Roger Waters (zanger en bassist van Pink Floyd) heeft zich verontschuldigt omdat hij de Elliott Smith’s tribute wall in LA ‘beschadigd’ zou hebben.
The controversy began when LA Weekly reported that a viral marketing campaign for Waters’ upcoming The Wall Live tour had tagged Smith’s memorial wall.
Since Smith’s suicide in 2003 farewell messages from fans have been written on the wall, at 4334 Sunset Boulevard in LA where Smith posed for the Figure 8 album.
The wall has been repainted several times in the last few years, however the viral marketing strategy which involved pasting up a quote by Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, on several ‘significant walls’ around LA including the Smith memorial has angered Smith’s fans.
A statement from Waters responding to the controversy declares that the decision to paste the advertising on the wall was “absolutely an accident.”
Waters explains that he “didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed [the marketing team] to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.”
“It’s not like this was some pristine monument and Roger Waters is the Big Bad Wolf who covered it up. That’s why I was so incensed when I read that [LA Weekly] article that said I paid someone to disrespect Elliott Smith,” Waters said.
“I admit I didn’t know [Smith’s] music, but I’ve talked to people who do and it’s clear he was a young man who felt deeply, and any empathetic person wouldn’t have an issue with publicizing that quote.”
The pacifist Eisenhower quote that has riled up Smith’s fans reads; “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
“I would guess, and this is only a guess,” Waters said, “but it’s my guess that [Smith] would have been sympathetic to [the theme of Eisenhower’s] message.”