The tour Roger Waters was disappointed in: “I expected more”
The touring life isn’t something that everyone’s necessarily ready for. It’s one thing to be able to play some of the best music you know how to, but when a manager calls you up and says that the band are going to be on the road for a year and a half with zero breaks, it can get more than a little bit monotonous. Roger Waters had already grown tired of the road before he had even left Pink Floyd, but during the shows to support the album Amused to Death, he felt that he was never delivering to the audience in the right way.
Because if there’s anything that Waters knew better than anyone, it was the ability to put together a great show. After all, Pink Floyd would have probably looked incredibly boring if all people saw was them jamming for hours on end, so being able to see the huge spectacle of The Wall or the flying pig on the Animals tour at least gave striking imagery for the audience to gawk at when tearing through their finest pieces.
But after Waters left the fold for a solo career, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking wasn’t exactly greeted with the same intensity that The Wall did. Waters was back at square one, but when resurrecting his rock opera for a massive stage show in Berlin, he also found time to sprinkle in pieces of his solo material like Radio KAOS into the mix as well.
Still, it’s not hard to see why The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking didn’t meet the same standards as Pink Floyd’s masterpieces. Outside of the fact that there’s only one of them playing, it falls into the same problem that The Final Cut had. Since this was the concept that the group rejected, what made it seem more likely that it would be acceptable now that he was on his own?
I’ll admit that there are some places where the beginnings of Pink Floyd’s classic sound begin to show themselves again, but having backup singers on the title track is more than a little bit cheesy. And despite Pink seeming like a sympathetic character on The Wall, hearing about someone who’s drawn to the rock outlaw lifestyle despite being married makes him look a little bit slimy by design.
Waters might have been happy to see his vision realised to his satisfaction, but he was more than a little bit disheartened seeing people not show up, saying, “I confess, particularly with the ‘Pros and Cons’ tour, it was a big surprise to me. So, that was a bit of a learning process. I don’t know. At the time, I was kind of disappointed. But I’ve learned now that nobody knows who I am, and that the whole thing was starting again… I expected more people than did to know who I was and what I’d done. But they didn’t. And they still don’t.”
It didn’t take long for Waters to start picking up the pieces, either. After bringing The Wall to stadium-level in Berlin, Amused to Death was his greatest work since his Floyd days, if only for the fact that he had a worthy guitar god to replace David Gilmour in Jeff Beck on a handful of tracks.
Then again, it’s almost sadly ironic that The Wall was what got Waters back into stadiums around the world. Just like Pink had been doomed to repeat himself at the end of the rock opera, so too is Waters condemned to play the same songs to get people in their seats.
