Roger Waters & David Gilmour talk about the battles that tore apart this legendary band
Below is an excerpt of an article that originally appeared in RS 513 from November 19, 1987. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via All Access, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about All Access.They simply refused to leave. The houselights were up, and the ushers were counting the minutes before they could knock off for the night. But even after three full hours of lasers in the face, trippy sound-in-the-round, brain-frying special effects and all those Fm-radio classics — "One of These Days," "Time," "Us and Them," "Welcome to the Machine," "Comfortably Numb" — the 15,000 kids in the Montreal Forum would not budge. For nearly twenty minutes, they stood at their seats, screaming themselves hoarse, determined not to move an inch until Pink Floyd came back onstage.
That this wasn't quite the same Pink Floyd — Roger Waters, the band's bassist, singer and dominant songwriter, was absent — that had transfixed potheads in the early, spacey Seventies did not faze this audience, or the other two Sro crowds during the group's three-night stand in Montreal. Hell, they'd just seen the humongous inflatable pig from the '77 Animals tour and the crashing airplane from the old Dark Side of the Moon shows. And when the silvery chime of David Gilmour's guitar skated over Rick Wright's burbling Hammond organ and Nick Mason's heartbeat drumming in "Echoes," with Gilmour's and Wright's voices gliding together in feathery harmony, it definitely sounded like Pink Floyd. Veteran Floyd freaks had waited for this a long time, a whole decade since the full quartet's last major tour. Novices were here because of the Great Floyd Mystique, the tales of concert wonder passed down by elder brothers and old hippie uncles. And the crowd wasn't going to leave until it got one more shot.
Eventually, the Floyd relented, returning with its seven-member troupe of extra musicians and singers for a stab at "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," which they'd tested only a couple of times in rehearsal. "It was extraordinary," said Gilmour later. "The people were on their feet cheering so loudly that at a couple of points I couldn't even hear what I was playing."
"There were a few mistakes," said Wright, laughing, "but we got through it. And the song is so Floydian. It was a perfect way to end the evening." Gilmour had announced the song with peals of church-bell guitar over icy keyboards and a slow blues pulse, heightening the chill of the absent Waters's reflection on the eclipsing of genius by madness. Later, as the fans filed out, one of the big sellers at the merchandise stands was a T-shirt that said, on the front, Pink Floyd, and, on the back, Still First In Space.
Two weeks later, in the Oakland Coliseum, Roger Waters wasn't settling for second place. He didn't have the pig or the airplane. But as usual, he had a couple of heavy axes to grind, among them the threat of nuclear self-destruction and the potential of communications technology as a means to bring people together, two themes central to his latest album, Radio K.A.O.S. Not surprisingly, Waters ground those axes with the same black humor, theatrical ingenuity and apocalyptic urgency that he brought to the staging of his musical autobiography The Wall, incorporating striking computer graphics, newsreel footage of Armageddon in the making and fictional telephone exchanges between a young spastic boy named Billy and a Kaos DJ, played by real-life radio pro Jim Ladd.
But there was also a matter of honor at stake here. When Waters poignantly reprised old songs like "Welcome to the Machine," "Money" and "Another Brick in the Wall," he wasn't just doing the best of Floyd. Those were his songs, "the words and music of Roger Waters," as Ladd declared at the end of an extended Floyd medley in the first half. The implication, of course, was unmistakable: anyone else out there playing these songs, claiming to be Floyd, is bogus.
"I would be terribly happy for you to like what I'm doing and to like what he's doing," Waters said sharply the next day, referring to Gilmour, "if it wasn't for the fact that he was calling himself Pink Floyd. He isn't. If one of us was going to be called Pink Floyd, it's me." Even the old props in the current Floyd show, Waters insisted, were originally his idea. "That's my pig up there," he said. "That's my plane crashing." He snickered and added, "It's their dry ice."
The "which one's Pink?" debate has been a legal football kicked around by lawyers since last fall, when Waters sued Gilmour and Mason in an attempt to prevent them from using the name, claiming the group was "a spent force creatively." (Rick Wright, who quietly left the group in 1980 after the Wall shows, has unofficially returned for the new Floyd album and tour.) Both camps, however, have now taken their cases to the people in a vindictive press war. Floyd fans are, in a sense, getting two state-of-the-art-rock shows and records — Waters's Radio K.A.O.S., the Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason — for the price of one band. But the price has been disastrously high. In their fight to determine who is the rightful heir to the Pink Floyd throne and the continuing fortune it's worth, Waters, Gilmour and Mason have destroyed whatever personal friendship, band camaraderie and musical unity first bonded them two decades ago. The musicians who created The Wall are now up against a wall of their own — the one separating them from one another.
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