Roger Waters as a bassist- underappreciated?

My favorite Waters-Mason studio performance is Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Restrained, tightly locked together, adding witty musical commentary to an infintely sad song - sometimes minimalist but totally emotional, way beyond mere professional efficiency. I've listened to it many many times before I'd really focused on the rythm section and since then, I think it's as tought-provoking as the Gilmour and Wright parts. The whole band on that song wasn't phoning it in, they were on a mission.

 

I prefer the Dan in that particular matchup (I'm not opposed to chops if I like the music), but quite concur with your point

 

I love his bass playing and it sounds great on the animals album. The song dogs has prog bass grooves and only the "right" notes are played...no wasted notes.

 

I would argue that if any member of floyd was more proficient at their instrument the floyd sound would be lost. You can browse the modern prog songs on any streaming site and hear amazing chops but you will not revisit a majority of those albums. Some prog is a combo of what floyd had and great chops like yes, genesis and king crimson but the thing that made floyd so great was "space"...room to breath in the songs. Too many runs can showcase a players chops but destroy the flow and overall sound. Pink floyd generally forces me to close my eyes while listening where as say dream theater forces me to change the song.

 

Do you mean he overdubbed bass parts before it was aired on the radio?

 

Virtuosity is not always a virtue.

Considering how their music has endured, those guys ( including Roger ) must have been doing something right.

D.D.

 

This has always fascinated me - and there's even footage showing it. I find Roger to be a competent bass player, he has his style, plays the right notes, Pink Floyd is very musical...and Roger didn't have enough ear to tune his bass by himself? I always wonder how that is possible, but apparently, it is

I like how Roger could play his usually languid, "lazy" bass lines but freak out too, especially in the early days (that crazy muted bridge rythmic thing he played in "Interstellar Overdrive" that almost sounds like Sonic Youth).

 

I'm listening to the pre-FM right now and I don't see a problem, except that the clocks on "Time" sound like poo, and the girls they've got singing are no Clare Torry.

If your point is that Roger overdubbed the bass on the official release, well, he ain't the only one. I read an article about it around release time where Nick was talking about re-recording his drum tracks. But that's official "live" releases for ya.

IIRC, Nick said that the drums were re-recorded because they were poorly recorded, not because of performance problems. Make what you will of that.

 

He was a very engaging player on the Syd-era material; those melodic lines on "Matilda Mother" and "The Gnome" were great.

He also had a kind of genius for generating sound effects from his bass: the clicks and clanks in "Interstellar Overdrive" (the version from the Tonite Let's All Make Love in London really does sound like proto-Sonic Youth!), the tick-tock later used in "Time", the wind noises in "Echoes".

Later his bass lines got less interesting -- and sometimes repetitive: "Let There Be More Light" loses a bit of its shine by getting recycled twice on More, and the octaves in "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" were reused in at least two other songs -- but his heavy, aggressively-picked approach to bass was still integral to the Pink Floyd sound, especially live (since in the studio Gilmour played most or all of the bass parts, from DSOTM on).

Unfortunately live performance also reveals some shortcomings in his musicianship. If you listen to a lot of Pink Floyd bootlegs from 1968-1973, you end up hearing a fair number of occasions where Roger miscounts and drops or adds a beat. Fortunately Nick was very good at spotting these mistakes and covering for him, so trainwrecks were usually averted.

Occasionally he misses notes in weird ways; there's a titanic mistake right at the end of the Montreux 1970 blues, where he gets off by a half-step, with gnarly results. Prominent wrong notes or timing were also present in the BBC sessions, specifically the 1971 Echoes (not a big deal) and the 1974 Us & Them (a bigger deal), and possibly delayed their release.

All told, I think he was exactly the right bassist for Pink Floyd, and I love his contributions. I also think the band had to work around his technical limitations -- perhaps more acutely than with any other member, though they all had some degree of limitations -- and that shaped their music in a number of ways, both positive and negative (on a bad day Pink Floyd really does plod). And had Pink Floyd broken up after DSOTM, it's hard to imagine he would have been an in-demand bassist per se for another band.

So, I think he was probably overappreciated by people who filled out "best bass player" polls in the 1970s, and underappreciated by people who don't realize how much of the sonic landscape of a typical Pink Floyd concert from 1967-1973 actually came from his bass.

 

I had that version in mind also.

What an intense young man Rog is in that footage.

 

Norman Smith said that Waters was tone deaf and that Barrett used to have to tune the bass for him.

 

Yep, Money is a particularly stinking bass line.

 

Jesus. People love to complain for the sake of complaining and will find anything to get upset about, even out of thin air. There was absolutely nothing wrong with your comments. Wish I had the patience you have so as to not get frustrated at people like that.

 

My point was, that by the time they got to playing 'Money' he appeared to have lost the ability to count in time!

 

Jeez...
After reading all this it makes it sound like Nick Mason could hardly hold a drumstick, and Waters couldn’t play “Louie Louie”..

Ridiculous stuff here...

 

Fascinating thread.

You’re trying to tell me Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most stately and immense sounding albums ever, was made by incompetents? Shine On You Crazy Diamond is played by weak musicians?

Pink Floyd have always admitted they were technically challenged but creative. Creativity is fired by limitations and a need to get around problems. I think Mason in a radio interview described them as successful amateurs. Dream Theatre have the chops and are creators of the most boring, soulless and pointless music ever recorded. Also there is a saying (I believe) that you need a Ringo in your band to keep you grounded i.e. you need a weaker player to stop your music turning into technically complex but emotionally dead turgidity.

As a non-musician I couldn’t care less if Roger Waters is a weak player. It sounds good or excellent to me. It satisfies my non-technical demands and then some.

There’s a hilarious moment in Guy Pratt’s memoir when he said that Roger Waters justified his inclusion in the group because he wrote great songs. **** ME!!!! The years after the fact non-songwriting session bass player concedes that the ****ing architect of Pink Floyd justified his inclusion in the group despite not being a good player?! Hilarious. So generous of him. In context of the book that statement was amazingly mind-blowing. As if more than 1% of the vast audience cared that Waters was a bit so-so on the bass. I think some people forget that SONGS are a million times more important than performance. I’d rather see a bad band play good songs (Pink Floyd, supposedly) than a great band play bad songs (Dream Theatre). Most prog is useless because songs get swamped by instrumental guff that communicates nothing.

EDIT

Here’s a review I wrote many years ago in 2009 concerning soulless musicianship:

Fear Of A Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree

The music has all the rough edges sanded down leaving it sounding flat and lifeless. It's all craftsmanship and no inspiration. And the songwriting is mediocre. The lyrics mention the subject matter of the album but doesn't tackle it and say anything insightful or interesting. It doesn't even give us an interesting point of view. And the singer's voice is too smooth and characterless. They're aiming to be Pink Floyd but have ended up more like Dream Theatre.

1. "Fear of a Blank Planet" - 7:28 (2 out of 5 stars)
It does not move me. I hear quality in it but it's pretty dull as it's too smooth and flat sounding even though it does have some spiky bits. I guess it's missing that musical weakness that allowed Pink Floyd to come alive (the better the musicianship the blander the music). Lyrics don't amount to much. Prog by numbers.

2. "My Ashes" - 5:07 (1 star)
Keyboards remind me of Led Zeppelins "No Quarter". Slow, ponderous and self-consciously mature. Banal lyrics. Peters out and doesn't have much of a climax. Competent but super dull. Of no real merit.

3. "Anesthetize" - 17:42 (feat. Alex Lifeson) (2 stars)
Tool made this song but much better and at only 7 minutes. It was called "Vicarious" and can be found on the 10,000 Days album. In fact too many bands have already done this, and better. It doesn't half go on a bit and drag. It feels bloated up to its extended length as it really doesn't need to take so long to say and do what it does. It opens and closes with slow near ambient quieter sections and has a rockier middle part. The opening and closing sections are bit boring. I think it's modelled on Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".

4. "Sentimental" - 5:26 (2 stars)
Vocals are more up-front with prominent piano and effect pedal guitar. Competent but dull. Feels like an attempt at a sad "Wish You Were Here" ballad. Far too easily forgotten.

5. "Way Out of Here" - 7:37 (2 stars)
The heaviest song but the songwriting isn't there to make anything out of it. Bland and boring.

6. "Sleep Together" - 7:28 (2 stars)
The most engaging song and has bit of a flow to it. It threatens to rock with shouty lyrics but keeps cutting back to boring ambient parts. The song has the most potential and so is the biggest disappointment.

Not the worst album I've ever heard, but sadly one of the dullest . Everything sounds the same. I feel no need to ever listen to this 50 minute album ever again. [I never did since writing this review.]

1 of of 5 stars

Someone commented on my review:

Q: "They're aiming to be Pink Floyd but have ended up more like Dream Theatre." what does that mean then?

A: I mean that like Dream Theatre they've recorded something that's musically complex and layered but is lacking anything interesting that you can feel or connect with. It's all technique and surface and absolutely no heart.

Dream Theatre on the one hand are a band of talented virtuoso musicians who make bland, insipid mush that I find boring, lifeless and bereft of any soul.

Pink Floyd on the other hand are a band of mediocre musicians* who are capable of great, great music. They might not be able to do complex things that make other musicians nod their heads in approval over, but they are more than capable of write stimulating music and are able to play something with great feel that can excite something in the listener.

From my own review: "The music has all the rough edges sanded down leaving it sounding flat and lifeless. It's all craftsmanship and no inspiration" and "It does not move me. I hear quality in it but it's pretty dull as it's too smooth and flat sounding even though it does have some spiky bits. I guess it's missing that musical weakness that allowed Pink Floyd to come alive (the better the musicianship the blander the music)".

* I don't play a musical instrument and I don't understand the nuts and bolts of it but I'm told they were not great musicians. Many other people have written that Pink Floyd are mediocre musicians (even Gilmour is a so-so guitarist but with an amazing feel and tone). Collectively they were more than the sum of their parts and made it work.

 

He's said it himself, he's tone-deaf.

 

You mean because he wasn't perfectly in sync with the cash register recording? Gimme a break.

 

In case you were confused, that was a typo and I meant to credit Money as the one particularly striking bass line he created (though still something easy enough to play that I leaned to nail the part in my first year of guitar lessons)

 

I honestly think that's an exaggeration. No matter what you think of Roger's singing voice, how do you sing in concert if you're tone deaf? He wasn't lip syncing in the 70's.

 

So true. There are plenty of people out there that can sound like Pink Floyd and plenty of people out there that make a living out of doing precisely that. But there is only one guy that can come up with the song ideas. That is where the skill lies. I honestly have no way of knowing how proficient Roger is on the bass and am sure there are plenty of player out there that are better. Not sure there are many songwriters and conceptualists that are though. As for Guy Pratt - yeah, seldom has a surname been so apt.

Nice avatar by the way. Was re-reading the Roger - Trent interview the other day.

 

You more talk or scream than sing, which is what Waters mostly does. Very few of their songs really require him to hold a note at a specific pitch.

I would not say he is completely tone deaf, but he perhaps has enough of an issue in that area that it was worth him having someone with a more musical ear get him tuned just right, and do so in 5% of the time it might have taken him to get close.

 

To me he’s the MVB Of bass players. Most Valuable Bass player. And he just comes up with some really incredible and funky bass lines.

 

Wait a minute. Are you saying that Nick and Roger overdubbed parts for the live stuff from Wembley, on the Dark Side and Wish You Were Here sets?

 

It is. Take it from me...