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Chapter 8: THE ROADIE SPEAKS
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(PART 2 of "A Saucerful of Sucrets" by Knickerless Schaffner)
The following interview was first published in the Floyd fanzine "Dain Bramage" in May 1973:
On the back cover of "Oogabooga" is a picture of the back of the Pink Floyd amplifiers. Standing arrogantly on a speaker is Skippy Twaddlepot, a Floyd roadie. I interviewed Skippy one afternoon during the tour for the Pink Floyd album "Dank Side of the Moon".
DB: How old are you Skippy?
S: Let me think...
DB: Okay then, what's the official title of your job?
S: Superintendant Managerial Overseer of Big Black Crates
DB: What does that entail?
S: You know those big black crates you always see backstage at rock concerts? I'm the guy they hire to put them there.
DB: How long have you been doing that?
S: That's a rather personal question, but I will say that I was with a band called the Greasy Hippies for two years, then i did three years with Teenage Wetnurse. I started working for Pink Floyd three years ago, during the tour for Atom Head Mother.
DB: What does your job involve?
S: Well... I'm mainly into sound. Of course, what with this being a rock band of sorts and all, you have to be into sound. You have to be rather fond of several hundred decibels slamming into your head for hours on end, night after night... but really, this job is quite a challenge. Those big black crates are really rather heavy, and I find it difficult to get them on and off the trucks. Although the band doesn't actually keep anything in the crates, he wood they're made of is just really, really heavy. Sometimes it hurts my fingers, and then I don't like it. Once I hurt my back, and I started crying. I cried for a long, long time. But when I stopped crying, I felt better, as though I were somehow... cleansed.
DB: Tell me about the Pink Floyd sound system.
S: Well, Rick always has some keyboards. He usuaully hooks them up to play through an amplifier. Dave plays his guitar through an amplifier. Nick plays his drums through an amplifier. And on some songs, Roger plays a bass through an amplifier. Did you ever see a bass guitar? They're like a guitar, but they don't have as many strings. Also the strings are bigger and sound different . It hurts your fingers to play it, too. It really, really, hurts.
DB: What kind of amplifiers do Pink The Floyd use?
S: Oh, electrical ones. They have to. If they didn't use amplifiers, they would be playing very quietly, and nobody would be able to hear them. Either that, or the audience would have to stop screaming like fucking maniacs and pay attention to the music instead.
DB: Pink The Floyd invented septaphonic sound. What is it?
S: Well, at the end of the sixties, other bands were making heavy use of stereo effects using two speakers. The Floyd thought, "Let's be bigger." So around the time of Saucerful of Cigarettes ...
DB: You mean Saucerful of Sucrets?
S: Erm... yes. Around that time, they started using seven speakers. First they called it the Hyperbole Coordinator, but everyone was calling it septaphonic sound by the time Pink The Floyd were touring for "Muddle". The idea of septaphonic sound was to enclose the audience. We would place two speakers in front of the audience, and two behind. Then we would put one speaker above, and one below, actually within the floor.
DB: That accounts for the six speakers. What about the seventh?
S: Well, we never did find a use for that one.
DB: So septaphonic sound died out.
S: Right. Besides, how would you wear the headset at home?
DB: What is the P.A. amplification set-up?
S: (shows me a photo)
DB: Wow!
S: And you see that? (Points at something on the photo)
DB: Oh! Isn't that--
S: Yes!
DB: Oh my God! That's absolutely amazing!
S: I was stunned when I first saw that, too.
DB: Tell me about the airplane stunt on this tour.
S: Well, for the Dank Side of the Moon tour, we're crashing a full-size, genuine World War II fighter plane into the stage.
DB: Doesn't that present some problems?
S: Well, the pilot always is killed at each show, of course. But it's carefully written into his contract. We've also lost several roadies, and a good number of people in the audience perish in flames at each concert. But I think people come to a Pink The Floyd concert expecting something special. The fiery plane crash is part of the show, and I think that the fans would expect no less of this band. The people down front always scream a great deal. It's wonderful to get a reaction like that.
DB: How do The Floyd get such a clear sound?
S: Well, it comes mostly from that. (Points at the photo) But it also has to do with the special Pink Floyd recording setup.
DB: Tell me about the recording setup.
S: Well, to record, we set up the instruments. Then we use microphones. We set up microphones near each instrument. Then he hook up all the microphones to a big tape recorder. They've been doing that ever since Poker At the Gates of Dawn.
DB: And that's why Pink Floyd sound the way they do?
S: Yeah.
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Chapter 9: PASS THE PRETZELS
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With their new-found rock star status, the Floyd's members finally had the time and means to pursue non-musical endeavors. David Gilmour took up drinking to pass the time, and found that this was an even more rewarding endeavor that skirt-chasing, a hobby he had enjoyed since boyhood. He spent much of the next few months completely unconscious, waking only occasionally to pop down to the pub for a pint or two before breakfast.
Nick Mason, meanwhile, attempted to drive a ridiculously-small race car across Europe. By October he had reached the Netherlands, but when the weather turned chilly he realized that he had forgotten his favorite mittens, the ones with the penguins stitched on the back, and he gave up. Tired of England and its tax laws (which had become terribly oppressive since the Floyd had been bumped up to the "unreasonably wealthy" bracket), Mason opted to take up residence in Rotterdam, where he spent his days watching the locals hunt for hedgehogs to sodomize. "Odd lot, those Dutch," Mason was noted to remark on more than one occasion.
Rick Wright and Roger Waters, looking for an appropriate follow-up to the success of "Dank Side", began working on a album called "Garden Tools", in which various hedge clippers, gas-powered tillers, and rakes were used instead of actual instruments. Waters, however, lacked Wright's overwhelming enthusiasm for the project, and work was abandoned after a few days. Waters then summoned the other members to rehearsals, at which he unveiled a bevy of new material. With titles ranging from "Gibbering and Flailing" and "Straightjacket Blues" to "Off Me Rocker", Waters' new songs dealt with insanity in all its forms.
The band toured France and Britain with the new material, the highlight being Waters' 20-minute opus "Shine On You Crazy Floor Wax". On more than one occasion the only Floyd to show up was a besotted David Gilmour, who more often than not would simply pass out on his guitar. The result was an loud wail of feedback that would go on uninterrupted for hours until Gilmour vomited, thus shorting out the equipment and ending the performance. Still, critics saw this as an improvement over previous tours, and audiences turned out in droves to hear what the New Musical Express called "a scream of rage against society's ills, or something. A bloody loud noise, anyway."
In 1975 the band recorded some of this new material, including "Shine On", which was split into two sections, and a new song called "Wish You Had Beer," which gave the album its title. Long-time Floyd cover designer, South Carolina senator Strom Thorgerson, notes that the album's packaging caused a bit of controversy when the Floyd insisted that the record's jacket be hidden under a plain brown wrapper, with a 40-ounce bottle of cheap malt liquor attached.
One unforgettable episode occurred during the final mixing of the album, when a long-forgotten Syd Barrett showed up at the studio, wearing his 1968 stage costume and carrying a bucket of chicken wings. "Good morning, gents! Sorry I'm so late... some things never change, eh?"
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Chapter 10: THIRD WORLD AND A FIFTH OF BOURBON
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By 1976 the band was under the complete control of Roger Waters, who was becoming increasingly obsessed with global domination through poultry and pork-bellies. He planned a massive tour of Third World countries, and kicked it off in Borneo, where the Floyd had gained some measure of popularity by association with "La Vallee", which was widely used as a cure for insomnia, especially among auto mechanics and pharmaceutical salesmen.
For this tour the band revived a few of their old favorites, and included some of their new songs, some of which wouldn't be played again for another 10 years. Syd Barrett, who had been watering Ricks garden over the past year was also present. Fearing he was on the verge of being replaced, David Gilmour disparaged the tour from the outset, saying, "Those fucking pygmies wouldn't know their ass from a pig stable, so if we drag a Pepto-crazed loony on stage they'll probably think it's part of the show anyway. Say, that recorder isn't running, is it?''
Reviews in the Borneo Times (14mar76) say that the setlist included such Floyd standards as "Astrology Domino" and "One of These Days", a 21-minute long "Wish You Were Beer", and a new track called "3 Different Pigs on the Wing". The encore on at least one occasion was a record-breaking "Matilda Mother," featuring a 27-minute feedback solo as Gilmour argued with the native waiter about the contents of a scotch-and-soda ("I said, scotch-and-SODA!! No, coconut juice will NOT do just as well! Bloody hell!") and Barrett tried frantically to open a package of Rolaids.
From the start, however, the tour was plagued by a variety of technical problems, beginning with the fact that the "Mud Hut Arena" was not merely a fancy name dreamed up by nostalgia-minded tourist agencies, but was in fact a rather apt description of a 10x10 pool of mud without any form of electricty for miles. More problems occurred when the band realized that the natives' previous experience with pyrotechnics was limited to the time Auntie Grooga went on a binge and caught her grass skirt on fire.
During the first show at the Borneo Hilton, a few wags in the audience were playing with some newly-discovered fireworks. Roger Waters became increasingly disgusted with the disurbance, and stopped the show to reprimand the offenders, who were terribly embarrassed and responded by lighting Roger's pants, thus leading to an intriguing bit of on-stage banter:
"Fuck, me trousers are on fire! Quick, Dave, piss on me."
"No chance. Burn, you beady-eyed bastard!"
Waters' eventually doused the flames with his own spittle, and Nick Mason summed up the entire episode, saying, "It's a good thing it started to rain. I prefer my bass players without the crust."
The next show in the Mud Hut Arena featured a lengthy improvised acoustic version of "Careful With That Axe, Eunice", where Roger, in an inspired act of showmanship, chased Dave Gilmour around the mud pit with a real axe shouting "Piss on this, you bastard!" while Syd Barrett gave an awe-inspiring 24-hour acapella version of "Scarecrow" by standing in a field where barley refused to grow and waving his hands in the air.
After this further shows were cancelled for 3 weeks while Steve O Rourke desparately tried to find a voodoo doctor. The rest of the shows were given from the Borneo International Airport hospital, with Baron Samedy doing guest vocals on "Take Up Thy Mojo Stick and Walk" and a certain Snowy White playing the guitars. Rick Wright recalls:
"[Snort] haaahhhhhhh ... ehm, yeah well, basically we needed a white geezer who could hold a guitar with the right side up, and look like he knew what he was doing. I mean, those shorties hardly know a whitey from a snow man and ... ehm .. did someone said snow? [snort....] hah ..... so we figured we could fool those dipshits easily. The last two shows, we just used a bunch of cardboard cutouts from the gladiator movie that was playing in the cinema, and played a tape of Nick's mechanic trying to start his car and... Say, that recorder isn't running, is it?''
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Chapter 11: PORK RINDS AND SHEEP DIP
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1977 brought "Animal Crackers" the Floyd's next opus. Originally called "Swine Lake" (and featuring songs entitled "Hogs", "3 Different Pigs on the Wing", and "Swine"), the album came under fire from the American Pork Association, who felt that the 'other white meat' was being portrayed rather unfairly. Buckling under pressure from the powerful agricultural consortium, Waters reworked the albums lyrics, choosing to describe different kinds of people by the dogs they reminded him of.
Waters recalls: "You see, I got the idea from this old cartoon I saw on the telly. It wasn't all that good, actually. Bollocks, mostly. I much preferred the pig angle, but you know, you have to keep the public happy. And I figured, what the hell? I mean, it's only a rock and roll record. But I'll tell you one thing; when the great economic collapse happens, those APA bastards are really going to take it up the ass, if I have any say in the matter."
Waters further estranged audiences on the subsequent tour, on which he arranged for an enormous inflatable pig to hover between between the audience and the stage, thus blocking the view for everyone past the first few rows. And lest these lucky few feel that their hero wasn't treating them badly enough, he arranged for roadies to come out and spit upon the hapless fans during the performances. Waters also angered his bandmates by shouting out their wives' shoe sizes during each and every show.
It was late in the tour that Jonathan Snottyguywhohatesrockstars wrote for the aptly titled Mechanics Illustrated Magazine that the Floyd had finally overcome their age-old inability to show up on time for a gig, but that their sound now had become "not unlike the sort of garbage one hears oozing out of the public address systems in malls, that Muzak tripe. Pink Floyd have finally turned their back on... their faithful following and have become pure sap. I'd offer the opinion they ought to erect a mall on stage to more appropriately accomodate their musical direction."
As it turns out, Roger Waters was thinking along those lines as well.
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Chapter 12: ANOTHER CHICK IN THE MALL, PART ONE
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Following the "Animal Crackers" tour, Roger Waters set out to write the ultimate concept album, one with which he could alienate the group's few remaining die-hard fans. During this time, David Gilmour released his first solo album, which is remembered largely for its imaginative title. Rick Wright, also freed from Waters' dominating attitude, was able to explore the agricultural themes so near to his heart on a concept album called "Weed Dream". This stand-out single was a pleasant ditty entitled "Hoes, Hoes" and in typical Floyd fashion it rose to #812 on the charts, thus earning the coveted Aluminum Record Award.
Perhaps the beginning of the building of Roger's Mall could be traced back to an unpleasant event in 1977, in Montreal, at the end of the In The Flush tour. Roger had been less than thrilled with the ceaseless sound of cash registers emanating from the thrashing legion of fans who were rabidly purchasing official Pink Floyd merchandise including t-shirts, tour guides, hats, panties, partly eaten eskimo pies, umbrellas, handy all-leather carrying pouches, and mugs bearing the legend "My grandfather saw Pink Floyd back in 1967 and all I got was this lousy brain damage."
"I could hardly stand it anymore," Roger later quipped to Rolling Stone. "I mean, here we were trying to play a song and I could hardly hear myself over the jingling coins, ringing cash registers, and snapping credit cards. I lost all control."
It was during a particularly listless rendition of one of the tracks from "Animal Crackers" that Roger set his sites on a hapless young fan in the front row. The bass player used his rock god status to incite the young, screaming fan to near hysterics, drawing him closer and closer until Roger could no longer hold back. The fan found himself face-to-face with his idol, drunken with the sounds and sights and the atmosphere, and totally unaware of the outrage about to happen to him, the utter fury his rock-n-roll god was about to unleash on him.
"I still can't believe I did what I did," Roger said, relucatantly. "I drew back, paused for a moment, and thoughtlessly... glared at him. Christ, I don't know what got into me. I just became overwhelmed with it all. I wish I could take back that glare, but it happened and it did its damage and I have to live with it. I was in a rage, and acting like a complete fucking animal."
Most of the fans barely noticed, however. It was obvious that they were taken with Roger's unique singing style which involved spewing copious amounts of saliva, Gallagher-like, on the front row of the audience with the singing of any "s". This had more than once earned Roger the unenviable nickname "Daffy Duck" from his many critics.
While Roger is quick to cite the Montreal glaring incident as the main motivating factor pushing The Mall to its final completion, it is only on rare occassion that he discusses the other, more personal reason for his magnum opus. "It's true, yes. My father died at the Anzio Mall, yes. I can't ever express the outrage that I feel about this. As a boy--and I put this into the film--I ran across some of his credit cards in my mum's dresser. I can't say what this did to me. It felt so fucking awful. I mean, we'll never know what he was buying or anything. The government never turned over his receipts. It was a bunch of bollocks, if you ask me."
It is this incident that drove Roger to write "When the Cashiers Broke Free" which sets the scene for the untimely demise of George Fletcher Waters and adds yet another layer to Roger's hatred of malls in general.
"It was just before dawn
One miserable morning 'bout 6:44
When two teenage girls were standing out front
Of a mall's department store.
They knocked on the doors
Said, "Hurry and open it up."
But the cashiers inside, only looked out and cried,
"Go away, you psycho sluts."
Then kind old manager George
Came to the door when he heard these ignorant twits...."
These are the words that greet the viewer of the film early on in "Pink Floyd The Mall," and it's far less confusing than the live show, which starts off with a surrogate band. Nick Mason explains.
"Well, we were falling into our old routine of showing up late for the shows so Roger decided to set up these chaps with pictures of us glued to their faces. Later, once we finally showed, we could actually sneak on stage and take over. It worked beautifully. And with most of the audience blasted off their bums with Pepto Bismol, it was hardly detected."
Roger had presented the Mall concept to his fellow bandmates along with another completed work, "The Pros and Cons of Bitch Slapping" (which would later become the basis for "The Pros and Cons of Ditch Digging.") Gilmour and Mason both decided that the work was far too personal and opted for The Mall.
"Not that I didn't have misgivings about The Mall with lines like 'should we drive a more powerful car.' It seemed to me that Roger was mocking the very scene we came from, our auto mechanic roots. It seemed wrong, but more promising that the other bit he brought in."
And so work had begun at Super Bug studios seemingly without a hitch. However, it was the recording of The Mall that saw the departure of Rick Wright from the inner sanctum of the band. By all accounts, his gardening obsession had finally taken the forefronts of his personal life and professional life and this created an insurmountable rift between Roger and Rick. Bob Ezrin was even called in to attempt a mitigation between the two, but, as Ezrin puts it, "Rick was beyond help by then--a real goner. He was bringing all sorts of strange gardening equipment to the studio, and he constantly reeked of fertilizer and soil. He was always talking about Martha Stewart too. We even caught him fucking weeding his piano at one point and that was the end of it. Roger told him to finish the watering the hedges and get out."
Rick concedes that he was indeed in the wrong. "Yeah, it's daft in retrospect, but I admit now that I had a real weed problem. I had to leave the band or run the risk of planting the seeds of distrust. Hostilities had already sprouted and bloomed. I was hopeless. I had to make like a tree and leaf, you know." When asked how he overcame his weed problem, he tells of his miraculous cure involving enormous amounts of Peruvian cocaine.
If recording the album was difficult, it was only because Roger himself made it so. Personality traits, such as spitting when he sang, only hampered the progress of the album's creation, and Roger was loathe at times to rectify it.
"We needed to put up great nets and sheets of tarpaulin between Roger and the microphone to catch all that spittle. We even wrapped Roger's head in large bits of canvas too," said Bob Ezrin. "Really it was quite disgusting, so that's when Dave Gilmour and myself went about rewriting the bits that had "s"'s or "th"'s in them. When we brought the suggestion to Roger, he recommended that we all go to his favorite Italian restaurant 'La Ristorante Egoiste' so we could discuss it."
According to those who were there, it was a bad scene. Gilmour had decided on the fettucine alfredo while Roger leaned more toward something with pesto as he felt the alfredo was too sloppy, the fettucine too loose. This initiated a screaming match between the two Floyds which ended with Ezrin coming between them and striking them both around the faces with linguine. He feels even now that "had I not done that, a real disaster would have ensued. Something like... lasagna with clam sauce." When asked about the wine selection for the event, Ezrin shrugs, some fear evident in his eyes, and declines comment.
For all its potential controversy, The Mall evaded the eyes of conservative and liberal watchdogs alike. Ironically, the one incident that marred an otherwise uneventful album release was a controversy surrounding the girls who sing background on "Another Chick In The Mall, Part Two."
The British press had a field day with the item, each trying to outdo the other for the biggest, most garish headline concerning the scandal. The Sunday Times shouted, "Pink Floyd Exploit Young Chicks" while the Evening Standard screamed, "The Floyd Rip Off Innocent Young Women" and the Sun bellowed "Pink Floyd Holding Nuns Hostage, Demand Nuclear Weapons."
The scandal spread like wildfire through the press when it was uncovered that the super-wealthy, loud-shirted Floyd had not appropriately compensated the young, Californian girls who can be heard singing in song's second verse.
Case in point: it was a non-issue altogether. The Floyd had offered the girls gift certificates for The Gap in lieu of cash payment. After witnessing the outrage of the press, Roger arranged to have the group of girls given a free copy of the album--that is, one copy for the whole group, not for each of them.
Despite the controversy, the song did astonishingly well on the charts. Within seven minutes of its release, it hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart. In fact, its popularity ensured that it also occupied the No. 2 spot and the No. 3 spot, narrowly pushing the Osmonds back to No. 4. Much to the surprised indifference of the Floyd, the single stayed in the No's. 1-3 spots for a record-breaking 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes of fame. It would later be dubbed the Andy Warhol debacle.
PART 3 - Chapter 13: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROGER