The show Roger Waters called “the best purchase I ever made”
In the grand scheme of rock and roll, Roger Waters was never one to give out praise all that often.
He had his favourite bands that he would champion every now and again, but when someone is that laser-focused on getting the right sound for his own outfit, it’s much better for him to leave all of the modern bands in the dust half the time. But when you get rocked by the right group of people, the Pink Floyd mastermind knew that feeling was something he would never forget.
If you look at Waters’s record collection, a lot of what he gravitated towards centred around singer-songwriters, and he was the first person to say that people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young had a tremendous influence on his life, and even in his later years, he felt that John Prine wrote the kind of tunes that stopped him in his tracks every single time they came on, but anyone in a prog-rock outfit is going to be looking for artists who could play their instruments.
Half of Waters’s job in the early days of Floyd was always about trying out new realms within the psychedelic movement, but it was never noise for the sake of noise. Syd Barrett had a vision for what he wanted the band to be, but whereas his brand of music was a little too idiosyncratic, a lot of people could understand what Cream were all about from the first time they heard them tear through a set.
While the band would have been considered a supergroup at the time, there was no accurate way of describing the kind of music they played. There were elements of everything from blues to jazz and acidic rock and roll in the way Eric Clapton played, but listening to them play at his college before Pink Floyd went professional was what lit a fire in Waters to pursue music full-time.
It wasn’t clear at that point whether music was a hobby for Waters, but he knew getting to hear Clapton play onstage with special guest Jimi Hendrix was one of the best choices he ever made, saying, “I had never seen or heard anything like it before. It was an astounding sight and an explosive sound. Two-thirds of the way through their set, one of them said, ‘We’d like to invite a friend of ours from America out onstage.’ It was Jimi Hendrix, and that was the first night he played in England. That ticket cost about a pound or so. It might have been the best purchase I ever made.”
Then again, Waters was never going to be able to play at the same level as Jack Bruce when he got a bass guitar, and while he could play a few intricate parts when the time called for it, if there was one thing that he took from Cream that night, it was the way they made the audience feel whenever they started thrashing away on their instruments.
They had created a communal feeling that no one else could touch, and Waters would spend the rest of his career learning how to do the same whenever he performed. Not every one of his ideas may have worked out for the best, but the grand scale that he used to create projects like The Wall was descended from Clapton and Hendrix, opening people’s eyes to what rock and roll could be outside of a few catchy tunes.
So, really, Cream might have been one of the first true progressive rock bands, judging by how they approached their craft, and while Pink Floyd and King Crimson may have been finding their feet around the same time, their attempt to challenge the listener every time they made records was the first step towards bands trying their hand at more complex material.
