In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Wish You Were Here

  • Pink Floyd- Wish You Were Here- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Pink Floyd- Wish You Were Here- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason


    It didn’t take long for progressive rock masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon‘s  worldwide success to affect the individual members and the band collective in Pink Floyd, and their followup in September 1975, Wish You Were Here, reflected a fond farewell to both long-gone Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett as well as their innocence.
    “YOU try following up Dark Side of the Moon.  Go on, just try it!” playfully admonishes Pink Floyd guitarist/singer David Gilmour.”We’ve been trying to do it ever since,” laughs drummer Nick Mason. Yet not only is that follow up album Wish You Were Here  their confessed favorite of all that they did, this postcard from the edge of Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett’s madness holds up exceedingly well because of classics “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”,”Have a Cigar”,”Welcome to the Machine”, and the title ode.  

    There’s a common misconception that the fracturing of Pink Floyd occurred at some time after their worldwide blockbuster The Wall  album and movie. However, this week’s classic rock interview with  Waters, Gilmour,  Mason, and the late Richard “Rick” Wright clearly reveals that Waters has a completely different recollection than the other three of the 1975  recording sessions for Wish You Were Here, with Waters declaring to me pithily, “That album should have been called ‘Wish WE Were Here’, because we weren’t, really. Already the rot had set in…”

    Regardless of the conflicting perceptions by the participants, Rolling Stone magazine ranks Wish You Were Here at #211 on their Top 500 Albums of All Time, with readers to Britain’s Q magazine voting it much higher at#34 all time. Even prior to the reissue and box set in 2011, Pink Floyd’s ninth album had sold in excess of 13,000,000 copies. David Gilmour and Nick Mason are my guests, Roger Waters makes a cameo, and we include archive comments from the late keyboard player Richard Wright to round out the definitive classic rock interview regarding Wish You Were Here. –Redbeard

  • Pink Floyd- The Wall- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Pink Floyd- The Wall- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Upon the album’s release in late 1979, one of the more ironic trivia “bricks” in the original limited concert staging of The Wall by Pink Floyd was that, unbeknownst to hardly anyone then outside the band’s tight inner circle, the internal power struggle, dissatisfaction with the contributions of two members, and the thinly-veiled attitude of a third had finally resulted in original Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright being forced out. Ultimately, Wright was hired to play on The Wall  tour as a sideman, but The Wall concept creator Roger Waters insisted that Rick’s severance include a clause forbidding Wright from ever officially rejoining Pink Floyd again, a barely submerged shoal of contention that would emerge far into the “endless river” of Pink Floyd’s future.

    The original performances of The Wall  were so elaborate, so expensive, tickets so limited (Roger Waters refused to do it in stadiums originally), and the dates so few (about thirty) that Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason all lost money touring it, whereas as a salaried employee with expenses paid by Pink Floyd, keyboardist Rick Wright was the only one who actually made money!

    “Time has a way of making you behave,” David Gilmour reminded me when recounting performing as a guest with Roger Waters in 2011 at London’s O2 Arena, but it could just as easily have been said by the surviving Pink Floyd alumni Nick Mason or even Waters himself, all of whom rejoined me for the first of our two-part peek behind The Wall. For instance, Roger Waters admitted to me that, in 1980, Pink Floyd had been guaranteed one million dollars per night to perform The Wall  on a stadium tour. “And I refused to do it outdoors,” Waters tells me in this classic rock interview. “But how can you do a show that’s about the alienation you feel about doing stadium shows, in a stadium?”

    Apparently Waters reconciled that personal dilemma, as evidenced by his multi-year globetrotting tour recently. This is part one.- Redbeard

  • Pink Floyd- The Wall pt2- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Pink Floyd- The Wall pt2- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Whether architectural student-turned-musician/composer Roger Waters would have designed an actual structure more acclaimed or lucrative than The Wall, his musical concept for the Pink Floyd November 1979 double album, is pure conjecture, but the numbers that it has generated are starting to rival the Great Wall of China: #129 ranking on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2020 Top 500 Albums of All Time; worldwide sales of an estimated 30,000,000; a historic performance, broadcast and film at the actual Berlin Wall in 1990 by Waters and guest stars; a multi-year multi-continent extended live concert production of The Wall  by Roger Waters, and most recently his politically-charged Us + Them tour. 

    Waters talks about the original Pink Floyd album, the limited initial live performances in late 1979 and early 1980, and The Wall  film which followed three years after the album, with pre-Live Aid organizer and Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof as the disillusioned, increasingly isolated “Pink”. David Gilmour and Nick Mason also disassemble The Wall pt2  in my classic rock interview here. – Redbeard 

  • Pink Floyd- Animals- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    Pink Floyd- Animals- Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason

    How did Pink Floyd devolve from the sublime introspection of Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 to the madness and despair of The Wall six years later? It’s a real zoo In the Studio with Pink Floyd Animals wranglers David Gilmour, Nick Mason, & former member and big-concept composer Roger Waters. Gilmour,  Mason, and  Waters explore the dark, ominous, yet vitally important transitional musical missing link, January 1977’s Animals, an album that was highly anticipated, here in my classic rock interviews. After all, the two Pink Floyd predecessors, Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here,  were on their way to selling forty million copies, collectively, just in the U.S.

    The original sound of the Animals  disc was as dark and murky as Roger Waters’ vision of humanity, and I must confess that the combination of only three lengthy main songs,”Dogs”, “Pigs”, and “Sheep”, with that thick bass-heavy sonic presentation of the original, kept Animals  off of much of American rock radio then. With the close-mic’ing technique of the musical instruments so popular then, the resultant sound of Animals can be startling today with the latest 21st century remastering, like finding a pristine black pearl perfectly preserved in the muddy bottom of the stream of time.

    With hindsight, it is clear that Pink Floyd’s Animals   and its subsequent tour were the linchpin between the sublime Dark Side…, the melancholy Wish You Were Here,  and the creeping numbing isolation of The Wall   brought on by superstar success. Animals, though, was cynical, agitated, downright venal in places, Roger Waters’ vented emotions frozen in time then without the luxury of The Wall‘s explorations of Waters’ troubled childhood past for context, nor his future for resolution. Listening to Animals  upon its release was the musical equivalent of suddenly coming upon a car crash and being aware immediately that serious trauma had occurred. The listener desperately wants to call for help, but who are we to notify? –Redbeard

  • Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright 3-94

    Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright 3-94

    It is no secret among Pink Floyd partisans that the incentive for the surprise emergence of The Endless River   album was to honor the late Pink Floyd original keyboard player Richard “Rick” Wright. This is the full Rick Wright interview that we did in March 1994 while Pink Floyd were rehearsing in a B-52 hangar on a military base in the Southern California desert just days prior to the start of The Division Bell  tour. The Pink prodigal son had contributed minimally at the end of recording for Pink Floyd’s 1987 comeback A Momentary Lapse of Reason   but was sufficiently healthy enough to rejoin for the massive 1987-88 world tour. Comments by the late keyboard player who died in September 2008 also can be heard here In the Studio  during Pink Floyd’s  album The Division Bell. That’s Rick Wright on the  organ at Britannia Row Studio. – Redbeard

  • Rock’s Picasso, Storm Thorgerson, Goes to the Great Gig in the Sky

    Rock’s Picasso, Storm Thorgerson, Goes to the Great Gig in the Sky

    Storm Thorgerson, the most prolific, most influential rock graphic artist ever, has passed away at age 69. Most widely known for his work with  Aubrey Powell and the Hipgnosis team in England for the long series of Pink Floyd covers, it’s a safe bet that you have enjoyed more of Thorgerson’s genius wrapped around the music of your life than any single musician or band. And we have Storm Thorgerson, along with recording engineer James Guthrie, largely to thank  for the recent Pink Floyd catalog box sets, as Pink Floyd ceased to exist as a musical entity decades ago. Storm Thorgerson …wish you were here. –Redbeard

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