The John Lennon album Roger Waters adored: “It knocked my socks off”
Roger Waters has never been known to mince his words about the music he listens to. From the less-than-competent music he heard from other musicians to the horrible chapters of Pink Floyd’s discography, Waters usually spoke his mind when he thought a particular piece of music wasn’t up to the standards he had set for himself. Although Waters could dish it out, there was one album that pointed the way forward for him.
Coming out of the 1960s, Waters was already beginning to struggle with the loss of Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd. Since Barrett has lost his battle with his mind, Waters took the reins as the group’s leader, guiding them into future projects like A Saucerful of Secrets. As the band were unsure of going off on their own for the first time, another central British rock band went through their spiral.
After the business deals at Apple Records reached a head, every member of The Beatles went their separate ways. As Paul McCartney and George Harrison got to work on their solo outings, John Lennon was looking to rebuild his soul, taking classes in transcendental meditation and letting go of the emotions he had suppressed for so long.
Channelling all of his pain into his music, Plastic Ono Band became the definitive post-Beatles statement, as Lennon said his piece on how the group broke up and how he only believed in himself. Although most fans saw the album as a sobering listen when hearing it for the first time, Waters was elated when he first heard it.
Talking about the legacy of the record after the fact, Waters remembered being floored by Lennon’s solo album, saying: “It knocked my socks off. I don’t remember where I was, but I can remember it clear as a bell. The outro of ‘Mother’ is amazing. The sonic quality on that record was like listening to [The Band’s] Music From Big Pink or something. Those records, when you listen to it and say, ‘That’s so new and fresh and different and brilliant’.”
After a long wait between albums, Lennon’s masterpiece set the stage for the next phase of his career, bringing political messages on albums like Imagine and Some Time in New York City. Although the following records had varying degrees of success, there’s a good chance that the fearlessness in his debut solo outing rubbed off on Waters.
Since he had found himself without a band for the first time, Waters’s reluctant step up as the principal songwriter resulted in Floyd looking at the world around them. Compared to the character pieces that went into songs on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it’s hard not to see tracks like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Time’ as a direct extension of what Lennon did on his debut, stripping away every facet of his celebrity on talking about the fundamentals of human existence.
Once Waters had steered the group into telling his own life story on albums like The Wall, things began to change within the confines of the group. Not satisfied with everyone’s participation, Waters thought it would be best to strike out on his own as Lennon did, taking his songs with him for albums like The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. Since Plastic Ono Band was about declaring independence, it made sense that Waters would follow suit eventually.
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