As music fans, we like to think that all is hunky-dory within our favorite groups, until we read stories about a guitarist going off on a drummer’s Corvette like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.
Why? Because we were conditioned – by Beatles movies and “The Monkees” – to think that a band was not only a group of musicians, but a group of friends. Anyone who has taken a peek behind the show biz curtain can tell you that disagreement between band members can turn uglier than a Karen taking on a Walmart manager who will not honor her coupon.
Such was the case with Pink Floyd. Though the members of the band had known each other since childhood, there seems to have been little brotherhood among David Gilmour (guitar), Roger Waters (bass), Richard Wright (keyboards) and Nick Mason (drums).
Not that the guys didn’t like each other. At first. All were considered reasonable companions for a good hang. Eventually, though, they really didn’t enjoy spending time together outside of the studio or the stage.
This is the essence of Mark Blake’s new book Pink Floyd – Shine On: The Definitive Oral History (Pegasus Books, 432 pp., $32). Blake has done his homework, conducting numerous new interviews and thoroughly researching his subject, bolstering these efforts with knowledge gleaned from 35 years of covering the band as a journalist.
Pink Floyd can be viewed as the prog rock band that is preferred by people who generally don’t like prog rock. And why not? The band’s two best albums, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975) managed to rein in prog’s worst impulses while distinguishing themselves as relatable meditations on universal themes such a time, death, the hereafter, insanity and absence.
Behind the scenes, though, the battles waged within Pink Floyd were as vicious as could be imagined. I recall an article in Musician magazine detailing a dinner that Bob Ezrin, who at the time was producing The Wall, arranged to quell the animosity between Waters and Gilmour, washing the bad feelings away with multiple bottles of red wine at a trendy Los Angeles Italian restaurant.
According to the Musician piece, during the course of the meal, one of the bandmates (probably Waters) told the other, “You are nothing but a waste of sperm and egg” (or words to that effect).
The arguments between Waters and Gilmour filled the studio air with tension. Nick Mason recalls that, during recording of The Final Cut, co-producer Michael Kamen became frustrated with a Waters overdubbing session. “Roger was attempting to perfect a vocal. Pitch was not coming easily, and Michael hadn’t said a word for some time. Instead, he scribbled with great focus on a legal pad. Eventually, Roger stormed into the control room and demanded to see what he was writing.
“Michael had decided he must have done something unspeakable in a past life and this was his karmic payback. So he had written on his legal pad, line after line, page after page, ‘I must not fuck sheep.’”
Though the narrative’s drama becomes extreme during the latter portion of the book, Shine On starts out pleasantly enough, at the very beginning, when times were good. There is generally something charming about an “origin story,” and Pink Floyd’s history doesn’t offer anything to counter this notion. They were, initially, a group of half-assed musicians (bar Gilmour and, later, Wright), late-blooming bohemians who were easing into the role of proto-hippies. They enjoyed performing but didn’t take their career (such as it was) very seriously.
One of Shine On’s chief merits is its subtly effective way of providing the reader with an understanding of how London’s underground culture came to be. The text is certainly not a dry sociological history, but Blake definitively establishes the way in which a timely confluence of drugs, music, fashion, resistance to the British class system and an abundance of revolutionary ideas produced a culture which came to be known as “swinging London.”
The quotes describing early Pink Floyd gigs at the UFO (pronounced “YOU-foe”) club reinforce perceptions gleaned from earlier chapters that what was happening in London paralleled similar cultural shifts taking place in San Francisco. An early-days UFO denizen describes the atmosphere, saying, “UFO was the original all-night rave.”
Pink Floyd began playing shows at the after-hours club late in 1966. Like the Grateful Dead in California, Pink Floyd happened upon a scene at just the right time, when a priority was not placed on musical virtuosity or precision. It was more important to be simpatico with the environment, have the right look, and be able to play on stage while under the influence of whatever substances might be available. Lighting and stagecraft were primitive, but few seemed to care, wrapped up as they were in the notion of a societal revolution.
The music that Pink Floyd played during this era might be fondly remembered by some, but in actuality, much of it was awkward and (now) embarrassing. Scenester Libby Chisman is quoted as saying, “[T]he psychedelic stuff was not easy to dance to. It used to amaze me that all these people came to watch them and you couldn’t do anything except writhe to it.” Nevertheless, the band was perceived as hipper than hip. As Pink Floyd’s former manager Peter Jenner observes, “Somehow or another, we had hit that middle-class, post-young graduate audience.”
Pink Floyd benefited from rising (slowly) to fame during a period in which rock and roll was bringing in significant revenue, which meant that record companies were willing to give young bands time to hone their sound and cultivate a fan base. By 1972, though, Roger Waters had emerged as a lyricist with an axe to grind toward the status quo while David Gilmour (“a quiet fellow with a loud guitar”) steered the band’s musical course.
This division of labor certainly worked well for a period. Waters (never much of a musician) reveled in his role as a conceptualist, railing against the ruling class and the injustices of life. This thematic preoccupation would grow more pronounced as the years went on (see The Wall and The Final Cut), but the mid-‘70s saw Pink Floyd sell millions of records, reach a certain level of ubiquitousness, and provide a mostly mellow soundtrack for the years when many people were regrouping and reassessing after the wildness of the previous decade.
While most readers crack open a rock and roll biography / autobiography / memoir / oral history hoping to become privy to some dirty laundry, the latter portion of Shine On is a bit of a letdown in that department. Sure, the many battles between band members are meticulously chronicled, but after a while it’s not much fun to read about, as relations began to resemble those dramatized in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Plenty of vitriol, psychological gamesmanship and sadness stemming from the continual revisiting of old wounds.
Anyone who keeps up with music news these days will no doubt occasionally read about new wars of words between Waters and Gilmour. Waters seems to genuinely enjoy his provocateur status, firing off mean-spirited and offensive quotes as a means of getting attention.
Blake revisits a recent conflict between the two musicians in which Gilmour’s wife and sometimes writing partner Polly Samson responded to a shot across the bow by Waters, tweeting, “Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”
Gilmour, terse as ever, weighed in by posting, “Every word demonstrably true.”
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