The one bandmate Roger Waters was never friends with: “Fellow travellers with goals in common”
There’s no accurate way of describing the kind of telepathy that every member of Pink Floyd had in their prime.
While it took them a while to move out of Syd Barrett’s shadow, it was clear by the time of Dark Side of the Moon that they had hit on something that was a lot more empathetic and heartfelt than any of the other avant-garde roads they had gone down for the rest of their career. But even if Roger Waters was the one calling all the shots at times, there were more than a few musicians in the band who didn’t really have the same staying power once they put down their instruments.
Then again, Waters wasn’t exactly the most technical master on his bass, either. A lot of what he was doing did a great job of supporting the song whenever he played tunes like ‘Comfortably Numb’ or ‘Time’, but his strong suit was always in writing the greatest lyrics for the band and helping transform some ideas into more cerebral concepts when they made tunes like ‘Money’ or ‘Welcome to the Machine’.
But there’s a lot more to being in a band than writing a bunch of great lyrics. The heart of any great rock and roll outfit always centres around everyone’s ability to kill it onstage, and anyone who saw Floyd back in the 1970s will happily tell you that it was one of the best concept experiences of their lives. Not all of them needed to be engaging onstage, but when the music and the lights are in sync, you could hardly ask for a better theatrical show in rock and roll.
The band weren’t in the same realm as Alice Cooper or anything, but watching all of them work off each other in Live at Pompeii is a great example of how they stretched themselves. You can tell that each of them are listening to each other intently so they can come in at just the right time, and even when they are improvising pieces of their show, the cacophony of sound on the live version of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ is still one of the most intense passages of their entire career.
But if Waters was integral to the message of Pink Floyd, the real key to their live sound came from David Gilmour and Richard Wright. And while Gilmour has been talked about more than a few times as a rock and roll juggernaut, Wright tends to get overlooked more than a few times. He was the real musical mastermind on a lot of their records, and you can hear him slowly incorporating different textures into their sound, whether it’s being more reserved on Animals or throwing in jazz lines on Dark Side of the Moon.
That was all well and good, but even years after his passing, Waters felt that Wright’s work never seemed to have any major effect on him, saying, “We spent a lot of time together working, but we were never really together. We were just on parallel tracks for a while. Fellow travellers with goals in common. [His death] didn’t change that, [but] he was quite important to all of that work that we did together.”
And Wright’s firing is really a case of Waters not knowing the kind of musician he was working with. Wright was willing to put in the time every single time they made a new record, but Waters’s decision to fire him instead of having a conversation about how the piano should sound on their records is still one of the ugliest chapters that the band ever had while the bassist was at the helm.
While Wright did eventually come back into the fold when Gilmour took the reins and even managed to bury the hatchet with Waters, the fact that he was taken for granted was one of the biggest missed opportunities that Floyd ever had. Most people could have easily kept things going with someone with that much talent, but sometimes one’s own hubris clouds their judgement of the legends that are standing right in front of them.
