Roger Waters was thrilled as an undertaker in a room full of fresh corpses. Silhouetted on a walkway above the stage, he counted down the opening song as though it were the prelude to an execution and hissed, “Who let all this riff-raff into the room? There’s one smoking a joint!” as he pointed into an audience illuminated by prison-tower lights. “And another with spots! If I had my way, I’d have all of you shot.”
Great to see you, too, Roger. Has it really been 12 years?
In welcoming us once again to his machine, the Pink Floyd founder was not exactly all warm and fuzzy. Saturday at the Rosemont Theatre, he began the second night of his first tour since 1987 with a series of precisely performed reminders that the Floyd songbook belongs to him alone. Though his former bandmates — David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason — continue to record and tour as Pink Floyd, Waters argues they don’t have a clue because he was the primary architect of concept works such as “The Wall” and “Wish You Were Here.”
The concert illustrated that Waters is both a formidable and forbidding talent, a control freak who no longer has any use for a creative democracy such as Floyd once was. With a six-piece backing band and two harmony singers, the bassist demonstrated that he can hire musicians to mimic perfectly every note on key selections from all the biggest Floyd albums, from “The Dark Side of the Moon” through “The Final Cut.” Tellingly, even gunslinger Doyle Bramhall II didn’t stray far from the signature guitar solos of Gilmour, replicating the Floyd ax man’s deliberate, stately tone down to the last shimmering vibrato.
Waters also appropriated the imagery of the 1970s Floyd tours– the prism from “Dark Side,” the pig floating amid the smokestacks of “Animals,” the brick edifice of “The Wall.” It all made for a well-choreographed journey through a brilliant collection of songs, but — despite the relative intimacy of the venue — it had a remote air: less a rock concert than a classy recital of the composer’s best-known works, from “Brain Damage”/”Eclipse” to “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).”
Though Floyd is widely regarded as one of the great psychedelic bands, the music on this night suggested a particulary acerbic and haunting brand of protest music, lashing out at the monumental stupidity of the institutions entrusted by common people to guide them. When the aristocratic restraint of Waters’ voice was broken by a straining high note, as if he were choking on disgust, or when Bramhall reproduced one of those ringing Gilmour guitar lines, the poignance underneath surfaced.
But for the most part, the image of Waters strolling the stage during one of his post-Floyd solo works, “It’s a Miracle,” embodied the emotional climate: the singer warily eying a front-row fan with arm raised, reaching tentatively until their finger tips touched, then quickly pulling away before things got too intimate.
