The 85 Weirdest, Day 80: Roger Waters
The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
That sound. That unending sub-bass thrum, vibrating through bones and brain and soul as Pink Floyd’s song “Welcome to the Machine” opens. It is the sound of dread, the sound of not-too-distant madness inescapably approaching; it may well be the sound of Cthulhu’s first eyelid opening. While it took several exceptional musicians to breathe life into the psychedelic musical innovations of Pink Floyd, songwriter ROGER WATERS (1944- ) stands at the forefront of the band’s most enduring and influential weirdness — for instance, his screenplay for the hallucinatory experience that is the film version of The Wall, brain-eating worms and all. And then there’s fact that Waters made the band perform The Wall live from behind an actual wall. Freak-o…
Actually, Waters’ screenplay for the film was ten pages of rather roughly scribbled notes, with the final result being pretty much Alan Parker’s imagination running riot with the album. As it stands, Waters’ work has essentially been about resolving the mix of his absent-Daddy issues (well, Dead Daddy) and his disopprobrium with Authority, mainly as represented by the military side that he blames for the loss of his father. As far as his lyrics go, he’s not all that good; Leonard Cohen delivers deeper weirdness and more coherence than Waters any day of the week.
The true bizarre heart of the Floyd was Syd Barrett.