No one goes through the amount of rock and roll history that Roger Waters has, who doesn’t have their fair share of embarrassing moments.
It’s physically impossible for anyone to go that long in the music industry without at least a few skeletons in the closet, and judging by his solo output, there are a handful of moments where Waters sounded a little bit cheesy in the 1980s and even during Pink Floyd’s inception. But when talking about the biggest lows of his career, Waters’s personal regrets tend to hit a lot closer to home than others.
I mean, there’s already the weight that every member of Floyd feels having had to watch Syd Barrett slowly deteriorate over the course of a few years. He was their leader and the one who started the ball rolling all the way back in the 1960s, and to see him go from this free spirit to one of the biggest musical casualties of the day was bound to do a number on all of them when they saw him later on Wish You Were Here.
But if you were to ask Waters, Pink Floyd had practically ceased being at that point. They had their moments of brilliance throughout their career, but after working on Dark Side of the Moon, a lot of the camaraderie had disappeared. All the studio sessions started to become far more tense than they were before, and by the time that Waters started drafting the concept for The Wall, the rest of them were glorified backing musicians trying to get everything right for him half the time.
Anyone not named ‘Waters’ would have been pissed off being in that kind of band, but when the bassist decided to split the whole thing up, his decision to sue them seemed to make absolutely no sense. The idea of him being the embodiment of Pink Floyd did hold some weight since he wrote all the lyrics on most of the tunes, but if they were able to continue on without Barrett, why couldn’t they have gone in another direction without Waters?
But for the bassist, no one should own the name but him. He was the one who had helped keep them alive, but his logic had more than a few holes in it as well. There are bound to be a few fans who claim that any version of Floyd without Waters isn’t really Pink Floyd, but that holds about as much water as saying that a version of Fleetwood Mac without Peter Green shouldn’t exist. It’s a completely unfair way of thinking, and even Waters knew that by the end.
When talking about finally reuniting his old mates at Live 8, even Waters had to admit he should have never gone after them for ownership of the name, saying, “When I left, there was a lot of aggravation and a lot of mudslinging, particularly between Dave Gilmour and myself, and I kind of regret it. c it twenty years down the road. So to have the opportunity to get back onstage and to play the old songs together, which people loved anyway, was really very good for me and for him as well I think, to act like grown-ups instead of kind of spoiled brats throwing their toys out onto the ground.”
The gig itself was far too fleeting for some fans to take in all at once, but the idea that they even managed to patch things up to get back onstage at all was a miracle. Given how many times Waters bad-mouthed records like The Division Bell, the fact that they could actually manage to be arm-in-arm again for the final curtain call of that night was something that most fans thought was gone forever.
And since the relationship between Waters and Gilmour has only become worse in recent years, it only made that one show more special. It was a moment in time where the stars aligned and every member of the group could put aside their differences to play some music, and all we could do was appreciate it for what it was.
