Roger Waters is going to tour The Wall again! - Page 2

Yes. Now go fetch some butter.

Wrong movie, sicko!

And Richard, for the record, I was only kidding. (Although I don't like About Face).

That is NEVER the wrong movie, Parker.

Oh, no offense taken. To be honest, it's been a while since I've listened to the whole thing. I usually just listen to "Murder", "Cruise", "Out of the Blue" and "Near the End".

Have fun if it's your bag, but at this point, does whatever band WATERS puts together even need him in it?

It's a freakin' expanded studio band covering THE WALL. And oh, by the way, Roger Waters plays bass. Yaaaaaawwwwwn.

It's 2010.

Waters plays bass and sings lead vocal. So he's kind of an important element.

Well, I guess since he also played bass, we should pretty much ignore Paul McCartney too.

If this is what Gilmour thought was a quality tune back then, I can see why Waters quit.

Les Claypool, Justin Chancellor, Bootsy Collins, Cliff Burton and a whole host of others that I'm shamefully neglecting would like to ear fuck you for a while.

What the hell are you going on about anyway?

I think his general point was that Waters' voice is now about as musical as a partially blocked exhaust pipe, and the average Pink Floyd bass line is about as taxing as any given Guitar Hero song when played on difficulty level one.

Pink Failed.

McCartney has continued to make new records. And although he stuffs his sets with Beatles tunes, he does throw in some NEW tunes.

What I'm "going on about" is I have zero interest in seeing a cover band perform the WALL. Yeah, Waters is the bassist and singer... so what. It's not PINK FLOYD and this is a lazy, pointless re-tread. Enjoy.

He also created and wrote 90% of the album. And it's highly autobiographical. So, no.

I have something to say. I'm going to make a new record.
Eh, too hard. No one cares. I'll just do THE WALL again.

What's the point you say?

**add - I'm not knocking the WALL. It's a cool record. But my personal opinion is it's lame to keep milking it. And this is my opinion on just about any of these nostalgia and reunion and "play a record from start to finish" tours.
But like I said, if it'll bring you joy, enjoy.

Like I said earlier in the thread, the dude wrote a fucking Opera. An opera that was fairly well received in the uber-critical opera world. What do you want him to do, tour the fucking Opera?

Also, he's done other solo albums and other tours. He wrote the Wall. People pay to go see the Wall. It's mostly his record, based on his life. He has the right to play it. And others have said in the thread, he puts on a good show with real stage presence.

And I ain't planning on going either. Not my bag. I'm just saying, dude's got a right to do it if he wants to, same as McCartney has the right to play Beatle's songs.

That makes the angry, anti-social 17 year old me happy. Until I read this,

Waters is promising to bring an updated version of the legendary set into the 21st century.

Ugh. It's fine the way it is. We don't don't need Pink getting his wife's voicemail when he calls her at the end of Young Lust.

...

Yes, he should be touring his new Opera instead. I'm sure you'd be first in line, right?

I got yer back, j-pants... Charles Mingus, Jaco Pastorius, Tony Levin, Trevor Dunn, Chris Wood, John Entwistle, Geddy Lee, Geezer Butler, Lemmy Kilmister, Steve Harris, John Onder, David Hughes...

Honestly you're not doing Waters any favours by bringing these names up in comparison. He's just not a very interesting bass player!

I don't understand the criticism lofted at any musician that involves "doing it for the money". These are rock stars, not charitable organizations. They, you know, make money. It's like someone watching you walk into your job every day and saying "Ugh, Jim just does peoples taxes for the money".

If Nick Mason decided to do a solo tour of The Wall, that would be pretty suspect. Waters, not so much.

One of These Days, Careful with that Axe Eugene and Sheep would like to have a word with you.

And before anyone complains about Gilmour playing the bass in the studio version of Sheep, this is true. But Waters wrote the song and had been playing it live before they recorded it. The only reason he didn't play it in the studio was because he wanted to play a rhythm guitar section of the song (oh yeah, he can play guitar too). Waters also made frequent guitar contributions to various songs, including Pigs (Three Different Ones) and Pigs on the Wing I and II.

And you understand that bass is part of the rhythm section, right? Just because you're not Les Claypool doesn't make you an "interesting" bass player.

It's a safe bet that none of these detractors are musicians of any worth whatsoever.

Well, to be fair, neither am I.

Waters has never been a showy bass player, but he's always synched up with the drummer quite well. You don't need to be Victor Wooten to be a good bass player, you just need to play the song. That said, I'm sure his focus has always less on being a virtuoso bass player, and more writing interesting material over all.

I'm quite confident in my own musical abilities, but they're really beside the point. The bass in Pink Floyd is functional and fits the song arrangements well enough, and there's nothing wrong with that. But 'interesting' in itself it is not, unless you somehow find a guy plodding away at root notes really fascinating.

There's probably some truth to the idea that someone else could play the bass parts on The Wall and few fans would really notice the difference.

For some reason, I just can't get interested in these kind of Big Event album recreations (or arena or stadium shows, in general)*. Quadrophenia's one of my favorite album of all time, but I just couldn't work up the excitement to drive the 15 minutes it would have taken me to see the version that the Who took on tour in the 90s.

It seems like a traveling museum piece or Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame exhibit or something. It comes off as particularly inappropriate for The Wall, as the album's so critical of rock's more fascistic tendencies, but I suppose that dichotomy was built in since the first time the band took it out on tour.

* I give a pass to the one-off All Tomorrow's Parties album recreations, since there's a spirit of fun there - they're not over-rehearsed to the point of sterility. And I'd gladly see Springsteen do one of his albums, but the E Street Band is incapable of sterility, no matter how much they rehearse - plus, Born to Run would only take up about a third of the average Springsteen set running time.

In hindsight, it would have been more appropriate to have directed my previous comment specifically towards P-3 and his outright dismissal of the importance of a bassist/bass in general. But insofar as Water's, his relevance to Pink Floyd can't possibly be overstated. It's not important that his playing style wasn't of a flashy/technical nature, because the music they composed didn't require that from him. Pink Floyd wasn't some showy type of Guitar God rock & roll. Their message has always been far more substantive than just - "Hey! Look at me! I'm playing guitar over here! Worship me!"

No doubt, but that's one album and one album alone doesn't qualify him to be labeled as an uninteresting bass guitarist. His contributions to the album add up to a hell of a lot more than "bass player" anyway.

And I agree, these shows don't interest me either for the very reason you mentioned. But not a lot of people ever got to see the Wall performed live originally due to it's insane level of theatricality and limited performance space of arenas compared to stadiums. So, if people who grew up with the album but were born too young to catch the first show (or never got the chance) now get to see it with its original creator, more power to them.

Oh, agreed. I think the accomplishment in The Wall is in the writing and arrangement. Which, I guess, leads me to question whether it matters who's performing the thing, aside from maybe the vocals. It's got Waters all over it in terms of the writing, but a bunch of skilled session guys could pull off the sound pretty easily, probably even down to Gilmour's solos. I'm not sure if this is quite as true for a lot of other big albums where specific players are somewhat more key (when I think about it, one reason why Quadrophenia Redux didn't appeal is because, as good as Starkey is, Keith Moon's performance is super key to Quadrophenia).

Guh. I just punched myself, hard.


And yeah, the only reason I started naming bassists was because of the overall implication that bass in and of itself always equals "boring."

And while Waters' bass parts were rarely the sort that make you stand up and take note (although many, many of them did that as well), I'm ALWAYS more interested in what everyone's part is doing for the song as a whole.

If plodding away at root notes happens to make the song better, then great fucking job on those "boring" root notes then. This is something I argue with my "band's" often-frilly bass player about from time to time.

I'm not knocking it for that reason. I'm for earning money.
I'll restate my point from my original post - if you will derive joy from seeing this show, enjoy!

But in 2010 I'm interested in seeking and finding new moments of joy, creating new memories, not reliving past ones.

And I wasn't so much knocking his bass playing, more so the fact that in a giant show like this, sitting back in section whatever, he's going to be one tiny speck amongst however many members of his band there are. So it wouldn't matter if he was even there or not. If I want to "see" it on a jumbotron I'll just wait for the DVD.

edit to add - what DaveB said above.

I wouldn't pay $200 to see it live, but absolutely, I'd be very interested in listening to a NEW Roger Waters rock opera.

Jane's Addiction, Pixies, Roger Waters... et al. I'm not interested in nostalgia right now.

Most of this is academic as we really don't know what he has planned.
I actually saw a Roger Waters concert just 3 years ago. It was billed as a Dark Side Of The Moon show. For the first act he did Floyd stuff and NEW solo stuff (his anti-Bush songs were particularly rousing). The second act was Dark Side in it's entirety. It had some fancy lights and video, the band sounded great, Waters sounded great. Excellent show all around.
Based on that actual experience- and not on a general theory about dinosaur rock acts dragging out tired old tropes- I confidentally predict another vibrant concert.

It's not a rock opera. It's an opera. Period.

Anyone catch Waters on Fallon last night? Aaaaaawkward.

Fallon does the Chris Farley show basically.

I think I'd rather watch the Chris Farley show than Fallon. Even if the host was Chris Farley circa...now.

Ditto. I loathe Fallon to a degree I once thought impossible. How in the holy fuck does that hack have a career?

So....(Just Curious)
Who ponied up and got tickets to go to the show?

I had access to the presale for a couple of cities, but I decided to pass on dropping 6 bills on two tickets.

I hear you.

Definite fuel to the fire in terms of this being a baby-boomer nostalgia fest.

Therefore, I got a pair of nosebleeds for the Staples show in LA, and an equally cheap (exact opposite seating area within arena) pair in Anaheim.
The major selling point for me to go for both shows is that the Anaheim show is two weeks later. Enough time to refresh the anticipation for experiencing the most important album of my youth in a live context.