It’s theatre rock n’ roll, capped off with one guitar solo that ought to make you feel like you’re in a spaceship taking off. It’s a song about a character called Pink who’s on a roller coaster that just won’t stop. And, it’s a song about the fragile sanity of, at least, one or two members of the band playing it.
“Comfortably Numb” is one of the greatest rock songs of all time. Here’s me looking at its history and the meaning of its lyrics.
Road to Making “Comfortably Numb”
The story of Pink Floyd is part of rock n’ roll lore nearly as much as Elvis joining the army or Dylan falling off his bike near Woodstock.
But let me try to cram it into a few sentences. Pink Floyd started out as a spaced-out psychedelic-rock band put together by brainy college kids from London. The highlight of the band was Syd Barrett’s beautifully naive, often brilliant songs. Barrett’s lifestyle, sadly, caused him terrible mental pain, which forced him to leave the band.
The group carried on, and after a few albums containing mainly eccentric sound designs and long jams, Barrett’s buddy Roger Waters took charge of the songwriting and got really good at it. Another of Barrett’s friends, David Gilmour, along with Rick Wright and Nick Mason, filled out the sonic palette.
“The Dark Side of the Moon,” a concept album about alienation in modern society, turned Pink Floyd into one of the most successful bands on Earth. No other progressive rock band was bigger in the 1970s than Pink Floyd. The group members began bickering. Still, the next couple of albums maintained the band’s status.
By the late 1970s, as Pink Floyd got ready to record the ambitious concept album “The Wall,” the musicians were barely on speaking terms. Meanwhile, Waters worried he was following Barrett down the same path. “Comfortably Numb” was written during this time.
The Meaning of the Lyrics to “Comfortably Numb”
“Comfortably Numb,” if you want to be cynical, is, at least, two musical visions coming together. One is Roger Waters’ storytelling. The other is David Gilmour trying to add his airy, musical sophistication over the songs, something he would do on only two or three compositions on “The Wall.”
Duality is the name of the game with the lyrics as well. Technically, they offer a crescendo to the story of Pink, troubled rock star and main character of “The Wall.” Pink’s sipped the sweet taste of success. But, he has lost his humanity, turned into something of a dictator, and now needs a “little pin prick” from a good doctor just to get himself up on stage to perform.
However, the song is also about Roger Waters’ detachment from the life he’d built. On the band’s previous tour, he’d caught himself arguing with a belligerent fan and had begun asking himself serious questions about the state of his psyche. Meanwhile, he’d kicked Richard Wright out of the band and had only allowed Gilmour to contribute to a handful of new songs, including this one. Rock star problems, I suppose.
Later, on a radio interview, Waters clarified that the song was also about one incident in which he got hepatitis, failed to recognise the symptoms, and had to be doped up on stage. He recalls his hands feeling like “like two toy balloons.”
Waters said: “That comes from a specific show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia (June 29, 1977). I had stomach cramps so bad that I thought I wasn’t able to go on. A doctor backstage gave me a shot of something that I swear to God would have killed a f—ing elephant. I did the whole show, hardly able to raise my hand above my knee. He said it was a muscular relaxant. But it rendered me almost insensible. It was so bad that at the end of the show, the audience was baying for more. I couldn’t do it. They did the encore about me.”
The music for “Comfortably Numb” was written by David Gilmour. The band’s previous work had, for the most part, been a near equal collaboration between band members. Waters, however, handled most of the work on “The Wall.”
Still, I should note that the song is, in no small part, famous for Gilmour’s guitar solo, one of the greatest of all time. Also, despite Gilmour’s few creative interventions, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” “Run Like Hell,” and “Comfortably Numb,” all songs on which he wrote, are likely the record’s most famous cuts.
Finally, Waters and Gilmour disagreed heavily about the song. Producer Bob Ezrin encouraged collaboration. Ultimately, this created a “light and dark” blend, one in which Waters plays the doctor administering drugs, and Gilmour plays Pink, who reminisces about past innocence.
Gilmour later told Guitar World in 1993 that: “We changed the key of the song’s opening the E to B, I think. The verse stayed exactly the same. Then we had to add a little bit, because Roger wanted to do the line, ‘I have become comfortably numb.’ Other than that, it was very, very simple to write. But the arguments on it were about how it should be mixed and which track we should use.
We’d done one track with Nick Mason on drums that I thought was too rough and sloppy. We had another go at it and I thought that the second take was better. Roger disagreed. It was more an ego thing than anything else. We really went head to head with each other over such a minor thing. I probably couldn’t tell the difference if you put both versions on a record today. But, anyway, it wound up with us taking a fill out of one version and putting it into another version.”
The Legacy of Pink Floyd and “Comfortably Numb”
“Comfortably Numb” is one of the great all-time classic rock songs. It’s also a bizarre composition, half-spoken, half-sung, containing a great guitar solo, and referencing drug use in show business.
The song and the guitar solo are routinely part of Best Of lists, including Alt77 ranking it the 9th greatest rock song of all time. Would you believe that?
“The Wall” was a colossal hit, selling over 33 million units. Pink Floyd, with both Gilmour and Waters, hung around for one more album of outtakes from “The Wall” before Waters embarked on a surprisingly unsuccessful, although underrated, solo career. I suggest checking out “Amused to Death” for proof of that.
Pink Floyd sans-Waters returned in the 1980s to colossal audience approval. Subsequent releases sold millions.
“The Wall” remains Waters’ magnum opus. He performed in 1990 at a massive show meant to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Van Morrison sang while Rick Di Fonzo and Snowy White traded solos. Fittingly, it was the last song a reunited Pink Floyd ever performed for the Live 8 charity event.
You’ve heard a million times, but “Comfortably Numb” still packs a punch. It’s one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
