The concert Roger Waters always said would be too difficult to play
Nothing that Roger Waters ever did was about being subtle.
Throughout every single era of Pink Floyd, Waters made it his personal mission to give audiences something that they had never seen before, and while that made for some uncomfortable moments when working on productions of The Wall, he would rather go down swinging with something he believed in than make the same musical slop over and over again. He knew that the stage could mean more than a bunch of people sitting around playing guitars, but there was also another side of Waters that people rarely got to see.
Because as much as he loved the idea of making a spectacle, Waters was never going to be able to get his ideas off the ground on his own. Syd Barrett may have had enough charisma to keep the audience in the palm of his hand whenever he performed, but after trying to make long musical exercises every single time Floyd played, Waters knew that they needed something more than boring the audience by looking at their shoes while they played.
It’s not like that mentality didn’t rub off on David Gilmour when he first started putting together shows on his own. There would be the odd low-key concert experience here and there, but the final days of the band touring records like The Division Bell were about giving people a theatrical extravaganza, down to them simulating an aeroplane crash in the middle of ‘On the Run’ during that tour.
Waters may have taken a lot of those same ideas with him when he reimagined The Wall both in the 1990s and the 2010s, but he wasn’t going to stop thinking of different approaches, either. Amused to Death deserved to be brought to the stage after it was finished, but even after years of listening to Waters hold court whenever he played tunes like ‘The Bravery of Being Out of Range’, he could be just as captivating on acoustic if he had the right song to work with.
After all, he had made brilliant unplugged tunes like ‘If’ from Atom Heart Mother, and bookending Animals with both versions of ‘Pigs on the Wing’ was a great way for him to embrace his inner Bob Dylan. That was the kind of songwriter that Waters was aiming for every time he played, but he felt that he could never manage to engage with the audience the same way that John Prine could for an entire show.
Prine’s folksy approach may have fit right in with Waters’s love of acoustic playing, but he felt that there was no possible way for him to carry that kind of energy for an entire show, saying, “I’ll sing ‘Hello In There,’ because I love it and it’s a great song. I love the opportunity to drift into a different genre. When it’s not my show and I’m not feeling expectations, maybe I would break all the rules and do a short concert that was only John Prine songs, because he’s so fucking good, but I probably won’t because it takes a lot of energy and I still have my own work to do.”
It doesn’t look like much when you see what Waters is doing, but being in that situation was always going to be an uphill battle. Many of Prine’s songs are incredibly written, but they also require the right person to deliver them, and even if Waters has that storytelling tone of voice, there was no way that he could pull off the same kind of vulnerability that Prine had during his prime.
He was much better equipped when he had a backing band behind him, but Waters’s admitting defeat wasn’t a case of him not stretching himself. He always welcomed the opportunity for a challenge, but sometimes you have to witness a master at work when they work their magic.
