Roger Waters fronts a Pink Floyd tribute band at Coachella
Apr 29, 2008, 12:59 PM | by Chris Willman
Categories: Music
I nearly got trampled by pig handlers at Coachella. More specifically, I had my iPhone raised in the air, trying to get a nice snapshot of the undercarriage of the giant inflatable pig Roger Waters sent soaring out over the crowd, when I noticed just in the nick of time the handful of very serious-looking, flashlight-wielding, rope-holding roadies about to mow me down as they led the porcine wonder around the main stage’s field. I got out of the way but failed to get the desired photo of the porker’s belly, which was inscribed with the word “Obama” and a check mark next to it. Was this presidential endorsement the ex-Pink Floyd frontman’s, or the sinister pig’s? The former, we can believe, since Waters reportedly also commissioned a plane to fly over and simultaneously drop Obama leaflets, though we on the field saw none of them and they blew into nearby residential neighborhoods, instantly ensuring that the litter-hating desert cities of Indio and La Quinta will swing wildly for McCain in November. Anyhow, the highlight of the show came minutes later when the bovine wranglers let go of the ropes and let the pig float up to that great gig in the sky. I keep waiting for its deflated carcass to show up on eBay any minute and make some reservist in Twenty-Nine Palms a fortune, but no luck yet.
I would like to dub this installment of PopWatch “PropWatch,” since Waters has always been big on inflatable stuff and giant puppets in his shows. I was permanently warped, as an impressionable youth, by the original Animals tour in 1977, which marked the first time Pink Floyd sent critters over stadium crowds. Back then, the pig was pink and unmarked by political graffiti and had a set of glowing red eyes that appeared to be seeking out concert-goers to slaughter, as a sinister symbol of fascism. It was grandiose and it actually meant something vaguely political, too — what a perfect combination for a kid with budding pretensions as big as mine. Somehow, though, on that summer night in ’77, this awesome symbol of oppression seemed just a little less evil when it got stuck right over the middle of Cleveland Stadium and couldn’t be reeled back in after the Floyd had finished “Sheep.” In a slightly Spinal Tappish moment, the band had to stop the show and the house lights came up while for about 20 minutes the authorities figured out how to retrieve the recalcitrant porker. No wonder that, more than 30 years later, Waters is apparently mass-manufacturing his pigs and just letting 'em go into the ether when they’ve served their purpose.
Waters’ set climaxed the three-day Coachella Festival, and it drew the kind of massive crowd that Prince had been greeted with the previous night, as opposed to the minimal welcome wagon that showed up for Jack Johnson on night one. But this followed a lot of grumbling from Coachella veterans who felt that Waters’ booking — to play a 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, in its entirety, along with selected other classic-rock staples — was a betrayal of the festival’s indie-rock principles. To see if these heated objections had any legal validity, I tried looking up the fest’s philosophical bylaws, and — surprise! — there aren’t any. Organizers are perfectly free to book the Steve Miller Band for the main stage next year if they so desire, and with the lack of commercially viable new acts emerging in any strain of rock nowadays, it may come to something close to that eventually. But I think there’s a case to be made for booking Waters at a festival like this… though I think I could make the case a lot better than the one Rog made for himself in his fairly dispiriting Sunday night set.
I will make the argument that the run of Pink Floyd albums from 1971’s Meddle through 1979’s The Wall is as solid a run of records as anyone has made in rock, including the Beatles, Stones, Who, and any number of more rock-critically correct bands. The legend goes that the Sex Pistols were formed in revolt against the pomp and circumstance that Pink Floyd represented, but I’ve always thought that Johnny Rotten and Roger Waters were two peas in a pod, in their mutual misanthropy. Dark Side of the Moon, for all its seemingly spacey tropes, is a relatively down-to-earth album about insanity, cynicism, torpor, and the encroaching inevitability of death — so no wonder it’s one of the most enduringly popular albums of all time, right? Waters’ crankiness was a little less disguised by stoner-baiting sonic splendor on Animals, as nasty a piece of work as you could find in the late ‘70s, or now. Remove some of Rick Wright’s slightly dated synth lines and the stuff holds up exceptionally well.
Except Waters isn’t removing any of Rick Wright’s slightly dated synth lines, or any other element of the original records. He seems convinced — and is probably right, unfortunately — that most of his boomer fans want to hear the songs recreated exactly as first created, from every drumbeat to every ambient quadraphonic sound effect. And so what we got Sunday night was the world’s greatest Pink Floyd tribute band. To be fair, this isn’t much different than the approach eternally estranged Floyd co-frontman David Gilmour took on his last tour, but at least there, Gilmour did have Rick Wright and the group’s original sax-playing sideman along for the ride, so you could almost forgive him for his control-freak exactitude. But whether he wants to include any of the songs Gilmour sang lead on or not, Waters has to do something about those brilliant guitar parts. Plus, by doing Dark Side in its entirety now, he is incorporating a lot of Gilmour-sung material. His solution, for Gilmour and the other missing guys, is to hire ringers who can do every once semi-spontaneous riff and lick note-for-note. You want me to defend that preserved-in-amber fussiness to a bunch of angry indie rockers? Can’t do it.
It doesn’t help that Waters hasn’t made a great record since The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, his first post-Floyd effort in 1984. From the evidence of the one “newish” song he played Sunday, we’re not about to get another one soon. “Leaving Beirut” was a textbook example of how wrong overtly political rock can go. Waters, in a rare address to the crowd, told of how he was taken in by a Lebanese family while stranded as a wandering youth in 1961. The tune that followed seemed to be trying to argue the position that because some Lebanese good samaritans were nice to him one night 47 years ago, war is bad. This may indeed be the case, but I’m not sure Waters’ weirdly pedestrian song argues it very effectively. In case we missed the point, there were lyrical shout-outs to George W. Bush (“That Texas education must have f---ed you up when you were very small”), Tony Blair (“Not in my name, Tony, you great war leader you… Now we are Genghis Khan”), and America itself (“Don't let the might of the Christian right f--- it up for you and the rest of the world”). However well-intentioned, this was painful stuff for an admirer of as formidable a talent as Waters’ to sit through.
So, hey, bring on Dark Side, with its Laserium-like film loops playing right to the stoners in the crowd, and the opening and closing Wall material. (Did we mention that this was the first Coachella set ever to last almost three hours and have a 20-minute intermission?) Much as I was chagrined to see Waters trade in pure nostalgia to pick up a paycheck, the material itself has aged well, and I even allowed myself to hope that some of the indie crowd who’ve settled for ephemera might listen and get into what was once great about this stuff and have a little ambition rub off on 'em. But they’ll probably remember the pig.
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