The piece of Pink Floyd Roger Waters takes on tour
Leaving any band is usually like losing a part of one’s DNA for any artist. Even if they have been thinking of calling it quits in a group for a while, there are always those few times when things don’t feel the same once you start going solo. And despite Roger Waters being an integral part of Pink Floyd throughout every step of their career, he was never that far away from home when he first started his solo career.
But for the first few years on his own, there were moments where Waters didn’t seem to have the same followthrough as his bandmates. A Momentary Lapse of Reason was far from the best thing the band had ever made, but looking back on The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking felt like every part of the bassist’s sound got unintentionally neutered the minute that he lost David Gilmour’s guitar solos.
And when looking at the Waters solo outings that garnered major attention, it always came at the expense of the people that he had on it. Either it was something like Amused to Death that thrived off of Jeff Beck’s immaculate guitar chops, or it was the shock and disgust at seeing people like Guy Pratt onboard to take a flagrant dump on the original version of Dark Side of the Moon in the 2020s.
Granted, not every piece of Water’s career lent itself well to being played by a full band. Radio KAOS was a bit of a heavier listen, and considering the massive amount of 1980s keyboards over everything, it seemed like Waters was more than happy to continue the career plans he had ever since Animals by retiring and never bothering to go on tour again.
Once the Berlin Wall finally came down, Waters did have a reason to bring his masterpiece The Wall to the live stage one more time as an act of celebration. He had all of the rights to use it, but if he could manage to get someone as big as The Scorpions to be the surrogate band during ‘In The Flesh’, why not try to reach out to Snowy White from the original production to give some credibility to the show?
Although the idea of having Eric Clapton was tossed around, Waters eventually became comfortable having that bit of connective tissue from the old Floyd days, with White saying, “Roger phoned me up, and he said, ‘I’m only doing this little tour, just three weeks. It would be nice if you were in the band.’ I agreed to do it since it seemed like a nice chance to get out to America and do some shows. I thought it would just be three weeks, but that short tour turned into 13 years.”
And for all of the bickering that still goes on between Waters and David Gilmour today, White is one of the few people who have remained on good terms with both of them. He still is a major part of Waters’s touring show, but the fact that Gilmour managed to contribute some guitar parts to his solo album Highway to the Sun is no small feat considering how bitter he and Waters were at the time.
Then again, the reason why White works well in both incarnations of Pink Floyd is because he never was one for handling group dynamics. He was far more interested in doing the best job he could, and even if he started his career collecting a paycheck, it takes a special breed of musician to come to do justice to Gilmour’s and Beck’s solos whenever Waters goes on the road.
