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

Hmm, don't know. PF clearly indicated their preference for doing The Wall instead, when both demos were presented to them.

I listened to Pros recently for the first time in awhile, and was struck by the fact that it's (mostly) one long song in 6/8, variations on "In The Flesh". I was also surprised by what an enjoyable listen it was, despite its limited structure. It's pretty well recorded too, nothing terribly "Eighties" about the production. Eric Clapton's guitaring is rather bracing, too ... that was an inspired choice on Roger's part (Gilmour's over-processed sound was getting a bit tedious, to me. Nice to hear a Strat straight into a tweed Deluxe or Champ, and wicked up a bit!)

 

As someone who was first exposed to the Floyd with a copied cassette of DSotM, then Relics, immediately followed by my first CD purchase of Division Bell, there was a moment when I was 12 or so and seriously wondering if there were two different bands called Pink Floyd. The footage of the 1987 tour rehearsals in Toronto where they work their way through "Echoes" and "Welcome to the Machine" should be mandatory viewing - it's absolutely the same band, and that footage is a better illustration of the continuity than Delicate Sound of Thunder.

 

I find Animals to be a very empty album. There’s very little meat there. I’m glad they didn’t continue in that direction.

 

Well, it's my favorite Floyd album, so...

 

I'd never heard this excellent recording from Roger's tour with Clapton before...the setlist is very surprising!

Roger Waters w/ Eric Clapton, Live in Chicago 1984

 

And how fitting that he made a surprise appearance tonight to sing "Set the Controls" with Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets!

 

Nice snarky comment. You would have preferred they put out nothing?

 

This is a fascinating show, especially since Gilmour only played 2 or 3 Floyd songs on his About Face tour, and Waters doesn't treat them with the "classical reverence" of his recent tours. In a way, the different arrangements sort of highlight what Gilmour/Wright/Mason brought to the table. Pros and Cons is just about note-for-note, though with a few extra verses here and there, which is interesting. And most surprising - to me, anyway - is that yeah, it really does sound like he lip-synched the climax of "Every Strangers Eyes", using the studio version, even back then.

 

Gilmour could have made it a better record or he could have been relegated to a bit part like The Final Dad's Dead. The musical equilibrium of Floyd tipped into the abyss after Animals.

 

I caught the tour after Clapton left, but the setlist was the same. It was great hearing The Gunner's Dream live. One of my all-time favorite concerts.

 

I know Nick Mason went to one of the shows in '85 (and said it made him miss touring), but I wonder if Gilmour or Wright also saw Roger on this tour - I imagine Dave would have, and I remember in '99 or 2000, Rick was in the audience at one of Roger's In the Flesh shows. Famously, none of them were allowed into the shows on his Radio KAOS tour, but it had to be pretty damn weird for them to see him in '84-'85.

 

Also, I think the biggest WTF moment is 'Wish You Were Here' - he and Michael Kamen rework it using bits of 'Paranoid Eyes', and end up with something very similar to 'Perfect Sense, Part 2' (8 years before that was released)!

 

Mike's often disrespectful to Brian, even though Mike owes his career to Brian.

I've never heard of Brian being disrespectful when speaking of Mike, though Mike has earned it.

As for the success of the Beach Boys...

Take Mike away, and you still have great songs (and better vocals, without Mike's decision to sing in a nasal fashion).

Take Brian away, and you have nothing.

 

I personally think Floyd would have had that bored sound they became so accustomed to after having to play their albums in full since Dark Side of the Moon to stadium fans who wanted them to sound like the record. This album would have been no different IMO.

 

I don't think that was the fans' idea - on one of the great bootlegs from '74 or '75, you can hear someone near the person recording it say, "I didn't come here to listen to the album!" That was all Roger, and he kept it up for the Pros and Cons tour, and even criticized the others for breaking from that format in '87 (even though he did the same thing).

 

Q Magazine, June 1987:

Q: What was your favourite period of the Pink Floyd?

Roger Waters: It's hard to remember that far back. But I think probably pre-Dark Side Of The Moon. In those days it was a band. I'm sure that at that point we all agreed about the same things, like, We'll only play the new material. We won't play any of the old material anymore. We'll only do this album and the one before, and that's it. There was a certain integrity and what was important was the work. And that is still exactly how I feel now, although I do confess I do old tunes onstage now.

 

That's a funny quote to read, since as far as I can tell the part in bold almost literally never happened:

• When their third album (More) came out in June 1969, they were still playing material from the first album live.
• The Man & The Journey performances in 1969 all had Pow R Toc H (2 albums old), and sometimes had Interstellar Overdrive (2 albums old) as an encore. All the documented non-Man & Journey shows in 1969 included Astronomy Domine (2 albums old), Interstellar Overdrive, or both.
• They played Interstellar Overdrive until late November 1970, when it was 4 albums in the past.
• Astronomy Domine stayed until late June 1971, when it was 4 albums old.
• A Saucerful of Secrets was in their setlist until September 1972, when it was 5 albums past.
• Set the Controls from the Heart of the Sun was in the setlist until October 1973, by which time it was 6 albums old (and the song itself dates back to 1967!).
• Careful with That Axe, Eugene stuck around through June 1974, when it was 4 albums old via Ummagumma (or 6 if you count from the Point Me at the Sky single release, which predates More and Ummagumma).
• They played Echoes until 1975, which by then was from two albums before the then-current one (Meddle > OBC > DSOTM, with WYWH yet to come out).
• And on the 1977 tour for Animals, they consistently played two encores from Dark Side of the Moon -- again, two albums in the past.

Only with The Wall did the band drop all older material (including everything from Animals).

I guess you could argue that Ummagumma hit the reboot button for all the songs on the live side. Then again, the band originally thought of that recording as a way to retire songs like Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive (dropped from the album) by documenting them live once and for all -- something that obviously didn't happen.

I can only find two exceptions -- that is, two complete, documented performances where the band didn't draw on material from two albums past (or more). And those are?...

...the BBC sessions in 1970 and 1971. And even those are complicated, with non-album songs from 1968 (Embryo, Careful with that Axe Eugene) and 1969 (More Blues). But otherwise their material is all-new, or at most one album old.

 

Don't forget "Careful With That Axe" in Oakland, 1977! But that was a very thorough evaluation of one of Roger's many questionable statements. And what's particularly odd about it is, what did he think they would do...play The Final Cut back-to-back with AMLoR? Without him?

 

I grant a waiver to CWTAE since it was a special treat given as a one-off to a particularly engaged audience.

The main thing for me was that Pink Floyd may have wanted to part company with their back catalog, especially the Syd songs: like I said, Ummagumma was originally meant to retire the AD/CWTAE/IO/STC/ASOS-based setlist that was ubiquitous from mid-1968 through mid-1970. But they never actually did it, certainly not in the way Waters claimed.

To my mind Set the Controls was the biggest outlier, a 1967 song that they kept playing until 1973 (!) -- though CWTAE, dating from 1968, did show up in a few French 1974 shows and (as you say) that one performance on 1977-05-09.

And, of course, we just saw 2/3 of the remaining band play Set the Controls together, an amazing 51½ years after it first debuted! I suppose Roger thinks of it as his first really good song, and he's probably right -- though I am fond of "Walk With Me Sydney" and I absolutely love "Corporal Clegg".