How Do You...? [read]

I've never really thought about that aspect deeply before. I'm going to think about this a while and get back to you on this.

I didn't know that much aboput Floyd when I started listening. After I had become an ardent fan, I looked into their history. It was then that I learned that Roger was an egotistical, arrogant pompous ass. I freely admit it. Yet I still love the guy, it's almost as if I'm rooting for his selfishness. Rick in my opinion, and, as someone else pointed out in an earlier post, his opinion, was not contributing to the band at that time.

Let's get something straight though about the rights to the name, Roger didn't want them, he just didn't want someone else to use it. I agree with him, because frankly Dave tricked a lot of people into thinking they were buying quality material when they purchased The Division Bell.

There, that said, yeah Rog got out of hand, but my opinion of him as a songwiter is unaffected by it.

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stchrissie is not me.

Yeah I bet Rog also didn't like going on tour and playing to 1,500 people while "Pink Floyd"is down the street playing to 50,000 at the same time. And I don't know why either but i sorta root for Roger too even though he can be um...difficult at times.

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There may be dogs about.

We have kind of had this debate before. In my oft expressed opinion, Roger was Pink Floyd. David Gilmour made no small contribution and is a great guitarist.

However, Roger Waters was the creative genius behing everything they done. Maybe he has got a big ego, but let's face it, if any of us had that kind of talent and thousands of fans cheering us night after night, I bet our egos would be pretty big as well.

Again, as I have said before I would have respected Dave and Co if they had not continued to trade under the Floyd name.

Regarding Richard Wright and Nick Mason, I am not sure they made a huge contribution. Maybe they were sidelined by Roger's superior talent but Wright himself admits that he went through a long period in the wilderness.

I suppose the real question is whether Roger was right to break up the band when he did. Maybe he felt it had run it's course and wanted to do something as a solo project.

You say people cheered for Roger everynight at Floyd shows? No way, people want to hear Dave's guitar and voice. All Roger ever did was write lyrics and bad songs, only to be made better by Dave. Animals and the Wall are not Roger's solo albums, its just that he wrote the lyrics before anyone could write music, and so he took credit, Dave says all the time that all the music for The Wall and Animals was mostly his work.

And in my humble opinion, The Division Bell is a great album. All the music for the album was writen by Wright and/or Gilmour, besides Take It Back, which was co written by Bob Ezrin. But thats more than the wall which had two songs written by outside members, The Trial, and Is There Anybody Out There, which was not written by Roger, but by Bob Ezrin.

Some of the following is my opinion, but much of it is factual. It's usually pretty easy to pick out which is which.

First, on the subject of Roger being, well, a little egotistical, yes he certainly is. Any doubts should be allayed once you've read some interviews with him, particularly the Who The Hell Does Roger Waters Think He Is? article that Q Magazine did. It's availible on this site.

The real question is, does he deserve the status given to him in respect to Pink Floyd? Is he the only one in the band who mattered - with a possible exception granted to David for musical brilliance? No. Absolutely not. Roger is an integral part of Pink Floyd, but he is not Pink Floyd.

It is true that Roger wrote almost all of the lyrics that we have come to know and love. However, the music, for the most part, was written by David Gilmour. Ask somebody about the high points of any Pink Floyd album. Generally, they will refer to music written by David. Even with The Wall, a Roger Waters solo album in nearly all but name, fans will continually pick out Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell right along side Another Brick In The Wall and Hey You. The last two, you will also notice, are very similar musically.

And then there is the matter of Roger's bass playing, or more appropriately, lack of it. David is the one who plays bass on about half of the Pink Floyd tracks, if you believe him, and there's really no reason not to. His claim is that he would lay down the bass line for some of the songs on their records because it would take him much less time to learn and master the bass parts.

But the credits for Pink Floyd's success should not stop with Rog and Dave. Rick and Nick deserve credit as well. With Nick the case is slightly harder to argue, but the conclusion is the same. Go out and watch the Pompeii video, which is mostly shots of Nick on the drums. This illustrates more than anything else why he was an essential part of the band. Granted, technically he's not flashy, but would you want him to be? How do you think Echoes would sound with giant fills after each lyrical line? Or a drum solo rather than Dave's seagulls? Nick keeps the beat, as well as a positive attitude toward the band and their music - something Mr. Waters often lacked.

So what, if any, was Rick's contribution to Pink Floyd? Simple. Rick added atmosphere. What do you think Shine On would sound like without any keyboards? Rick wrote those parts remember. Or how about Dark Side of the Moon without The Great Gig In The Sky or Any Colour You Like or many of the other tracks that Rick's keys added to? Would Brain Damage and Eclipse sound all that great without the keyboard connection between the two? And then there's the laughable idea of a Echoes with no Rick. That whole song came about because he was tapping his fingers on the upper end of his organ and Roger asked how it would sound put through a certain amp.

If there is really any doubt about Rick's importance, people should simply look at the difference between A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell. On AMLoR, which is a Pink Floyd album about as much as The Final Cut is one, there's something evidently missing. Sure, Sorrow's alright, along with a couple other cuts off of it, but something's not quite right. The Division Bell restores the Pink Floyd to a level not seen since Wish You Were Here.

Rick is perhaps the most interesting member, simply because of the strife between him and Roger. Roger says it's because he wasn't producing any music. Rick agrees - he wasn't. Roger goes on to say there were 'artistic differences'. Rick says there was a 'personality clash'. It's also important to know that this was nothing new in 1979 near the time of the split. Way back in 1968 Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd's manager at that time, asked Rick to break away from the Floyd and form a new band with the then departed Syd.

The reason for that? Rick and Syd were considered, by Jenner, to be the only two in the band with any musical capacity. This is really not that shocking after you've heard Dave's guitar from that period, remember Nick's drumming, and consider that Roger had yet to prove himself as much of a writer - i.e. Pick Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk.

Rick also had no friends in the band. According to him, he and Roger were at odds right from the start, Nick would always take Roger's side and Dave was a couple years younger than the rest of them and didn't fit in much himself.

So there I've returned to the original topic of these posts: what happened between Roger and Rick? It's fairly obvious that Rick didn't feel like a part of the group anymore in 1979. He wanted to spend time on other things than Roger's hair brained idea of building some big wall across a stage. This conflicted with Roger's wishes and the two simply couldn't work together in Pink Floyd anymore. That's about it.

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Isn't it sad we're insane?

GeddyJr: Regarding Animals + The Wall, Dave's full of shit. He does that sometimes. It's called "revisionist history."

"All Rog did was write lyrics and bad songs": Trust me, if you don't like any of Rog's songs, you're throwing away about 80% of their pre-AMLoR material, and about 90% of DSotM, WYWH, Animals, The Wall, and TFC...just thought I'd let you know.

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Think for yourself. Question authority.

Also: The Trial was *co*-written by Ezrin, and Is There Anybody Out There was Rog's work. And where did you get the idea that there was almost no collaboration on TDB? All of Dave's songs on TDB were co-written by Polly Samson.

"My girlfriend wrote the lyrics."

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Think for yourself. Question authority.

No, Is There Anydbody Out There WAS written by Bob Ezrin, dont believe what u see on the credits. Also, i said the music was written entirely by Gilmour and Wright, so read closer.

I have to step in here and say, first of all Geddy, the topic wasn't on how much each member contributed, but whether we thought less of Roger knowing he was a jerk. For me the answer was no.

Second, Dave's contribution to The Wall is quite exaggerated, though I will give him credit for Animals and WYWH and Dark Side. But the only thing on The Wall that he is responsible for wholly is Comfortably Numb. And that was just the music part of it, Roger still wrote the lyrics.

Mother and Hey You, possibly the two strongest songs on the album, have Roger Waters written all over them. Granted, he couldn't do much else, Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking sounded an awful lot like these two songs, they are still the best two songs on that album.

Finally, lets not forget the lyrics. What would any of this be without the message Roger tries to send? Well, without exaggeration, it would all be just two albums, MLOR and TDB.

Really, let's not try to dismiss Roger's part in all this, he was the heart and soul. The driving force that brought out some great things from, if left under Syd's devices, just another pop group.

That's all I have to say.

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stchrissie is not me.

YES, but I think he took the band under his wing. Who decided HE tells WHO to go, thats like one empoyeer tells another one to quit, you know what I mean? And why did HE decide to write 80% of the lyrics to their albums? The band was not his, he was one of the members, that is what I'm confused about. What gave that guy the nerve to kick another member like himself out?
Rick was in it at the beggining, the same time Roger was, he just had a different role, thats all. If you wanted him to contibute, why did you write most of the music and lyrics yourself??



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For millions of years mankind lived just like the Animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk.

[Wright-Gilmour-Mason-Waters-Barrett]

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"Live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me, HaHaHaaa!"

I think Roger wrote the lyrics because no one else could write good enough lyrics. Or none of them wanted to, saving them for solo albums.

After thinking about this, I think that all of this has made me think less of him as a person, but not as a musician.

Why did he kick Syd out oh those so many years ago? For the same reason, he felt that Syd (or Rick) was more of a burden than a help.

Why did he write the lyrics? Someone needed to take charge, remember before it was Syd, then it was a conglomerate of ideas, but when Dark Side came out, the group realized that he was the best for the leadership role.

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stchrissie is not me.

[quote]
On 2001-08-06 02:17, Lucifer Sam wrote:
[quote]
And why did HE decide to write 80% of the lyrics to their albums?

Listen to Division Bell and AMLOR and all will be revealed !

Roger Waters is a perfectionist and no doubt sets high standards of himself and those around him. His creativity gave him power in the band and he automatically became the leader.

Roger always comes across to me as a genuine guy, someone who actually cares. He's definitely in control and no dount has a towering ego. However, without Roger Waters input Pink Floyd would have gone the same way as countless other 60s bands.