When I Try To Grab At Least Into A Little Something To Be Able To Draw The Guys From Pink Floyd Again

she's insane. i love her

JOHN LENNON AND GEORGE HARRISON DURING "OUR WORLD" REHEARSAL BREAK

DAVID MAGNUS, 1967.

Cream - N.S.U. Promo clip filmed on March 7, 1967 in Sweden (which may explain the tiny vikings) for the entertainment show Onkel Thores Stuga.

“That stands for non-specific urethritis which is a disease of the urethra you catch from women… from f*cking. We dedicated it to a mutual friend" -Jack Bruce, 1968

“NSU was the first thing that I tried to write for Cream, and a lot of people often ask me about why it’s called NSU. I just like to make this very clear, one of the members of the band was suffering from a venereal disease at the time, and that’s called non-specific urethritis. I can’t tell you who it was obviously, but he was a guitar player” -Jack Bruce, 1998

“It’s a venereal disease. Do you want to know who had it? It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Ginger, but I’m not saying who had it! So I wrote this song in praise of non-specific urethritis…" -Jack Bruce, 1999

well, i do not consider myself a rogerologist, but i know awful lot about this topic huh

so, for starters, what you said about his father and how it affects his social behavior is incredibly true, but we can dig much deeper. roger has spent his entire life, essentially, since the late 60s, pretending not to be who he really is. what i'm talking about is the fact that he says about himself that he is sensitive and he is hurt by some of the actions of his bandmates, but on the other hand, he immediately tries to seem cool and behaves as if he does not care about other people's feelings and what they say to him. psychologically speaking, this is a defensive reaction for people like roger. so you understand, he is a man in the 70s and he needs to show himself as a man, but he never had an example of how a father or husband should behave? and it seems wrong to him that he is sensual, so at one moment he accepts it, and at another he sharply denies it. very roger thing to do haha.

and do you know how i realized that everything was incredibly bad with his fake mask? i read some excerpts from the book "In the Pink". that's really funny because this book is not so important from the perspective of some stories, as from the perspective of how roger's friends perceived him and what exactly nicholas writes about him. this is crazy. because in front of nicholas, roger acts like he doesn't care about anyone. he acts as if he doesn’t care about the opinions of his friends, as if his wife is his burden and she’s pulling him down and as if everyone around him is an asshole and he’s the only genius on planet earth. but he's not like that. and that's what he tried to say in "the final cut". he was so lost that he created the whole different personality for him and the funniest part he HATES this personality, but he believes that this is the only true way (still the god syndrome is also there, just in other moments).

and now can you imagine those hellish roller coaster his wives had to go through? this is the guy who was SCARED of any intimacy with a woman in the 60s and could not imagine it (he said in some interview), but tried to deal w it AND tried to remain a badass in the eyes of others. diabolical.

oh yeah yeah so we can go to the part why he is so scared of women. first, he studied at a school for boys, in their psychology, when they grow up in a society without women, women appear to them as some kind of alien creature. and school, after all, is a place where hormones and sexual desire begin to play out, and from this follows the need for something more familiar (i won’t talk about his homosexual dilemma here, but this is also a rather interesting topic of discussion). the only woman in his life is his mother and as far as i know, mary waters was made of steel. she literally held him and his brother by the scruff of the neck and was incredibly serious about justice. she was the head of the family. THIS is why roger NEEDS to be bossed around, because his mom always did that and in his eyes it was a woman's job to rule him and the family.

do you see now where empty spaces came from? roger in his teenage years was not only afraid of intimacy with a woman, but he thought that this implied complete submission, since women were scarier and emotionally stronger than him. that's why at the end of the clip she eats him. because he thinks he's weak. for him, women are predators and because it was ingrained in his head, he could never get rid of this thought. therefore, he has two moods: either he is an obedient husband, or he is frightened by the pressure from his wife and begins to rush and growl, swear and yell at her like a wounded animal. and of course his mask of a tough guy who disrespects women in front of his friends.

I put in my head that you're the main roger waters scholar so I always feel like I should come here with hypothesis to get your opinion. I read a comment somewhere saying that roger acts different if the interviewer is male or female. And since then I've been noticing that it actually seems true. He's usually much mellower with women and his usually acerbic humor is sillier. Have you ever notice a difference or have any thoughts on that?

Yes, I've noticed that difference too and found it interesting ("what do you mean interesting?"). I've heard him mention in interviews before that part of his therapy in the 80's was addressing his fear of women, which stuck out to me, because he usually seems so much more comfortable around them (although maybe it really is more of a recent development). What I think is happening here is that Roger's social anxiety displays itself in a different way around men vs. women. Going right to the roots of it, clearly he feels sensitive about the fact that he didn't grow up with a father figure, and I think he's internalized that in a way that makes him feel very defensive around other men. He feels the need to show dominance to make up for feeling like he doesn't know how to act, and it displays as him being, well, Roger. On the other hand, if "Mother" is any indication, he's a lot more used to acquiescing to women. He isn't as threatened when they tell him what to do, and he doesn't see their interactions as something he has to win. Snide remarks have been about him being overly influenced by his wives, which is informative if a bit biased. Obviously, neither his "fight" response with men or his "fawn" response with women is healthy, but it's probably why he lets his guard down more when women interview him.

hehe remembered

Pink Floyd

John made a collage as a birthday gift for George in 1975

actually i have A LOT of stuff about songs and syd and roger

well, finally, the solemn occasion for which we have gathered here. let's discuss why i personally think that roger waters is 101% bisexual.

perhaps, let's start in order. teenage hormones associated with sexual desire begin to appear during school. i like to let you imagine situations, so imagine yourself back in the shoes of a boy in the 50s. his mother intimidated him with her strong character; adults around him believe that even mentioning sex is the height of indecency. nobody talks about this at all. there are no girls, the school you study at is strictly for boys and, accordingly, your first conversations about any sexual contact are only with boys. this closed male space becomes the motif for Empty Spaces, where waters reveals his fear of women. he was afraid of them because he was afraid of any intimacy with them, he was afraid to even imagine it, as i said earlier, women for him are like wild predators wanting to tear him apart. guys will be a more familiar experience, less scary, oh, and you all know what often happened in english boys' schools, yes (i'm not talking about anything mega sexy, it's just about exploring your sexuality). in his situation, i can’t say for sure, but i’m more inclined to believe that at school he had nothing but shameful curiosity. all the same, he was terribly pressed and everyone humiliated him. it’s unlikely that he would have even done something like that then.

let's move on. in general, let's talk about another very important psychological aspect, which left him with food for thought for many more years. Syd. imagine roger, who is ashamed of any intimate action, who is dependent on other people's opinions, is insanely tense and always attacks someone with aggression if they say something that seems offensive to him, and imagine syd, who is not afraid to expirience, he is not afraid of sex, he is not afraid to talk about sex, he does not need to listen to the people around him to know who he is and what he wants from his life. he's incredibly free. roger admires this freedom. i think he was openly surprised at this side of barrett more than once. even now, he talks insanely often about how much he and syd talked about things that he didn’t understand then.

and in fact, yes, syd greatly influenced his life. syd never needed roger to pretend to him like waters did with his other friends. syd never needed roger to be right about everything or for everything to work out for him. syd just loved being around him and knowing that roger was listening to him and that syd had something to share with him. he loved that sometimes roger is very emotional or very sensitive and he never judged him for that. i think their sheer revelation to each other is what made roger obsess over him. he could have chosen anyone to talk about all his life and write songs about, even his girlfriend or wife, but he chose syd because he treated roger equally, honestly and openly.

you might think it was some weird jump from talking about sex to talking about feelings, but it's roger's sexuality that we're talking about. and his sexuality certainly includes sex AND feelings.

i'll also clarify that i don't want to say that they had any kind of sexual contact, but i believe that at least once he really thought that maybe if it was syd of all, he wouldn't be against. roger is very sensual and emotional and he is very confused about his sexual feelings, he was one hundred percent just as confused about syd. the “i'm a homosexual” moment didn’t make the situation any better either.

and what roger described in Incarceration of a flower child is an incredibly intimate moment. he remembers it. this is what he wants to remember when he thinks about syd. when it was just the two of them, lying on pillows and discussing baby names. and the way he grabs onto this moment, afraid to let it go - this is also very significant. i mean, he deeply loved him, kinda romantically, kinda friendly. there are many examples of songs that can prove this if you think a little, but i won't do that here, it's already a long post.

when syd left, this whole long process of his “leaving” made roger angry. i can only compare this to when a wife’s husband dies and she begins to ask herself “why did he do this to me? why did he leave me?” (i have an example of real people with whom this situation happened). roger also likes to direct everything towards himself, of course it was syd who left him, not pink floyd. syd made them famous, they were being pressured to write a new album, and syd just decided that he was leaving. and roger didn’t need excuses for why this happened, he saw it as if he was simply left to deal with all the problems. and so he feels sad, because he feels sad he gets angry and you get the idea. but the anger passes. and he understands that he misses him and syd was very, very important to him. and then the realization comes that it was he who was selfish in this situation.

and when sid leaves he becomes who he was again. he is unsure of himself, he is waiting for approval, he cannot improve his sex life (in some way) because there is simply something missing in it.

he is kinda bisexual.

he will never admit it because he doesn't think it's anyone's business. he doesn't admit it because he's still closed and he still can't agree with himself. after all, even if he had thoughts and even fantasies, he was always ashamed of them because for society it was shameful then. and he was dependent on it.

you can agree or disagree, i am not claiming to be his sex psychologist, i am simply writing this as my own thoughts and conclusions.

queen