Shit That’s Good! Crap Albums I Love # 59 – Roger Waters, The Pros and Cons of Hitch
From time to time I like to share some stories about albums I love that are duds – either I’ve found a way in to appreciate it through sheer stubbornness – or I just loved it on first listen
Roger Waters, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, 1984
I can’t lie, I didn’t always think this was shit. And I also didn’t always love it either. Though when I first heard this album — a Christmas present of the cassette tape, along with Roger’s next solo album, Radio K.A.O.S — I thought it was absolutely incredible. I was a teenager, and a Floyd fan, and I was all in on concept stuff. I loved The Wall and The Final Cut, and I adored things like Tommy by The Who, and Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake by The Small Faces, and, well, any album that told any sort of story was entirely my cup of tea.
I soon got sick of that. But in the early 90s, when I was catching up with albums from the mid/late 80s, I loved that sort of a thing. And Pros and Cons was like butter.
But after a while, I really grew to not like the album at all — and bit by bit I fell away from Roger Waters’ other material (only to drift back, of course). I’m a lifelong Floyd fan, so I’ve broken up with the band altogether and then come back even stronger.
Roger though. He’s hard to love. He’s a cantankerous, puffed up know it all fool, and he’s overly wordy, and if Meddle and Dark Side and Animals are classics (and even if I retain my soft spot for Final Cut, which no one seems to like) I find it hard to care about the complete lack of melodic grace and overly verbose solo albums that clog space. (I still like Radio K.A.O.S — as absurd as its concept, it’s lean and ready to go).
Pros and Cons has something like 400 lines of lyrics — at one point Roger, so pleased with himself, sings about someone adopting a fox cub — “whose mother was somebody’s coat”. He appropriates How Much Is That Doggy In The Window, and makes the great Katie Kissoon sing it po-faced. And he rips himself off aplenty — with melodies (if you can call them that) we first heard on The Wall, and The Final Cut, which, technically, is his first solo album eh?
The thing is — and most nerds will know this already — Pros and Cons nearly got made instead of The Wall. Rog sketched it out at the same time, post-Animals, and David Gilmour said he preferred it. But it felt more like a solo album, so Bricks In The Wall became just The Wall, and Pros and Cons went back in the cupboard, to be worked on after The Final Cut, which was also in the mix around the same time. Or, my take: Gilmour said he liked it, so Waters shelved it. Lol.
The three albums — taken together — are the nadir of Roger Saying Too Much and Spelling It All Out and Thinking He’s Clever and Laying Metaphor On So Thick and Being Humourless and Always So Fucking Serious Man.
But, on Pros and Cons, he has a killer band. Andy Newmark (Roxy Music, Sly & The Family Stone) is on drums. And his “Gilmour” (replacement) is one Eric Clapton. Bit of a boss move/dick move, given this came out right after Gilmour’s 1984 album, About Face. A month after Gilmour reminds the world of his liquid-tone (largely missing from Final Cut), Roger gets Old Slowhand — bit of a giant fuck you and a big dick swing to help him say that Floyd is over if he wants it to be over. To help him point out that Floyd is just him and whatever his army happens to be, whoever happens to be in it…
And shit, I reckon it’s EC’s best playing in the 80s. Not exactly hard, but Eric would get burnt out and relish being a sideman. And just as when he disappeared into Derek and The Dominos a decade earlier, in the early 80s he needed a break again. He needed to hide. To just play. He found that with movie soundtracks and in a bizarre hook up with Roger Waters (their wives were mates, it was that easy).
I guess I have mixed feelings about this one now. The cover is cringe — and would not fly in today’s world, and might be the reason there’s no significant reissues — and the sheer self-absorption of the lyrics, is downright fucking exhausting. And sometimes comical. But fuck it all, Clapper hits in on some beautiful slide playing here, and one or two of his Same Five Note special solos there, and I’m weirdly captivated. There’s also something oddly endearing about how much Roger believes (in) his own shtick. It’s now Boomer-Cringe, totally, but back when it was just garden variety Mid Life Crisis as realised by a multimillionaire rock star it was kinda cute, kinda wow.
Anyway, I couldn’t write a serious rave about this album but there is no other record like it. And that might be due to a court order. And I can’t say it’s a great album because sometimes when I hear it I’m embarrassed for him. Even though he’s never not doing fine, financially, if not spiritually. Geez, I dunno — I can’t believe it’s nearly 2025 and I’m still occasionally listening to this album. I fell back under its spell while looking to completely write it off. Well, that’s the first love of music isn’t it — you feel the music while relating it to when you first heard it and how it shook you, how it made you feel.
This started a while back when I had my Off The Tracks site, there’s over 50 for you to look through in the back-pages of this here Substack newsletter:
