the time, including Waters bringing out massive balloons to play the role of certain characters.
Every piece was done in service to the story, and as far as Waters could tell, The Stones didn’t need that same treatment, telling Karl Dallas, “I was an incredible Stones fan. I still am, actually. I still think some of the stuff that they do is really good. I just think their shows are a joke, all those fucking people crammed into those big stadiums. I think they’re just as much of a joke for them as they were for us.”
At the same time, needing that kind of presence onstage is more about practicality than anything else. Sure, the band could be their traditional show, but if you’re playing in a stadium full of people, you can’t go the other way and make everything look like a seedy club. You need other people to help you belt to the rafters half the time.
Regardless of where both acts chose to spend their money backstage, Waters has only gotten more extravagant over the years, down to the massive light shows and setpieces that he uses for his solo tours. After those years of putting up The Wall for one generation after the next, maybe Waters has figured out that the massive setpieces actually work.
