Luca wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2020 10:27 pm
mabewa wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2020 10:34 am
As for Marooned, I find Jon's recent claim that Rick did not play on Marooned, despite Rick having composed the entire chord progression, to be a
highly dubious example of revisionist history. The meandering piano style sounds extremely similar on the demos and the final recorded version,
and the live versions (for which Rick is clearly playing the piano part, as you can see his hands at times). Why Rick would compose something so idiosyncratic, only to have someone else play in on the record makes no sense and contradicts all references I've ever read on the album.
I agree with you. Actually, there's an interview that Wright gave when Broken China came out, where he said that he considered himself more a composer than a performer. But he also said the Marooned was the proof that he was back in the band... I noticed that Carin changed his fb comments over time. He wrote "I played all the piano" but then many days later switched to "all the grand piano", it also seems that he deleted a comment and his own reply about supposed bad blood between him and Gilmour. However, it's pretty clear, at least to me, that he played more than a bunch of "additional keys" on the album.
Good perspective, thanks.
From live clips, you can see that Carin played the piano parts on High Hopes and Great Day for Freedom, which makes sense since those parts don't sound like Rick and were presumably copies of Dave parts. In contrast, the piano parts (both electric and acoustic), on songs like Marooned and What Do You Want From Me sound very much like Rick, and indeed Rick played those parts live while Carin played other stuff. For what it's worth, Wikipedia states that 'Wright's grand piano parts (originally played and recorded on a Kurzweil) were recorded at Olympic Studios in London.' It's a bit unclear where that comes from since some of the links on that article are now broken, but it's been up there for years--Carin had has plenty of time to correct it if he thought it was wrong.
And yes, 'Additional keyboards' is likely understating his role, but I remember hearing AMLOR for the first time and lamenting that there were few obvious Rick parts (a perception that was later confirmed), but then hearing TDB for the first time and hearing a lot of stuff that was obvious Rick. Clearly, Carin can imitate Rick's sound fairly well live, but I've never heard much evidence at all that he can effectively create and play Rick-like parts in the studio. The most Rick-like part not played by Rick on AMLOR is the organ on Dogs of War, and that was played by Hammond whiz Bill Payne, not Carin. And it doesn't make sense that Rick would make up distinctive parts, play them on demos, then have Carin exactly mimic them on the albums, only to have Rick go back to playing those parts live.
I also find it notable that in the (very detailed) credits of Endless River, Rick gets lots of keyboard parts, while Carin gets few keyboard credits, and when he does, it's again, it's not hard to tell who plays what. For example, Allons-Y sounds very Rickish in the organ parts and not particularly so in the synth parts... and indeed the credits confirm Rick Wright on Hammond and Jon Carin on synth... and then the clips of them working on the song in the studio show Rick Wright on Hammond and Jon Carin on synth. I think that's a good reflection of how TDB was recorded--Carin was definitely there, but Rick still played the parts he had worked out before Carin even got involved in the sessions.
And I don't think that PF has ever been in the practice of misrepresenting who played what on their album credits anyway. If they had wanted to exaggerate Rick's role, then it would make no sense for them to credit him with 3 separate key parts on a track like 'It's What We Do,' and then give him zero credits on a track like 'Anisina,' which they presumably redid when they revisited the material in 2012, due to a lack of a good multitrack version from the TDB sessions. Engineers usually have tracks marked with this kind of information anyway, so they presumably just gave Rick credit for stuff he did and no credit for stuff he didn't do.
I suspect that Carin is miffed by having Rick become the star keyboardist on the AMLOR remix, and is trying to claim more of DB in response, probably influenced by the typical bad memory thing that musicians often display decades after the fact (witness, for example, McCartney claiming that he wrote parts of song that both he and Lennon agreed were written by Lennon back in the 70's). But without confirmation from the production team, I think he should be taken with a huge grain of salt.