Which one's Pink? What Pink Floyd got right (and wrong) about the cigar ritual

TL;DR. “Have a Cigar” is probably the most famous cigar reference in rock, and the cigar in it belongs to a phony: a record executive offering a smoke to a band whose members he can’t tell apart. Waters got the 1970s boardroom cigar dead right. It was a prop. But the prop only worked because it was imitating something real, and the real thing is slower, quieter, and a lot harder to fake. That’s where the humidor comes in.

There is a man at the start of side two of Wish You Were Here that anyone who has ever been on the wrong end of a sales pitch will recognise. He’s friendly. He’s enthusiastic. He has heard the record, or says he has, and he can already see the charts, the money, the long bright future. He offers the boys a cigar. And then, mid-flattery, he asks them which one of them is Pink.

Waters wrote the song in 1975, after The Dark Side of the Moon had made Pink Floyd very rich and brought every music-business handshake in London to their door^[1]. The question was not invented for effect. Gilmour said years later that people in the industry genuinely asked it, that there were executives who assumed Pink Floyd was the singer’s name. Think about that for a moment. The man is handing out cigars to people he cannot tell apart.

I carried this LP home from a record shop in Oslo in the autumn of 1975, and I have loved it for fifty years, and still it took me an embarrassing number of those years to notice what the cigar is doing in the song. It is not a celebration. It is a substitute for one.

The cigar as costume

To understand why Waters reached for a cigar and not, say, a bottle of champagne, you have to remember what the cigar had become by the mid-seventies. It lived in boardrooms. It came out of desk drawers at contract signings, handed across the table by men celebrating deals made on other people’s work. This was not only a London disease. My own father kept a box of them in his office near the harbour in Oslo for exactly this purpose, untouched for months at a time, dry as kindling, and nobody ever complained, because nobody receiving one of those cigars was planning to enjoy it. The point was the handing over. The cigar had turned into a gesture, the way a firm handshake is a gesture, and a gesture can be performed by anyone, sincere or not.

Mostly not, the album argues. The sleeve says it without a word of lyrics: two businessmen shaking hands on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, one of them on fire. Getting burned was industry slang for what happened to artists who signed the wrong deal^[2]. The man in flames was a stuntman named Ronnie Rondell Jr., and the famous photograph took fifteen takes; on the last one the wind shifted and took his moustache off. I mention this partly because it’s a good story and partly because I enjoy the fact that even Hipgnosis’s portrait of insincerity required a patient professional doing careful, dangerous work to get right.

So the executive’s cigar is a costume. Lit fast, waved around, stubbed out half-smoked when the meeting ends. Nobody asks where it came from or how it was kept. It could be a fountain pen for all the difference it makes.

Waters got that completely right, and the image stuck so hard it became the stereotype. Ask someone with no interest in cigars to picture one and the chances are good they picture his man: the grinning suit wreathed in blue smoke, promising you the world.

Roy Harper, or the part you can’t fake

The recording of the song has its own little parable in it, and I have never been able to resist it.

Waters couldn’t get the vocal. He tried it alone and he tried it as a duet with Gilmour, and neither take worked. Gilmour didn’t want the lead at all; he didn’t share Waters’ contempt for the business and had no appetite for singing it^[1]. Waters, to his credit, was honest about his own voice around that time, admitting he found it hard to pitch and did not much like the sound of it. So there they sat, the two of them, stuck on a song about a man who fakes everything, defeated by the one thing in a recording studio that cannot be faked.

The solution was down the corridor. Roy Harper was at Abbey Road that summer making his own record, and he came in and sang the executive better than the men who’d actually met him. Sly, oily, fully inhabited. Gilmour thought it was the perfect version. Waters came to regret it and said so for decades, wishing it had come out more vulnerable and less of a parody^[3]. They never did agree.

And then the business supplied its own ending. Harper has said his agreed fee was tickets for life to Lord’s, the cricket ground. (Cricket, of all things. I am a football man, like most Norwegians of my generation, and I would have asked for a season ticket at Old Trafford and understood what I was watching. Cricket I have tried. Ten minutes is my record.) What he got instead, eventually, was a few hundred quid, and for the first decade or so the pressings did not even credit him^[4]. The man who sang the definitive portrait of the music industry received the definitive music-industry treatment. You could not write it. Well. Waters more or less had.

What the prop was imitating

But a costume only works if it looks like real clothes. The executive reaches for a cigar because the cigar already meant something before he picked it up, and what it meant is more or less the opposite of him.

His cigar takes five minutes. A real one takes an hour, sometimes two, and there is no pausing it, which is precisely what I value about it. You cannot multitask a robusto. It keeps you in the chair, and the conversation has to go where conversations go when nobody can leave.

His cigar goes to strangers. The ones I remember went to names. My father-in-law on the night my daughter was born. An old friend on his terrace by the fjord, the evening he finally signed away the company he had built, a contract signing that for once deserved the ritual. The cigar did not make those moments and could not have. It marked them. It needs the moment to already be true, which is exactly what the man in the song does not understand, or understands perfectly and is counting on you not to.

And his cigar has no past. It comes out of a drawer like my father’s did, provenance unknown, bone dry. A real one has been kept. Somebody chose it months or years ago, rested it at a steady 65% humidity, picked it up and put it back on evenings when its time had not come yet. None of that can be improvised on the day, and all of it shows. The first half-inch of a cigar will tell you how it lived, plainly, where a handshake apparently tells you nothing at all.

That last difference is the one I would put on the company crest, if anyone asked me, which they have not. You can fake warmth. The song is five minutes of proof. What you cannot fake is a year at stable humidity. The humidor does its work in the dark, unwatched, for months on end, which makes it about as far from the man in the song as an object can get. My colleagues here have firm opinions on watching that work properly and on what the right humidity actually is, and they are right, but the instruments stand in service of an old idea: the things worth sharing are the things somebody took care of first.

A pairing, while we’re here

The album runs forty-four minutes^[2], which in my hands is a robusto, or a small toro if you take your time. Take your time. Something medium-bodied and quiet; “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is no place for a pepper bomb. Light it as the first chord fades in, and do not rush the long instrumental opening. The band certainly did not, they spent half of 1975 at Abbey Road on it.

The executive turns up about twenty-one minutes in, right around your midpoint. When he leans through the speakers with his offer, have a look at the thing burning evenly in your hand, kept by someone who knew what they were doing, and enjoy the difference between his cigar and yours.

He never asks how it was stored, you will notice. Of course he doesn’t. He does not even know which one is Pink.

— Kjell