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Roger Waters exposes the secrets of Rock 'N' Roll's most
self-destructive supergroup,
PINK FLOYD
Penthouse Magazine, September, 1988
"Is there anything more sad and unjust than a *fake*?" frets
radically flustered British rock legend Roger Waters, seated in
his Spartan loft offices in London. His fervid question fairly
scars the afternoon air with its savagery. "Can you imagine the
disappointment in learning you'd spent your savings on a false
Magritte or a fraudulent John Lennon manuscript? Not to mention
the spiritual trust and emotion people invest in the symbolic
power of any name."
Indeed, Waters allows, in many ancient cultures names were sa-
cred things that could never be changed, transferred, or falsely
assumed. To tamper with a name, much less manipulate it in the
marketplace, was to desecrate the spiritual force it contained.
It was like spitting on the soul.
"And it was the struggle *against* these kinds of attitudes,"
adds the wiry Waters, his square jaw stiffening, "that helped
John Lennon create the sense of artistic decency that I like to
call `the Lennon Instinct.'"
The fight that Waters is discussing is closer to home than any
cunning exploitation of the farflung Beatles legacy, but the
stakes are still plenty high. Indeed, one of the biggest and most
bitter battles in the annals of the billion-dollar rock business
concerns the much-coveted legal custody of a quirky musical
trademark: Pink Floyd.
In the beginning were the words, and the words were the Pink
Floyd sound. Derived from the first names of two obscure Georgia
bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council), the term was applied
in 1965 to a certain experimental British rock band; and over the
course of two decades it has become synonymous with a magnetic,
edgy music in which its pervasive chilling mood is the star.
The man at the center of the ugly contest for control of this
potent rock presence is songwriter Roger Waters, a lyricist *ex-
traordinaire* whose spiky meditations on death, madness, and apo-
calypse were pivotal in leading an obscure British psychedelic
group to the pinnacle of commercial preeminence in progressive
rock. In particular, Waters wrote all the words and the better
part of the music for Pink Floyd's 1973 album, _The Dark Side Of
The Moon_. One of the most successful records of all time, the
hypnotic _Dark Side_ has lingered for a staggering 725 weeks on
_Billboard_'s pop charts; yet its spooky cover image of a
prismatic pyramid is the closest its faceless creators have ever
come to iconlike stardom.
Waters' legendary fertile imagination yielded another phenome-
nal blockbuster in 1979, the epic autobiographical ode to postwar
alienation, _The Wall_ -- and under his leadership the band would
ultimately move more than 55 million albums. But the focus of
fans' adulation remained the anonymous banner of "Pink Floyd."
The Floyd broke up in 1983 -- notwithstanding all flamboyant
appearances to the contrary -- and now Waters and longtime Floyd
lead guitarist/vocalist Dave Gilmour are locked in a fight over
rights to the name. Waters wants "the reigning trade-emblem of
rock" to be permanently retired, pleading, "Let's be fair to our
public, for pity's sake, and admit the group disintegrated long
ago!"
Gilmour vehemently rejects such notions, raging, "I've been
working on my career with Pink Floyd for 20 years -- since 1968.
I'm 44 now, too old to start all over at this stage of my career,
and I don't see any reason why I should. Pink Floyd is not some
sacred or hallowed thing that never made bad or boring records in
the past. And I'm not destroying anything by trying to carry on!"
Actually, these pitched acrimonies evolved out of a 1985
management rift, in which Waters ended his representation by
veteran Floyd manager Steve O'Rourke. Their falling-out was over
contractual agreements for future Floyd output -- a matter Waters
deemed moot since the band was, to his mind, defunct. When
O'Rourke bridled, calling his termination by Waters a violation
of his own formal agreements with, and responsibilities toward,
the entity known as Pink Floyd, Roger sought support from former
band members Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason (Roger even rashly
proposed to cede the band's rights to Pink Floyd if they'd close
ranks against O'Rourke's claims; neither Gilmour nor Mason ac-
cepted Waters never-to-be-repeated offer.)
As Waters tells it, when he calmed down and took the long view
on both the deepening breach with O'Rourke and his estrangement
>from Gilmour, Mason and Floyd orphan Rick Wright (who Roger says
was fired by mutual consent of the rest in 1980), he decided the
sanest course of action was a writ to nullify the name Pink
Floyd.
In 1986, on Halloween, Roger Waters filed suit in London
against Gilmour and Mason. Last year, the dispute spilled out of
the offices of the principals' attorneys and onto the world's
concert stages. Roger Waters mounted a massive tour in support of
_Radio KAOS_, his second solo LP, while Gilmour, Mason and Wright
performed the _A Momentary Lapse Of Reason_ LP under the Pink
Floyd flag.
Waters' record drew wildly mixed reviews and sold modestly;
yet his much-praised KAOS concert pageant, while pitted against
the rising tide of pseudo-Floyd promotion, slowly prospered to
where Waters could sell out solo shows in England's gigantic
Wembley Arena on two consecutive nights. Meanwhile, the product
of Gilmour's Floyd facsimile drew similarly mixed notices but
triumphed in record stores, sparking a hefty 3 million purchases
in the U.S. alone; and the lasers- and props-packed _Lapse Of
Reason_ dates proved a steady sellout internationally.
On both tours, crowds were treated to the bountifully forebod-
ing sweep of the Pink Floyd aesthetic. Hits and FM favorites like
"Welcome to the Machine," "Money," and "Another Brick In The
Wall" were lavished on all comers -- but it was only during the
_Radio KAOS_ concerts that noted Los Angeles deejay Jim Ladd
(performing as the voice of the mythical KAOS station) deigned to
declare, "Words and music by Roger Waters!"
While Waters' authorship of the best of the Pink Floyd reper-
toire was plain from the start, it was opponent Dave Gilmour who
won the crucial first round at the box office. While savoring the
bounty from _A Momentary Lapse Of Reason_, Dave permitted himself
a bit of boasting last november in the pages of _Rolling Stone_:
"We never sat down at any point and said, `It doesn't sound Floyd
enough. Make this more Floyd.' We just worked on the songs until
they sounded right. When they sounded great and right, that's
when it became Pink Floyd."
Roger Waters read that "arrogant soliloquy" down in Nassau's
Compass Point Studios last spring while at work with Paul "Don't
Shed A Tear" Carrack and the Bleeding Heart Band on the then un-
titled follow-up to _Radio KAOS_.
For Roger, Gilmour's assertion was the last straw. "That's an
outright lie, absolute and barefaced," he seethed, slamming the
magazine down, "and someday the world will know the depth of this
entire hoax!"
Waters saw Gilmour's quote in _Rolling Stone_ as the rock
equivalent of the Iran-Contra crew and their droll demurrals con-
cerning official misconduct, despite a damning paper trail to the
contrary. The Gilmour statement emboldened Waters to come forth
for the first time with details of what he sees as the behind-
the-scenes disloyalties and double-dealings that gave rise to _A
Momentary Lapse of Reason_. "I must say," Waters quips, "that
under the circumstances, it's a superb title for a so-called Pink
Floyd record."
Granted, anyone can say anything to the press to justify his
position to Pink Floyd's legion of rabid fans. However, the in-
trigues that emerge from six months of independent inquiry into
this epic test of rock'n'roll wills differ shockingly from all
previous accounts.
What emerges is a saga of greed, cynicism, and misrepresenta-
tion in the modern music business. Over the last 20 years, rock
has grown from the simple expression of a spirited singer and
his song into a gigantic entertainment juggernaut in which even
the most splendid displays of "talent" and "vision" can be of
synthetic origin. Thanks to the convolutions of current recording
technology, a musician needn't play, a band needn't assemble, an
artistic bond needn't exist. A songwriter-producer can adopt the
focused traits of an assembly-line foreman as he brings the illu-
sion of a supergroup and its latest album into being. This is the
story of a massive controversy, centered on the marketing of two
seemingly foolish words: Pink Floyd.
"You learn nothing from a lie," says Roger Waters, stretched
out in the Billiard Room, a home studio that has supplanted the
game room of his spacious house in Barnes, West London. It's been
a troubled six months since our initial Pink Floyd-related talk,
and the sinewy Waters looks distinctly world-weary. "Even as you
discover a deliberate untruth, it always only confirms what you
already knew but refused to face."
This blunt observation is at the core of Roger Waters's
outlook as a composer, since unsentimental confrontations with
delusion form the fundamental themes of his work. Like many old-
guard rock practitioners, Waters values the unconditional open-
ness of the best rock as a public expression of a personal truth.
Naysayers claim that rock no longer requires any creed or sub-
stance beyond the brazen announcement of itself.
"In Aldous Huxley's book *Brave New World*," mulls Waters,
nursing a cup of strong tea, "he warned about every human being
conditioned to accept his lot so that the bosses arrive at a nice
smooth situation where nobody questions anything and everything
is supposedly `taken care of.' This is the deluded scenario I put
forth in *Radio KAOS* -- which was my doomsday-bound vision of a
`soap-operatic republic' in which nobody gives a shit if, for in-
stance, Oliver North did the right thing or was wrong, or what
effect it had on anything else. All that many viewers still care
about concerning the indicted Mr. North is whether he gave a
good, solid, John Wayne television performance. And because
North's airtime suddenly became entwined with the American net-
works' sickening concept of what constitutes great television, it
was literally excused!
"What it comes down to for me is: Will the technologies of
communication and culture -- and especially popular music, which
is a *vast* and beloved enterprise -- help us to understand one
another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart? While
there's still time, we all have to answer for ourselves. But nei-
ther Huxley nor Meese nor Ollie North could have prepared me for
the creative, technological and moral issues I'm facing with the
Pink Floyd sham -- a grand display that's also being excused in
public because it makes for great arena rock.
"Naturally," he chuckles, showing a handsome, seldom seen grin
that merits more exposure, "all of this solemn contemplation is
showing up in my music. *Radio KAOS* was hopefully universal in
its pained concern, but my new album's themes involve anguish in
my very own backyard."
Indeed, one day last winter, as the personnel calling them-
selves Pink Floyd were moving across the map from San Diego to
Sydney in fierce pursuit of ticket sales, a pensive Roger Waters
went to the Billiard Room and began writing stanzas for what be-
came a song for his new album:
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on Earth
But then it was over
We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed lookout spied a flickering star
Our last hurrah
(COPYRIGHT 1988 ROGER WATERS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)
Waters gradually realized the two verses were a requiem for
the fragile integrity of the Pink Floyd reign. And yes, tens of
thousands of spectators *were* at that moment crowding arenas to
hear a band calling itself Pink Floyd. Yet the most devout fans
surely were aware that the whole presentation could not be furth-
er in fact or intent from the aims of the idealistic school chums
who forged the Pink Floyd Sound.
When a title for his bittersweet new song eventually occurred
to Roger Waters, it also seemed an apt name for both his latest
solo album and the tragic creative destiny that it summarized. "I
didn't know what else to call it," he shrugs, "but *Amused to
Death*."
Among ultra-hard-core Pink Floyd zealots, the period of mourn-
ing for the band commenced way back in 1968, when another Roger
-- Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett -- was booted from the psychedelic
act he'd named. A fellow student of Waters's at Cambridge High
School for Boys, Syd Barrett was invited by Roger in late 1965 to
join a combo he'd formed with two other architecture majors (Nick
Mason, Rick Wright) at London's Regent Street Polytechnic. Spew-
ing barrages of feedback-cum-Chuck Berry chords during Sunday-
afternoon "Spontaneous Underground" sessions at the fabled Mar-
quee Club, Pink Floyd quickly became the vanguard experimental
outfit on the London underground scene.
Unfortunately, young Syd too quickly became high-priest-
without-portfolio of a surreal strain of hallucinogen-fueled rock
songcraft, whose halcyon era was as hazy as his own cerebellum.
While still sufficiently grounded as of January 1967 to author
Pink Floyd's first British hit, "Arnold Layne," Barrett soon
tired of the rigors of reality. He was halfway to the laughing
house when *The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn*, the debut Floyd LP,
emerged from Abbey Road Studios in August 1967.
Cambridge High School alumnua`s Dave Gilmour, fresh from gigs
as a male model in France, was brought on board in February 1968,
to serve as backup guitarist and vocalist for the dangerously
balmy Barrett. When too many visits to the popstar pharmacy paved
the way for Syd's inevitable on-mental tour collapse, Gilmour got
the nod as new guitar hero. Waters, Gilmour, and Rick Wright went
on to assist Barrett in two loopy solo LPs (*The Madcap Laughs;
Barrett*), and then Syd retired to his mum's house to preserve
his premier rank as acid-fried rock savant.
With Gilmour the appointed front man, Waters gripped Floyd's
artistic reins and steered them into years of exotic
progressive-rock reveries. The electronics-drenched albums had
titles like *A Saucerful of Secrets; Ummagumma; Atom Heart Moth-
er; Meddle. And the spacey songs followed suit: "Set The Controls
For The HEart Of The Sun," "Astronome Domine." The band also pro-
vided soundtrack scores for a few of the more outre' late
sixties-early seventies art movies, notably *More* and
Michelangelo Antonioni's daffily desolate *Zabriske Point*(1970)
in which the Floyd song "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" soared
over the closing sequence of desert explosions. (**note from
typist/poster: the song in the movie is titled "Come In Number
51, Your Time Is Up." and is a very souped-up version of "Careful
With That Axe." This article contains some other minor inaccura-
cies, but I couldn't let that one stand.**)
The Pink Floyd stage productions of the era were the
forerunners of the modern rock extravaganza, featuring elaborate
special effects and one of rock's inaugural light shows, plus
protracted instrumental suites served up via a remarkable 360-
degree sound system called the Azimuth Coordinator. At one UK
concert, a 50-foot inflatable octopus rose from an adjacent pond
during a climactic number, the Floyd playing so loudly the deci-
bel level actually decimated the real aquatic life in the water.
For all its bizarre overkill, the Floyd had no impact on the
American market until 1972's _Obscured By Clouds_ was embraced by
FM radio. From there it was a short step to a commercial blast-
off courtesy _The Dark Side Of The Moon_, with its immaculate in-
strumentation, ominous phonic mumbles, and jarring sound
effects(ticking clocks, ringing cash registers). Each band member
contributed something to the mix of _Dark Side_, but lyrically,
musically, and conceptually it was Roger Waters's coming out par-
ty. While the rest of the group basked in the glow of their
abrupt mass acceptance, Waters busily exorcised his ingrained
demons, expounding throughout _Wish You Were Here_(1975, dedicat-
ed to Syd Barrett), _Animals_(1977), _The Wall_(1979) and _The
Final Cut_(1983), on gloomy human themes rooted in grief for his
airman father's World War II death.
"My father was a schoolteacher before the war," Waters ex-
plains evenly. "He taught physical education *and* religious in-
struction, strangely enough. He was a deeply committed Christian
who was killed when I was three months old. A wrenching waste. I
concede that awful loss has colored much of my writing and my
worldview."
It has also shaped Waters's intense sense of protectiveness
toward Pink Floyd's recording heritage, since it encompasses ma-
jor developmental horrors in his life -- whether they involved
coping with the death of the dad he never knew, or the psychic
dissolution of adolescent companion Syd Barrett.
"Syd and I went through our *most* formative years together,"
Waters shyly admits, "riding on my motorbike, getting drunk, do-
ing a little dope, flirting with girls, all that basic stuff. I
still consider Syd a great primary inspiration; there was a
wonderful human tenderness to all his unique musical flights."
From his alternately slack and hypertense body language to the
crackling clarity of his discourse, Roger Waters, 44, is the epi-
tome of the overly bright man for whom intellect, self-awareness,
and social conscience are a decidedly mixed blessing. The hard-
ness of his chiseled visage and flinty gaze are leavened, howev-
er, by the disarming vulnerability of his nature.
"There's something to be said for disastrous business miscal-
culation and failure in the marketplace," he says with a hapless
chuckle. "They send you back home to ponder your value systems,
and at the same time they reward you with a new freedom to follow
your creative heart without worrying about commercial tyrannies.
"I've also discovered that the law is not so much interested
in moral issues as the cold factors of ownership, treating the
name Pink Floyd as if it were McDonald's or Boeing! On a personal
level, I have nothing against Dave Gilmour furthering his own
goals. It's just the idea of Dave's solo career masquerading as
Pink Floyd that offends me!"
Gilmour is the polar opposite of his adversary in both appear-
ance and opinion. Round-faced, smiling, with a teddy-bear torso,
he projects amicability and approachability -- until his darting
eyes sense weakness in their vicinity. At which point, the smile
turns to a fixed leer and a fabled sarcasm spills forth.
"I don't share Roger's sense of angst about music and the
world," he banters scornfully, speaking at dusk in a Providence,
Rhode Island, hotel room shortly before another concert stand.
"If I did, maybe we would have come to an agreement on our
dispute. While Roger's acted dumbly and isolated himself, I've
discovered new strength with the extra work load I've had to put
on myself in this last year. But like him, I did several solo LPs
myself and made no demands on anyone when I did. Granted, I did
less work with Pink Floyd back in the old days, but that was
something Roger was forcing. And now," Gilmour adds with glee,
"the poor chap's lost his whip hand!"
Perhaps. But David Gilmour is singing a vastly different tune
than he did back when his solo future seemed brighter.
"Roger comes up with the concepts -- he's the preacher of the
group and spends more time home writing with Pink Floyd in mind,"
a breezy Gilmour told _Rolling Stone_ in 1978, as his _David Gil-
mour_ album was being issued. "We get along fine. I know what I
give to our sound, and he knows it, too. It's not a question of
him forcing his ideas on us. I get my ideas across as much as I
want to. They would use more of my music if I wrote it."
**(typists note: why might Gilmour have wanted/needed to publicly
deny internal strife within the band in 1978? Think about it.)**
Gilmour took an aggressive stab at writing his own music for
his _David Gilmour_ and 1984 _About Face_ collections, but it ap-
pears that only Pink Floyd cultists bought them (**typists note:
and who bought Waters's solo projects?**) It was after his second
solo album that he began to press the Pink ploy.
"From there, the story takes a sordid turn," claims Waters,
"and after long thought on this mess and the mountain of false-
hood (**not to mention the money they're making with the band I
thought was *mine* Waaah! -- typist's insertion. sorry, I'll stop
:-)**) mountain of falsehood that this scheming bunch has creat-
ed, I'm now going to divulge the cold, hard, indisputable facts.
Please do feel free to go back to any of the parties mentioned
about their side of the story. I think you'll stop them dead in
their sneaky tracks."
The first bombshell Waters drops is that Bob Ezrin, who served
as coproducer on _The Wall_ as well as _A Momentary Lapse of Rea-
son_, was originally supposed to produce _Radio KAOS_.
"That's right," Waters says with a grim nod. "We met in New
York City in February of 1986. This was after Gilmour had been
spouting for a year about how wise it would be to get Pink Floyd
back together in any passable form -- with me always refusing
that scam.
"So I see Ezrin for a two-day meeting and give him cassettes
of the _KAOS_ material I'm working on. He said he was interested
in doing the record. We shook on the _KAOS_ agreement, and we
agreed to start work in England on April 16 of 1986."
Come early April, Waters found it impossible to contact Bob
Ezrin.
"I couldn't reach him," says Waters. "Then,exactly ten days
before my first scheduled _KAOS_ session in England, I manage to
catch him at home in the wee hours of the morning. He picks up
the phone, is startled to find it's me on the other end, and he
blurts out, `My wife says she'll divorce me if I go work in Eng-
land!' I was stunned. I said, `Couldn't you have told me that
three months ago?'
"I'm in a state of shock, and the minute I put the phone down
after the conversation, my wife Carolyn says to me, `I'll bet
he's going to do that pseudo-Pink Floyd record David wants' All I
could reply was, `I can't believe he'd do *that*.'
"I discovered exactly one week later," Waters says, "that he
had indeed been hired to do a Pink Floyd record."
After having Waters's detailed accusations read to him, Bob
Ezrin replies, "I was in Los Angeles in the midst of a Rod
Stewart album when Roger called from London in February of '86,
and I set two days aside at Roger's insistence and we met each
other halfway, both of us flying to New York to talk about
_KAOS_. At the time I met with Roger, I said I wanted to do the
album, but I had an instinctive sense that he was being too rigid
and intense in his attitudes about the project. And believe me, I
know how rigid Roger can get from doing _The Wall_ with him.
"See, Roger was completely inflexible about when and where he
wanted to do _KAOS_. I have five kids, and he was wanting to move
my whole family to England for a minimum of three months. My wife
was against it because she felt it would disrupt our children's
school schedule. And so after I thought it through, I exercised
my right as a potential employee of Roger's to decline.
"It was a *full month* afterward," Ezrin proclaims, "that I
was approached by Dave Gilmour about producing a Pink Floyd pro-
ject. I hadn't been in touch with Dave since producing his _About
Face_ album."
So why, after rejecting a three-month Waters-related stay in
England for the good of his family, did Ezrin wind up spending
almost seven months in London recording _A Momentary Lapse of
Reason_ with Gilmour?
There, a long pause. "Dave didn't demand things like Roger
did," Ezrin finally replies. "While Roger was thinking only of