“Too sloppy”: The drum part David Gilmour was convinced Nick Mason couldn’t play
No musician gets into progressive rock without being put through their paces. This is the genre that was meant to test the limits of what rock and roll could be, and that didn’t always equate to someone strumming a guitar playing the traditional cowboy chords that everyone learns. No, this was the moment where every instrument had to step up a notch, but when working on this Pink Floyd masterpiece, David Gilmour thought that Nick Mason wasn’t quite up to the band’s standards.
Compared to the rest of the prog-rock scene, though, Pink Floyd’s best songs were deceptively simple. Even though they had grand visions for what they wanted their songs to be, many of their classics only had a few chords between them and featured them building on those themes rather than having 20 different sections spread out across a half hour.
And as much as Roger Waters likes to paint himself as the leader of the group, their best moments didn’t come without everyone contributing to the final product. Even though Dark Side of the Moon had the prime concept from Waters, it would have never been the same had Gilmour not added his signature guitar solos to ‘Time’ or ‘Money’ or if Richard Wright hadn’t thrown in some strange pieces like the beautiful keyboard line on ‘Us and Them’ or the jazzy bit of ‘Breathe’.
When working on The Wall, though, everyone at least understood that they were looking to serve Waters as he created his baby. If this rock opera was going to be done right, it would have to cater to the storyline from front to end, and that meant keeping a lot of band members at arm’s length half the time.
While Gilmour could stay on as a producer and co-creator of the project, it’s sad to think about Wright being fired from the group during this time for committing the crime of not understanding every single thing going through Waters’s head. That said, Mason was also slipping in some respects, and when it came time to record ‘Comfortably Numb’, Gilmour felt that he was starting to crack under pressure.
There had been countless session musicians on the record, but Gilmour’s critique of Mason’s performance was enough to create a major rift in the studio, saying, “We’d done one track with Nick Mason on drums that I thought was too rough and sloppy. We had another go at it, and I thought that the second take was better. Roger disagreed. It was more an ego thing than anything else. We really went head to head with each other over such a minor thing.”
Regardless of who got their way, the results were still magic. Even though some parts of the song could be a little bit sloppy, hearing the beat hang back a little bit does provide an extra bit of tone painting, as if the song itself is painting the picture of Pink’s heart rate going down after being sedated with drugs before he gets thrown onstage and starts saying things too heinous to repeat in this article.
But the real problem was seeing Mason’s confidence shaken a few albums later, hardly playing on A Momentary Lapse of Reason at all due to him not having his chops anymore. Gilmour and Waters may have been the two butting heads in the group at the time, but Mason’s feelings on his own chops seemed to get caught in the crossfire.
