By Leila Cobo

The Miami Herald

Published: Friday, June 2, 2000

Few musicians acquire the legendary status of Roger Waters, founder of Pink Floyd and the man many regard as Pink Floyd. His music is indelibly stamped in the collective consciousness of generations, thanks to works like Dark Side of The Moon (which has spent nearly 20 years on the Billboard charts, an all-time record) and The Wall (which has sold more than 23 million copies, according to the RIAA).

Now 56, Waters -- whose last album was 1992's Amused to Death -- comes to South Florida Saturday as part of his first national tour in nearly 15 years. Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1983 after public and acrimonious differences with his band mates, spoke on the phone from England about the past and the present.

Q: What prompted you to go on the road again?

A: I did a charity concert for Don Henley [in 1993] and I did a few songs for his band. It was John Fogerty, Neil Young, Don Henley and me. And it was a wonderful evening. I was very warmly received by the audience. It encouraged me to go back to the stage and try to rediscover the magic that I had felt in my first years with Pink Floyd. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I felt that I really rekindled a connection with the people out there who had been listening to my songs all these years.

Q: How is what you're doing now different from your work with Pink Floyd?

A: It's very different. We became seduced by our success in Pink Floyd and started playing larger and larger venues. It's well-known that I became dissatisfied by that, and by 1977 I had arrived at the point where I couldn't stand it anymore. I felt the magic of music and communication had been crushed beneath the weight of greed and numbers. That's really part of what prompted me to write The Wall.

Q: In fact, you weren't too pleased with the release of The Wall Live earlier this year, were you?

A: I was rather unhappy when I heard about it because it felt like money grabbing to me. It felt like scraping the bottom of the barrel. And I've expressed that.

My oldest son is 23 years old and I expressed that to him. And he said, 'Come on, Dad, lighten up. People will be interested in these recordings.' He's a fan of an American band called Phish, and every single concert they do is recorded by someone and people swap [the tapes]. And the kid is absolutely right. No one's twisting anybody's arm to buy it.

I think [engineer James Guthrie] has done a great job. I take my hat off to it. I think the result is great. It's like, my son and everybody else, they're right. This is a good piece of music -- why shouldn't the live recording be available?

Q: You're back on tour on your own and performing material that you've recorded as Roger Waters as well as old Pink Floyd material. What is the difference now?

A: We refuse to play big venues. I've been asked to go to South America to play big shows back-to-back in 50,000 seat venues and I will not play big venues. I don't miss it at all. I hated it. Because it was no longer about performance and our songs and our music and our work. It was about the event. I think football stadiums are good for football, but they're not great for rock and roll. It's just too big and people get diverted, and they shout and they scream and they throw up.

Q: People all over the world related very strongly to Pink Floyd and its music. Does it surprise you that you've managed to have such an impact in such a variety of places?

A: No, it's not strange at all. Some people I know went to Machu Pichu (the Mayan ruins in Peru) and they saw 'Pink Floyd' written on one of the walls. We're all human. One of the exciting things about being alive in the '90s is we get to communicate via the Internet through the explosion of technology. We no longer have to sit on a boat for three weeks in order to communicate. And it's no surprise to me that the preoccupations of a lot of Colombians wouldn't be the same as the preoccupations of a lot of English.

Q: I know you have several musical projects going on.

A: I'm making a new album. I'm also working on an opera about the French revolution called Ca Ira. I've recorded the orchestral parts and that will be coming out on Sony Classics. I'm also recording a new rock and roll album. It's finding its own way. It's hard to talk about because although there are a number of complete songs in it, it's all a part of my story. It's still the story of me searching for love. And I mean love in the broad sense of the word. It's a good quest.

Q: How did you end up working on an opera?

A: The guy who wrote the libretto, Etienne Roda-Gil, who writes novels and pop lyrics, wrote this libretto in 1989. And he showed it to me and it was beautifully illustrated by his wife, who has since then died of leukemia. And he asked me if I could set the piece to music and I read it and I liked it a lot. I said, 'I've never done this before -- why not?' So I called an engineer, and I said, we're going to start work on an opera. I spent six weeks doing a sketch, playing piano, synthesizer, and I produced a demo of this thing that was a couple of hours long. And I've been not refining it since then, because [his wife] died and we shelved the whole thing. But about three years ago we started working in detailing.

Q: Operas have traditionally been the ultimate challenge for classical composers. Is it the same with you?

A: It's not more challenging than anything else. In fact, in some ways it's less challenging than the work where I need to look deep into my own soul to figure what it was about.

Q: Nothing is ever superficial?

A: No. I never write anything superficial.

Thanks to Jeff Storm