The one singer Roger Waters never wanted to see perform again: “Too upsetting”
Roger Waters didn’t set out to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
Pink Floyd was destined to be the kind of psychedelic band that took rock and roll to new heights whenever they played, but when Syd Barrett found himself out of step with the rest of the band, Waters didn’t really have a choice over what his destiny was anymore. If the band was going to stay together, he was going to need to become a new songwriter, and that meant learning every lesson that his heroes had to teach whenever he played.
But when looking at Waters’s influences, he wasn’t going to go down the same roads that Barrett did. There was no point in trying to be a lesser version of the crazy diamond that kicked everything off, and a lot of his best moments came from him wanting to dig a little bit deeper into his own psyche. His favourite artists, like John Lennon and Neil Young, were being open and honest in their songs, so Waters figured that a song like ‘Echoes’ was his answer to those kinds of writers.
That said, a lot of what Waters talked about did end up becoming a bit too much for the rest of the band. He may have been the one thinking up all of their lavish concepts every single time they made a record, but I imagine that no musician really likes being told exactly how someone’s song should go and not being allowed to spread out whenever they play any of them on the record.
So while Waters was practically begging to go solo by the time he made The Wall, he felt that he needed something more than just a tour of him playing his tunes. The spectacle is what Pink Floyd was all about, and when he finally had the resources to make something gargantuan, he wanted to bring songs from records like Amused to Death to the people in the way that he always intended it.
But that’s not how everyone sees rock and roll. For many, the biggest draw of any songwriter is seeing them change over time, and while Waters has definitely had a few lulls in his vocals over the years, that’s nothing compared to what Bob Dylan has done. He switched up his voice on almost every single record, and while that was interesting for the time, Waters felt that he had no time for the folk-rock icon if he was going to croak his way through some of his older classics whenever he played live.
For Waters, he still wanted to do those songs justice, and he figured that Dylan spending his time singing ‘Desolation Row’ with a new arrangement didn’t serve that well, saying, “I would always start from the record and only make changes if there was a good reason. That’s why I don’t see Bob Dylan anymore, because I don’t like sitting there trying to work out what fucking song he is playing.”
Adding, “After you’re listening for about five minutes, you go – my god it’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. I love the recordings so much, I find it too upsetting. If I’m doing some of these old songs, I like them to be very recognisable.”
At the same time, are we sure that Waters hasn’t done the exact thing he rallied against when making his own version of Dark Side of the Moon? His wild experiment was always meant to be an update of what he and the band had created back in the day, but there’s no way that anyone would have been able to listen to his version of ‘Money’ or ‘Brain Damage’ and claim that it was just as good as what he had done in 1973.
Updating one’s discography is something that only a select few people can do successfully, and while Dylan never claimed to be someone who played the hits, Waters did at least have a higher standard for when he got up onstage. He wanted to give the audience a show that they could remember, and Dylan strumming away and talking his way through his earlier hits wasn’t his idea of a good time.
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