Roger Waters on the two songwriters who opened the door “between poetry and song lyrics”
There was a time when Pink Floyd’s lyrics were just ludicrous. The following, for instance, is a genuine verse: “I know a mouse, and he hasn’t got a house / I don’t know why I call him Gerald / He’s getting rather old, but he’s a good mouse.” Taken from the song ‘Bike’, the band seemingly penned a silly song presumably about a noble mouse who was simply begging Syd Barrett to call him Klaus.
However, when Barrett was fired from the band, and Waters began to exercise greater control over the core of the material in the 1970s, things grew increasingly more serious for the group from a lyrical standpoint. In truth, they had always been inspired by elevated songwriters, with Barrett penning the likes of ‘Bob Dylan Blues’ in 1965, but Waters decided to drop the whimsy that went along with it.
Suddenly, the group began crafting daring concepts and Waters hit upon deeper, hard-hitting words. He set about putting the world to rights with poetry, proclaiming, “As far as my contemporaries, I am monumentally surprised how fucking scared my fellow musicians are to stick their heads out.” But he didn’t want to simply be outspoken with grace and style, so he turned towards two of his songwriting heroes.
“Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were the two men who allowed us to believe that there was an open door between poetry and song lyrics,“ Waters said on Desert Island Discs. He went on to heap praise on ‘Bird on the Wire’ as an indispensable effort from Cohen. “So simple. So moving, so brilliant,“ he said of the 1969 effort from Songs From a Room.
Meanwhile, Dylan has always been an inspiration for the songwriter. He’s even the reason for Pink Floyd’s experimentalism, never mind the poetry to come. “‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ changed my life,” Waters told Howard Stern. “When I heard that, I thought worthy. If Bob can do it, I can do it. It’s 20 minutes long, it’s a whole hour and in no way gets dull or boring or anything. You just get more and more and more and grow. It becomes more and more hypnotic the longer it goes on.”
In many ways, Cohen and Dylan liberated a whole legion of musicians to be more expressive and daring with their words. Cohen was a poet before he even became a musician, and if you believe Eric Clapton, a poet is the only thing Bob Dylan has ever been. The guitarist explains, “He’s a poet. Basically, he’s a poet. He does not trust his voice. (Bob) doesn’t trust his guitar playing. He doesn’t think he’s good at anything, except writing—and even then he has self-doubts.”
The likes of Joni Mitchell, Bill Withers and Neil Young would soon push music down the same poetic path, but as Waters states, the door had been kicked open, and the hand-holding sentiments of old were not returning any time soon. As David Bowie would put it, ”a new kind of intelligence” had arrived in pop songwriting.
However, there was plenty more to the two men than their poetry alone. As Dylan conveniently explains about his contemporary, “When people talk about Leonard,” he said, “They fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius. Even the counterpoint lines, they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs.”
