The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking

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The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
Studio album by Roger Waters

Publication
(s)

  • April 30, 1984 (UK)
  • May 7, 1984 (USA)
Label (s) Harvest Records , EMI Group

Format (s)

CD, LP

Genre (s)

Progressive rock

Title (number)

12

running time

41:58

occupation
  • The National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted and arranged by Michael Kamen

production

Roger Waters, Michael Kamen

Studio (s)

February to December 1983 at Olympic, Eel Pie and The Billiard Room, England

chronology
With Ron Geesin : Music from The Body
(1970) 		The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking Radio KAOS
(1987)
Single releases
June 1984 Every Strangers Eyes
1984 The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking is Roger Waters' first solo album from 1984. He released the album a year before leaving the band Pink Floyd . It was awarded gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in April 1995 in the United States .

Album concept, creation and song information

The idea for The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking came to Waters together with the The Wall concept. He designed the twin project after completing the 1977 Animals Tour. It explores the scattered thoughts of a married man on a tour of California . The man is in a midlife crisis and is daydreaming, among other things, of the seduction of a hitchhiker he took along on his way. During the trip, he experiences fears and paranoid states , all of which take place in real time in the early hours of the morning between 4:30 a.m. and 5:12 a.m. on an indefinite day.

At the time, Waters made demo tapes for both idea complexes and presented them to the other Pink Floyd members. You should decide which one should be worked out for the next Pink Floyd album and which should make a solo album. The band chose the isolation psychogram The Wall , which put the male imagination on hold for the time being. In 1983, Waters started implementing it. He took over drummer Andy Newmark and producer Michael Kamen from The Final Cut production . Cover illustrator Gerald Scarfe also confirmed his services again. The studio work lasted from February to December. Waters rejected a hi-tech overload, for example using a real orchestra instead of a computer or simple clock ticking instead of electronic alienation effects. Everything should sound as natural as possible.

The parallels to The Final Cut were even more evident in the songwriting. 4:50 AM (Go Fishing) contains a piano melody that is already included in the singing of The Fletcher Memorial Home , and there is also a melody from Your Possible Pasts . During the Wall sessions, an early version of 4:41 AM (Sexual Revolution) was recorded, which was included in the extensively expanded edition of The Wall under the additional title Immersion Edition Box Set . In retrospect, some lines of text were interpreted as swipes at his Pink Floyd colleague David Gilmour, who had become a rival . The track 4:58 AM (Dunroamin, Duncarin, Dunlivin) , for example, deals primarily with the topic of infidelity in a relationship, the last verses - I would like to go on [...] but I puke but also in the context of Waters' relationship with his bandmates interpreted, particularly as next a guitar riff follows that the right the Wall -Stück In the Flesh is removed.

Track list

Side one

  1. 4:30 AM (Apparently They Were Traveling Abroad) - 3:12
  2. 4:33 AM (Running Shoes) - 4:08
  3. 4:37 AM (Arabs with Knives and West German Skies) - 2:17
  4. 4:39 AM (For the First Time Today, Part 2) - 2:02
  5. 4:41 AM (Sexual Revolution) - 4:49
  6. 4:47 AM (The Remains of Our Love) - 3:09

Side two

  1. 4:50 AM (Go Fishing) - 6:59
  2. 4:56 AM (For the First Time Today, Part 1) - 1:38
  3. 4:58 AM (Dunroamin, Duncarin, Dunlivin) - 3:03
  4. 5:01 AM (The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Part 10) - 4:36
  5. 5:06 AM (Every Stranger's Eyes) - 4:48
  6. 5:11 AM (The Moment of Clarity) - 1:28

Contributors

Musician:

Crew:

  • Roger Waters and Michael Kamen - producers
  • Andy Jackson - sound engineer
  • Laura Boisan - assistant to the sound engineer
  • Michael King - Special Effects
  • Zuccarelli Labs - Holophonics
  • Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe - cover design
  • Alex Henderson - Photos
  • The Artful Dodgers - coordination

LP cover, tour and film

The cover image shows the rear view of a blonde woman standing on a stylized street in a hitchhiking pose. She only wears red high-heeled shoes and a backpack of the same color. This representation sparked violent protests. The allegation was sexism , some even spoke of incitement to rape . As a result, many advertising posters for the album were torn down. The uproar panicked those responsible for the label, so that they had the model's bare bottom covered with black stickers or provided the artwork for reprints with black bars.

The first part of the 20-appointment The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking Tour took place from June 16 to July 31, 1984. Half of the appointments were in Europe (the only German in Frankfurt am Main was canceled), the others in North America . The second part in March and April 1985 included another 17 concerts in the USA (plus one in Toronto ). For the first part, Waters resorted to Tim Renwick , who was already a live guitarist at Pink Floyd . Album guitarist Eric Clapton was also there. Clapton refused to contest the second part. The reason was that Waters had given a rigid structure and Clapton had therefore forbidden his improvisations . Nevertheless, it was a good thing for the two guitarists, because it turned out that they harmonized perfectly, which is why Clapton invited Renwick to his band, which performed at the Live Aid Festival in Philadelphia , which was broadcast worldwide .

A huge screen was set up in the background of the stage, fed by three synchronized projectors. The stage itself represented a bedroom furnished down to the last detail, in which the protagonist's imaginations took place. A “multimedia show consisting of live music, film clips and theater” was offered. Between the various visual stimuli, the unclothed hitchhiker from the record cover and "sometimes a burglar who turns out to be a perverted killer with a chainsaw" appeared. The well-known Quadrofonie was used again. The lavish production cost Waters hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is why the project went down in Waters' artist biography as a "financial disaster". When asked why he was making such an effort, he replied: “[...] because I really want everything to be as I imagine it in my thoughts and dreams. And dreams are very often expensive - but also beautiful. "

As with The Wall , a movie version for Pros and Cons should be made, but this was ultimately omitted in view of the disappointing reception of the original work.

Reception, chart placement and sales

The attribute "brilliant" was given to the album, which was only a few days old, in the rather uncritical music scene , which is aimed at a younger clientele . The Musikexpress called the album in August 1984 a "controversial epic" and a magazine edition later an "annoying ego trip". At the same time, the American Rolling Stone wrote about the work that it was composed of “hazy, cloudy allegories ” in melodies based on a folk theme and concluded from the Wall- like show that Waters wanted to prove all too obviously that he was actually pink Floyd was and is. In 2011, the German Rolling Stone spoke of a "confused work of insanity that can only be interpreted psychoanalytically ".

In 2002 , Arno Frank saw the reason for the “terrible” flop in the Musikexpress in the “crude song structures” that “failed [because] they were no longer grounded by David Gilmour's weighty guitar”. In 1990, the Frankfurter Rundschau saw only a “medium flop”, but in all respects: “artistically as well as commercially”.

The baby blue pages offer three perspectives. The first reviewer gave the album the label “entertaining listening experience” (10 out of 15 points), the next disqualified it as “tired rejects” (6 out of 15 points) and finally felt it was a continuation of the previous Pink Floyd works that took some getting used to ( 8 out of 15 points).

The ultimateclassicrock.com website revealed the reasons for the failure . In addition to the compositional weaknesses criticized by critics, which are a matter of opinion, Waters was an inappropriately perceived part of the bigger picture, which is called Pink Floyd. In addition, his stubbornness in not admitting questions about Pink Floyd offended journalists.

Album and tour ticket revenues were regularly significantly behind those of Pink Floyd. After all, the album reached position 31 in the US charts. It took almost ten years to reach gold status.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984). Roger Waters. "The moment of clarity faded like charity does ...". In: floydianslip.com. Retrieved August 16, 2015 .
  2. ^ A b Roger Waters - The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. In: inchdrillf0f.cf. Retrieved August 16, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Nick DeRiso: The Road Not Taken: The History of Roger Waters' "The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking". In: ultimateclassicrock.com. April 30, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  4. ^ A b c Wilfried F. Rimensberger: Roger Waters . In: music scene . June 1984, p. 62 f .
  5. ↑ Arno Frank: “I have to throw up!” The musical squabbles of Messrs. Waters and Gilmour . In: Musikexpress / Sounds . No. 529 , February 2000, p. 33 (within the article The Wall in the Heads of Josef Winkler and Arno Frank, p. 30 ff).
  6. ^ Roger Waters Live. (No longer available online.) In: pulse-and-spirit.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; accessed on August 16, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pulse-and-spirit.com
  7. ^ A b Graham Clarke: Will Roger Waters perform again? In: ingsoc.com. Retrieved August 16, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Tim Renwick. Chronology. (No longer available online.) In: timrenwick.com. Archived from the original on August 19, 2015 ; accessed on August 16, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.timrenwick.com
  9. ↑ a b c Robert Schaetti: Roger Waters. Zurich, Hallenstadion . In: Musikexpress / Sounds . No. 343 , Aug 1984, Live. The most important concerts of the last month, p. 30 .
  10. ↑ a b David Fricke: Roger Waters can't top 'The Wall'. Show relies on Pink Floyd songs, spectacle . In: Rolling Stone . No. 429 , Aug. 30, 1984, Performance, pp. 38 .
  11. ^ Franz Hendricks: Biography. In: rogerwaters.de. Retrieved August 16, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Frank Schöler: Roger Waters . In: Musikexpress / Sounds . No. 344 , September 1984, CD disks, p. 81 .
  13. ↑ Arne Willander: Roger Waters. The Collection . Complete works box with the albums of the English brooder since 1984. In: Rolling Stone . No. 201 , July 2011, p. 100 f .
  14. ^ Arno Frank: Roger Waters. Flickering Flame - The Solo Years. Volume 1 . In: Musikexpress . No. 557 , June 2002, Sampler, p. 73 .
  15. ↑ Martin Scholz: The wall piles up. Roger Waters: Benefit concert for civil protection / “The Wall” with Bryan Adams and the Scorpions in Berlin. 160,000 fans expected . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . July 14, 1990, Rock Rundschau, p. 10 .
  16. ↑ Thomas Kohlruß, Jörg Schumann, Markus Peltner: Roger Waters. The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. Reviews. In: babyblaue-seiten.de. February 25, 2014, Retrieved August 16, 2015 (date of last review given).
  17. ↑ Karlgünter Rammoser: Roger Waters. The wallflower . In: Musikexpress / Sounds . No. 416 , September 1990, pp. 40 .