The 1980 Pink Floyd masterpiece Roger Waters said was almost ruined: “Just awful”
Roger Waters always wanted to have the final say in whatever Pink Floyd was doing.
Even after he left the band, Waters insisted every subsequent record was a waste of time because, as far as he was concerned, they had already said everything they needed to say by the time the 1980s arrived. It was time for everyone to move on to bigger and better things in their solo careers, but they had at least left behind one of the greatest conceptual albums of all time.
Then again, half of Floyd’s greatest records did have a thematic element behind them, and that all came down to the way that Waters set a scene with his music. He knew that any album that was just a bunch of guys playing off each other would have been incredibly boring, so making up the idea of the passage of time on Dark Side of the Moon or paying tribute to Syd Barrett on Wish You Were Here was the best way for him to let out all of the emotions that he had deep inside him.
Not all of them came easy, but after Animals, The Wall needed to be absolutely perfect in Waters’s mind. The whole album feels like a Floyd album in name only since Waters wrote most of the songs, and even when you look at the production behind everything, it’s not like Waters was exactly diplomatic when it came to telling everyone what to play and how the songs were supposed to go.
Richard Wright’s firing was completely unnecessary to a certain degree, but it’s not like people like Michael Kamen didn’t have the band’s best interest at heart, either. He was the one who could make the symphonic elements of the record absolutely sing like they were supposed to, and while Waters was comfortable with the entire record from start to finish, the initial i of what became ‘Comfortably Numb’ was nothing but garbage from where he stood.
The entire climax of the album hinges on this part of the storyline when Pink gets overly medicated, but when David Gilmour got his hands on it, it wasn’t about trying to make something gargantuan. He wanted to make the most streamlined version of the tune that he could, and when Waters got the song back after the guitarist had worked on it, he was absolutely horrified by what he heard.
All of the swagger was gone, and he felt that they needed to scrap the entire mix and get back to what the original version he and Bob Ezrin had worked on, saying, “Dave spent a week re-recording the track. I remember it came over on the 24-track tape and Ezrin and I were both really expecting it to be great, hoping he’d improved it, and we put it on and looked at each other because it was just awful. It lost all the passion and life the original had. And that became a ‘real’ fight. It’s most interesting that Ezrin completely agreed with me. But Dave obviously felt very, very strongly about it, and we ended up using the intro from the old one.”
Granted, it’s not like Waters’s vocal is absolutely perfect on the song, and Gilmour’s version of the intro does add the right kind of atmosphere behind it to set the scene of someone about to go through a drug-induced illusion. But for something that was meant to be the rock and roll equivalent of a Broadway show, Waters knew that they needed to keep true to the kind of barebones version while Gilmour sprinkled his beautiful guitar solos on top of everything else.
These kinds of fights were half the reason why Gilmour and Waters tore their friendship apart one album later, but it’s not like both of them had their fair share of points. Waters knew what he wanted his songs to sound like, and while Gilmour couldn’t always get behind that, he was going to do whatever he could to make the song sound as good as it could.
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