Preview “The Big Interview” with Roger Waters

Part 2:

• Dan Rather: When you were writing the music for the Dark Side of the Moon, did you have any sense at that time how extraordinarily successful it was to become?
• Roger Waters: When we’d finished making it, I took a quarter-inch home and I played it to my (then) wife and she burst into tears, and I thought “well she feels the same way I do”. This – we finally cracked it, so it’s at THAT point, which is 1973, where I felt we’d been at this since 1965 so it was 8 years later – I said during those 8 years, we HAVE honed our craft to the point where we’re capable of making a piece of work that is homogenous and well-crafted and well-put-together. If we were cabinet makers, we could stand back now and look at that cabinet or chair and go “you know what? THAT is well made – that’s a nice piece of furniture”. And it was. So I think we were all confident that it would strike a chord. How big a chord, no…nobody could predict that. But it was something we were proud of at the time.
• Dan Rather: Well I’m thinking of a phrase that my late grandmother was fond of saying: “we are above average blessed”. And it occurs to me that you are above average blessed – not that you haven’t worked hard for it, but you’ve had so many successes. Both as a recording artist and a touring artist. When you look at what we call in television “the wide shot”, of what are you most proud?
• Roger Waters: Right now I’m going out on the road because I care about stuff, so I’m really very very very blessed that I still care about things and that I still have my health and enough strength to fight the good fight. I’m proud of it, although it’s not my doing, there’s no way that you can dictate that any of these things should happen. But as long as I’ve got my health, I should keep doing something like this because I need to. I have a sort of need to do it. As I’ve said often to people in the past “I know you believe this too, I know – I look in your eyes and I know you believe this” – the work is its own reward. We don’t need another reward, it’s the doing of the work that’s the reward. Music – it comes in the moment…I like to sometimes use the analogy of painting. So, it’s like when Van Gogh puts that last bit of yellow on his sunflowers or whatever, in that moment when he stands back – I dunno what he’s thinking, but this is what happens when I’ve written a song or recorded a piece of music – there is one fleeting moment where you go “THAT is good”…and then it’s gone. And it never comes back, you never hear it the same way. Whether Van Gogh ever saw a painting again in the same way after that moment when he knew it was finished, I don’t know. I don’t know why I told you that.
• Dan Rather: Well, can you think of a time when you were writing music, writing a song, when you had that moment?
• Roger Waters: Um…yeah, I mean just recently (because I can only think about recent work) but when you say that, there’s a song on the record called “The Last Refugee” which is really beautiful. And it’s got these lines at the end – it talks about “you’ll find my child down by the shore digging around for a chain or a bone, searching the sand for a relic washed up by the sea – the last refugee”. That’s making me nearly, I know it sounds ridiculous talking about that, but the idea of being in a future where the idea of a refugee being a relic from the past is so moving to me.