“The only record”: The one album Roger Waters wrote about sex
The mantra of classic rock hasn’t been called ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ by accident. Countless musicians have lived by that creed, often at great personal cost, but part of its allure was watching artists indulge in excesses their fans couldn’t. While Pink Floyd might not be the first band that comes to mind for an impromptu sex jam, that didn’t mean promiscuity was entirely off the table—especially when Roger Waters was crafting some of their classics.
Granted, half of the band’s first few albums were more about trying to decipher what the hell Syd Barrett was even trying to say. He may have been one of the leaders of the psychedelic movement, but with all of the allusions to space travel in every one of their songs, it wasn’t clear whether he was trying to set up a mood in the listener’s mind or if he had the same imagination as a rock and roll version of Dr Seuss.
When Barrett left the fold, though, the door was open for everyone to start contributing new ideas to the mix. Although Waters’s first major song, ‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, was based around Chinese poetry, the rest of the group were willing to write a few more tunes about their escapades on the road. Then again, no one is really going to be getting in the mood to ‘Summer ‘68’, which tells the story of Richard Wright becoming desensitised to having flings with groupies everywhere they went.
Although ‘Young Lust’ did put some real edge into their sexual material on The Wall, it was too little too late, as Waters would leave for a solo career soon afterwards. Once he didn’t have the rest of the band behind him, though, he could work on anything that he could think of, and that meant exploring the tale of a man who was trying his best to stay on the straight and narrow while being a travelling musician.
While The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking does feel like it’s missing something with the other members of Floyd in the mix, it does have a consistent theme running throughout it, taking place in real-time as Waters tries his best to keep his wife in mind when he’s at home. Despite this being the version of The Beatles’ song ‘All My Loving’ stretched out for almost an hour, Waters knew that this was an opportunity that he couldn’t bear repeating.
Despite being proud of the final product, Waters remembered that this was the only time that he consciously tried to write about sexual encounters, saying, “It was a strange time, because I was working with Eric Clapton as well, and the only reason I went on the road is because Eric said I should tour it. And not only that, he came on the road with me. I said, ‘If you go, I’ll go.’ I did a tour with Eric Clapton as my guitar player! It was terrific. It’s the only record I’ve made that was only about sex.”
But Clapton’s decision to take him out on tour was actually a more poetic way of telling the story. The whole point is to see this person in action as they’re trying to navigate their way through the wilderness, and since The Wall was still fresh in everyone’s minds, this was practically Waters doing his own version of Pink’s storyline, only this time the fear of one’s other half cheating on them is reversed.
Although The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking doesn’t have nearly the same sturdiness as The Wall or even Waters’s later projects like Amused to Death, it is interesting to see him try his best at sexual frustration and quiet desperation. Don’t expect anything hot and heavy by any stretch, but it’s saying something when even the “sexy” songs in an artist’s discography are designed to make you think.
