The producer is always supposed to be the guide throughout every classic album. Even if they aren’t responsible for writing the songs, they lay the perfect foundation for every musician to stand on when they enter the studio. But it takes a special producer to rein in someone like Roger Waters.
Then again, Waters’s strengths as a musician are also half of why he has been so difficult to work with over the years. He has always been a great conceptualist throughout his solo work and his time with Pink Floyd.
Since Syd Barrett had to be kicked out so early on in their career, Waters should be given a lot of credit for being part of the glue that held the band together during a time when most other bands would have broken up. But there’s a fine line between leading a band and being a dictator, and he crossed it more than a few times.
It’s not like he wasn’t within his rights to air his opinion. The Dark Side of the Moon was his idea from the start, looking at the concepts of what makes people go mad, but if there’s anything to gain from listening to his redux version of the record, it was how much David Gilmour and Richard Wright helped flesh out some of the melodies behind him. And when working on his last albums with Floyd, you can sense that tension from what ended up on the record.
Gilmour did at least get a few contributions in when working on The Wall, but outside of tunes like ‘Young Lust’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’, the rest of the album feels like a Broadway show that Waters came up with that happened to feature the band members. If the band themselves were tired of his antics after the record was over, they wouldn’t be happy going into a new record that was all Waters’s tunes.
If he had the confidence to be the main songwriter across The Final Cut, though, he figured he was also qualified to be in the producer’s chair. Thus, while Bob Ezrin is a brilliant producer who managed to keep everything together when working with everyone from Floyd to Alice Cooper, he admitted that those days working on The Final Cut made him not want to work with Waters anymore.
It simply wasn’t fun any longer, and while Ezrin could respect Waters’s vision, he couldn’t go along with it, saying, “I think Roger is brilliant, but he’s a tough guy to disagree with, and he can be overly passionate and uncompromising. It’s those qualities that go into making him a great artist, but neither Dave nor I would ever consider ourselves great artists. I love Roger and I truly love most of what he does, but not enough anymore to go through what’s necessary to be a part of his process. It’s far easier for Dave and I to do our version of a Floyd record.”
It’s a shame knowing that Ezrin would never contribute to one of Waters’s later solo albums, either. Nigel Godrich was a worthy substitution in the 2010s, and the musician proved that he had the chops to deliver something worthwhile in the 1990s with Amused to Death, but an album like Radio KAOS is absolutely begging for someone to crack the whip and tell everyone that the synthesiser sound isn’t working.
While the Gilmour period of Floyd has always been a bit of an acquired taste, no one can argue that Ezrin didn’t bring his A-game to those records. Some of the music may not have had Waters’s sense of scale and drama, but it was worth knowing that everyone in the band had a fair say in what ended up on the record.
