Again, this is your rather eccentric take on things. He 'bothered with' playing the bass on stage and studio while he was still the band's bass player. As you say yourself, his playing was pretty much pentatonic stuff so you could argue he didn't stretch himself. But he was interested in getting results - which of course the band unquestionably did- so of course he was 'bothered'.ZiggyZipgun wrote: Tue Jun 08, 2021 12:15 pmI'd say Roger lost interest in being a bass player no later than 1972, but I don't believe that he bothered with it much in the studio before then either. The Abbey Road footage in the Pompeii film features them all apparently hard at work, but Dark Side was in the final mixing stage at that point, and the director had them mock-up a few scenes as though they were still recording it. If Roger plays "On the Run" on the Synthi-A even though he didn't do it on the album, then I wouldn't assume he wrote the bass line that he plays on "Eclipse".
I know you're skirting around the 'Gilmour played over half the studio bass' stuff again, but again I'll point out this is simply wrong. There is no substantial amount of pre-77 songs that feature significant deviations in the bass style of the studio / live incarnations. The development can be traced from stage to studio and back. We know the songs Gilmour played bass on because they're documented (several are simply acoustic studio-only songs where the two swapped acoustic for bass when recording the rhythm part). There's no reason to suppose there's a vast amount of others where Gilmour slavishly copied Waters' lines to 'save time' or whatever.
We know Waters was capable of coming up with bass lines from Piper - some of them are considered rather good in their own way. We also know Gilmour's (earlier) bass playing from Fat Old Sun and the Barrett LPs. It sounds nothing like PF bass playing. If you have specific stylistic examples to prove your case please post them.