Smoking left legendary musician Roger Waters “out of his brain” for a few years as he tried to kick the habit.
The Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter would share his experiences with smoking during an interview, where Waters also broke down his dealings with drugs. With kicking his smoking habit, the “dope went with it” and his brushes with acid were rarer than some would believe given Waters’ role in psychedelic music. Speaking to Uncut Magazine in 2007, Waters broke down what he did and why he didn’t do much more than smoking during his time in Pink Floyd. He said: “I had lots of chances to take acid – in fact anything I wanted, really. I took acid twice.
“Once, I’m not sure what year it was but it was on the island of Patmos in the Greek Archipelago…this wasn’t what you get on bits of blotting paper or sugar cubes. This was off a dropper out of a bottle, and it was pure lysergic. It was an extraordinary experience and it lasted about forty-eight hours. I took some more a couple of years later in New York.
“I remember getting stuck in the middle of the night on 8th Avenue trying to get something to eat and peering at the traffic lights. I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to ever do this again. No, enough, enough.'”
Waters would go on to say he didn’t do all that many drugs, and kicked his habits entirely when he gave up smoking. He added: “If you want to know the entire history of my drug taking, I smoked dope for a few years because I was pretending I was overcoming my nicotine addiction. I stopped smoking cigarettes, but I’d roll a joint every morning.
“I was out of my brain for a couple of years pretending not to smoke cigarettes. As soon as I finally kicked the nicotine habit, the dope went with it, as it’s a very pernicious drug. It slows you down and stops you from doing anything productive. It has a very negative influence on people’s lives.”
Though the works of Pink Floyd have been connected with psychedelic genre stylings and even psychedelic drugs, Waters believes the meaning of the band’s music is far removed from those ideas.
He said: “Just because you’re not a virtuoso guitar player doesn’t mean that you’re not a good musicians. It’s a sort of fallacy that has been picked upon by my enemies from time to time (laughs). Music is actually about communicating feelings to human beings.
“If you do that within the genre it doesn’t matter if you can’t play Chopin preludes on the piano. You’re still a musician.” Waters would also note the influence of The Band and their album, Music from Big Pink.
Waters added: “I always say to people the thing that changed everything for me was the Beatles and (The Band’s) Music From Big Pink. Music From Big Pink changed the whole way that musicians felt about recording. You can so hear how large a contribution (Helm) made.
“Obviously everyone in the band was great. Robbie (Robertson) wrote great songs. But Levon was for me the heart and soul of the thing. They were all great, Rick (Danko), Garth (Husdon) and Richard (Manuel), they were all fantastic.”
