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of
Floyd as a stage band is bassist Roger Water's un-shakable command
of the Floyd citadel. The very man who writes
anti-totalitarian songs expects every musician around him to kowtow
to his leadership and songwriting prowess. When band work on
The Wall began a year and a half ago, Waters reportedly said
bluntly, "The other guys work for me."
Nick Mason and Rick Wright, admittedly not the innovators they once were,
have been so displaced by Waters's restric-tions that they've taken
to outside projects - Mason drumming with Rob Grill, Wright going
the solo album route. Both contributed instrumen-tation but no
writing to The Wall. Even guitarist Gilmour had to
"bust Roger's arm," Ezrin said, in order to write for the project.
And Waters told Ezrin, "You can write anything you want; just don't
expect any credit or money for it." Ezrin swallowed his pride
and got on with his work (producing, arranging, editing and adding
keyboards). "I keep hitting these turkeys," he said of the
rock world, "who cant' put four words together in a nice sentence.
To run into Roger Waters was an absolute joy. He's the finest
lyricist in rock."
Is this not what you expected to see?/If you'd like to find out
what's behind these cold eyes/You'll just have to claw your way
through the disguise.
-Roger Waters, "In The Flesh?"
"We had so
many effects, different styles of echo and different EQs," said
Ezrin, "That every song had to be set up and individually crafted."
Bringing this mountain of sonic com-plexity to the stage meant
hiring extra musicians, partly to free Roger Waters to sing better;
partly to facilitate the tricky staging, which involved three
different band setups; and partly to fill out the sound. On
stage, bassist Andy Bown holds most of the bottom down, while Snowy
White trades guitar solos with Gilmour and the tape recorder.
When former Sutherland Brothers & Quiver organist Peter Woods plays "In
the Flesh?" in a Rick Wright mask, the lyrics prove literally true,
for the "cold eyes" of Woods's mask are really part of a disguise.
Substitutes Woods and White aren't "what you expected to see," for
the elusive
Wright and Gilmour don't join the performance till the second |
number, "The Thin Ice." When the band rocks the hardest,
as on "Another Brick (Part Three)," all eight musicians, including
ex-SB & Q drummer Willie Wilson, play together.
At such times the quartet image of Pink Floyd loses definition, and one
wonders how long Waters intends to keep group appear-ances going.
A Wall insider has predicted that Richard Wright will not
remain long as Floyd's keyboardist after the mini-tour. Circus
Magazine has no proof that the four Londoners played even once in
the same room between the '77 Animals dates and the '79
Wall tour rehearsals. Helping to keep them together,
however tenuously, is their friendship, shared backgrounds as
engineering students, and a mutual preference for the clinical
approach to musical perfor-mance. As rock & rollers go,
they're comparative highbrows. Recordings, not shows, have
become their main creative outlet.
The
presence and backgrounds of the music arrangers Michael Kamen and
Ezrin seem indicative of Waters's growing restlessness with the
Floyd format and with rock & roll in general. Kaman, known in
the U.S. music business for orchestrating sophisticated pop and
folk-rock albums, has recently scored a ballet for La Scala, and is
involved with a complex, reggae-inspired Broad-way musical.
Canadian Bob Ezrin wrote for The Atlantic before becoming a
record producer. He's worked with Lou Reed on the concept
album Berlin, and seemed a good choice to Roger after
Caroline Waters (his wife) suggested he use Ezrin, for whom she used
to work.
"Boby has a gift for taking someone's concept and
At the outset
of 'The Wall' project, Roger Waters said, "The other guys work for
me."
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organizing it almost
before the
artist has though of it," said Kamen.
"In an all-night session," Ezrin revealed, "I rewrote the record. I
used all of Roger's elements, but I rearranged their order and put
them in a different form. I wrote The Wall out in forty
pages, like a book, telling how the songs segued. From that
the stage show grew. [Album and show development cost over
$1,500,00 before road ex-penses.] It wasn't so much rewriting
as redirecting. I acted as Roger's editor, and believe me, his
lyrics were so good they didn't need much."
Roger Waters's original version of The Wall, for example, included
this lyric for "Another Brick in the Wall":
I don't need your drugs to bring me down, down, down.
Waters set down a series of parallel lines which substituted other
specific substances for "drugs." At Ezrin's editorial
insistence, Roger generalized the lyrics for Part Three of the song
to convey Pink's alienation with more power:
I don't need no arms around me. I don't need no drugs to calm
me...Don't think I need anything at all.
"The record used to be Roger's life story," Ezrin said, "and there were
dates in the lyrics that put him at 36 years old. Kids don't
want to know about old rock stars. [Ezrin is only 30.] I
insisted we make the record more accessible, more uni-versal.
It was kept universalized, with some very important fine tuning by
Roger. But the credits would've read like the Bible if we'd
broken everybody's con-tribution down."
Now that he's done a double album and multi-media stage show with the
collaborative assistance of classicists and showmen Ezrin and Kamen,
could Waters (and Floyd) be looking to more "legitimate" theatrical
work? Producer Ezrin may have the answer.
"One thing we went for with the Pink Floyd vocals was an 'acting'
quality. For example, Gilmour, who's very sober by nature,
sang screaming on 'Young Lust' in a way he hadn't sung in years.
And all the characters and accents in 'The Trial' are Roger.
When we were through, I said to him, 'We've really got to do
Broadway.' He and I are ser-iously discussing something like
that."
Set the controls for the hart of the theater district - or the boards of
the British sound stages.
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