Could Pink Floyd have done a great job with "Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking "

Like many of us, he has changed over the years. He is far more at ease performing in front of a large crowd now and actually finds touring enjoyable. He referenced these changes every single night of the The Wall tour.

He does. He played at least four songs from Is This the Life on every night of the Us and Them tour and sometimes as many as seven. I think there were only two cuts from the entire album that never actually made the set list at some point or another. Obviously, when touring The Wall he plays The Wall. And tremendously grateful I am that he did tour it as I never got to see it first time around. Being three years old and all

See above.

Because that's not Roger's schtick. He plays Pink Floyd as a classical piece. That's his preference. Not only that, due to the heavy visual content of his shows the music has to be fairly rigid in order to marry up with the visuals.

 

I am not a Waters fan though. I like all members of Pink Floyd, and far prefer them together.

If you check my posts, you'll see if have very clearly stated I took no sides in David vs. Roger - I prefer them working together but I own CD's by both of them individually I enjoy. I have listened to 'Rattle that Lock' - and enjoyed it - within the last 4 weeks, and 'Amused to Death' back in late February.

Not everything has to be a battle, or to pit 'sides' again each other. I find this so frustrating when people take extreme positions.

Just because I do not like a particular Pink Floyd album, please do not assume I am in any sort of 'camp' or take sides.

Rather than repeat myself again, which is getting VERY tiresome, see
Roger Waters "Greatest Hits"

I can never really understand how these sort of threads seem to degenerate into bickering - I really like Pink Floyd, and I really like Roger Waters and David Gilmour's solo output too and own selections of both - its' true neither pf them on their own reached the heights they achieved together, but its clear from their solo work what their contributions to the Floyd sound were.

I see similar bickering all the time as a Beach Boys fan - with Brian vs. Mike - equally baffling to me, as both were vital in their early success, and if you take away that early success you don't have a band to fight about!

Not everything has to be a battle.

 

Uh, that's him whispering as he mimes.

He certainly clung to it in 1968, when he didn't know how to write songs but was more than happy to hire someone with a great voice to keep singing someone else's songs. And he most certainly did not think it was going to be a hard slog - that man was genuinely surprised that people didn't know who he was, and he lost a lot of money on a very short tour. "I thought that people did kind of identify me with quite a lot of the work that went into the Floyd, particularly in terms of the shows, but they didn't. There's certainly a huge gap in communicating the fact that my Pros and Cons show is a Floyd show except Eric Clapton is playing guitar and Andy Newmark is playing the drums instead of Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason. But everything else is the same: same team doing it, same guys building the sets, same sound system" - this, after Roger refused to make any mention of Pink Floyd in promotion of the album and tour. As Gilmour said, “I haven’t spent twenty years building up my name: I’ve spent twenty years building up Pink Floyd’s name.” I think it's very funny that after presenting The Wall and Pros and Cons to the band to decide which one they would make into an album, a stage show, and a film, Roger said he only toured Pros and Cons "because Eric said I should tour it. And not only that, he came on the road with me. I said, 'If you go, I'll go.' I did a tour with Eric Clapton as my guitar player! It was terrific." Eric quit after 19 of the 36 shows.

 

We've got a couple of children on this forum that have destroyed any reasonable and insightful discussion on this subject.
I do not understand this neurosis that causes people to feel they have to take sides attempting to pit songwriters of a band reputations and bodies of work against each other, typically smearing one of the artists to prop up the other.
If you want to know what an narrowminded idiot thinks read this thread and you'll see a level of pettiness and childishness that is offensive.

 

This all took place before he quit Pink Floyd. He was well aware - having undergone the Pros and Cons tour - what quitting PF would mean in terms of solo success and that it would be a hard slog.. But he went solo anyway. Dave knew what it meant as well, having toured About Face. His next album was under the Pink Floyd name.

 

If it's even possible to smear someone with their own words, while providing context, then I suppose could have counterbalanced my input with some well-warranted criticism of About Face - which even I am not fond of, apart from "Murder". But perhaps no one in the silly "rock and roll" industry had ever taken themselves so seriously, and to such a melodramatic extent, as Roger did (and apparently his most pious supporters).

Also, there's nothing quite as childish as completely blowing up in a public forum.

 

To be clear I did not mean to say, or imply, that you have to be a Roger fan to dislike Momentary. But I will say I have gotten the distinct impression, going back to Roger's own take on it at the time, that their release of Momentary immediately became, and has since remained, an object of derision from the Waters camp. In other words I think even if you are not in that camp that it is not unfair for me to say that it is a position taken by many of those who are.

Also to be clear I wish there were no such divisive matters among Floyd fans overall. I greatly value Roger's contributions to their legacy (up to a point, but that's another discussion). It is not possible to imagine they would have been near as great without him over a large part of their history.

But it is also true that if it was up to Roger, the others would have been legally prohibited from continuing as Pink Floyd, and I very much disagreed with that then, and if anything more so now.

My main point you did not respond to, however, was the notion that Momentary is not real Floyd has no real basis among the majority of Floyd fans. It may not be their favorite album - it is certainly not mine. But I think overall it is very good, and is definitely Pink Floyd even if Roger was not part of it.

 

Let me get this straight - you are still not man enough to apologies to me, and are doubling down? If you want to address these other people, then you start a new post, not quote me out of context. Unbelievable.

As to not addressing A Momentary Lapse of Reason, if you are interested in my take, you can find my views in the relevant threads here. Search. I'm done.

 

Many fans have stated that they didn't care for The Final Cut because it felt too much like a Roger solo effort without significant input from the others. Similar complaints have been made about Momentary Lapse being essentially a Gilmour album that was later dressed up to be Pink Floyd. Obviously, both of these albums were released under the Pink Floyd banner and are officially sanctioned releases--there's room for disagreement on that point--but the question in the mind of some fans is basically, are these genuine, full bodied Floyd collaborations or are they more like solo projects. Personally, I don't really have a preference in the Waters vs. Gilmour debate, but I vastly prefer Pink Floyd back when they were a functioning band in the 70s and quickly lose interest after Animals.

 

Several people have brought up Roger's point of 'If it had the Pink Floyd name on it, it would sell!'...but if that's the case, why are there more than twice as many copies of A Momentary Lapse of Reason out there than there are of The Final Cut?

 

This is great stuff! A new high in wilfully perverse creative distortion of the facts.
I can see that pointing out the idiocy of the '60% bass' claim was hopeless in the case of someone who comes up with this kind of thing

 

In what way is this inaccurate?

 

Let me expand on that a little - since The Final Cut hadn't done very well, and none of their solo projects were successful, why would anyone expect the next album to do as well or better? Is it possible that the lawsuits had the "Streisand Effect" and helped raise awareness of the new Floyd album? How did this success not carry over to Radio KAOS? Why did AMoR do as well as it did?

 

Because AMLOR is the better album?

*ducks the many flying pigs being thrown*

 

To be clear, I was asking how my comment about the band's situation in 1968 was inaccurate. I've already provided the full quote from Gilmour mentioning that he played bass on "at least half" of their records, which was not an off-hand, nasty remark, and since he is very technically-minded, I trust his estimate.

 

I think having the 3 remaining members of Pink Floyd would have spoiled The Pros And Cons menacing ambience , it's a glorious record just as it is.

 

This is fair.

 

Could? Sure, given the right environment of collaboration and give-and-take. Even without that, "Sexual Revolution" proves it was possible for them to record a Pros and Cons song and do it well.

Would? Probably not, given the band's pathology at the time. And if you re-recorded the album with Gilmour, Wright and Mason instead of the folks who are on it, but otherwise left everything the same, you'd have what you have now: a weak, preachy, nearly-tuneless album from someone who desperately needed a foil to keep his worst instincts in check.

(That's not a dig at Waters, really, since his story is the norm: it'd be far more unusual for a great artist who loses his main collaborator/partner to keep doing good work. Most solo albums suck.)

FWIW, that's coming from someone who loves The Final Cut, but finds little to no value in 98% of Waters's solo material. (I seem to remember thinking that some of the When the Wind Blows stuff is OK, though.)

 

Momentary Lapse had some hit singles and was more commercial. This isn’t groundbreaking news is it? Do you think it would have sold as well as a solo Gilmour record? Who knows for sure, though I doubt it.

 

Because it was a comeback album from a hugely successful band many thought were dead for good. If Led Zeppelin had come back in say '85 with a new drummer, decent hit single and a massive world tour it would obliterate the sales of In Through the Out Doot regardless of their new albums quality.

 

I have nothing to apologize for. I started out by referring to your baseless statement about Momentary and not being recognized as Floyd. I clarified I did not mean to say (and did not) that one has to be a Roger fan, meaning part of the Waters camp for lack of a better term, in order to not like Momentary. I don't really care if you are or aren't. Most who diss Momentary can legitimately be characterized as such.

 

I caught one of Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets' shows last week, and it made me wonder what a back-to-basics, Get Back/Let It Be kind of project would have been for the Floyd. Their way of doing things first changed in mid-1974 - backup singers, big screen, and an actual guitar technician tending to a more complicated rig. Animals was pretty sparse and straight-forward, inspired to some extent by the punk movement, and the tour featured quite a bit of improvising, but what if they'd followed it up with Pros and Cons, approaching it more like the Eclipse concerts of 1972, working through the rough songs in front of an audience? In fact, the extended versions of "Childhood's End" had a slow, 6/8 section that originally reminded me of "Shine On" and "Empty Spaces" but I wasn't thinking at all about Pros and Cons, most of which revolves around a single hammer-on acoustic riff in 6/8. Sparse, acoustic, "Mother"-type instrumentation, augmented with Gilmour's Fuzz Faced-lap steel in place of Clapton's Dobro, some tape loops and gurgling analog synths? Back in the '90s, Gilmour mentioned that he'd tried hooking up the "old gear" again - the passive Black Strat and a few primitive pedals - and he just couldn't get it to sound the same, but he's certainly been able to sort it out since then. They even brought the Farfisa out of retirement in 2006! These days it's perfectly normal to see Jonny Greenwood sitting on a pile of wires in front of a modular synth or an Ondes Martenot, provoking unpredictable sounds out of ancient equipment. What if Pros and Cons had been honed in a simplified but more experimental environment by a band trying to "stay true to their roots", as some bands have tried to do? The sore thumb of a title track would certainly be different - but I can imagine it sounding much more like a cross between the early "You Gotta Be Crazy" and "Young Lust", with a very different chorus built on a Rick Wright chord progression. Thoughts?

 

On one hand I would have preferred after Animals if they had continued in that vein. Very much so, certainly at the time. But over the years enough as come out about what was going on with them leading up to The Wall that it is not surprising, not in the least, that they did not continue as they were. I was at the time disappointed with a big chunk of The Wall, not knowing, at that time, that the band was disintegrating. not long after that we began hearing about legal issues, Wright's departure, problems with the Pros. All very upsetting to this Floyd fan.

At a certain point it seemed quite likely they were not going to reunite. So then Momentary came out, with at least some participation by the three. Perhaps I gave it more of an open ear because I had thought we were not going to ever get anything like it. Whether it should better be viewed as a Gilmour solo album is not relevant to me. That the band was not the same lineup as before was, I think it fair to say, Waters's fault for the most part.

Momentary is therefor the best one could hope for from the band at the time. I suppose that statement could come with the caveat that perhaps Rick, for one, might have been more involved in it. But for various reasons he wasn't. I certainly don't think from say a starting point of Animals that it was David's goal all along to end up where he was in making Momentary. He felt there was a demand for it from the fans, and there was. He did his best. There's a lot of excellent especially guitar work on it. I don't especially care for the snippets on the second side, and Dogs of War is too tendentious for my taste. But about 2/3rds is very good to excellent.

 

They certainly couldn't have done worse.

 

It's fine as is.
Clapton does a grand job.