5:06AM (Every Strangers Eyes)

The Zoo Crew has got "5:06AM (Every Strangers Eyes)" turning on the platter right now, Roger Waters from the 1984 album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this one sits in a strange little pocket of rock history. It is the soft landing after a long, uneasy dream. Waters built the whole record as a fitful night in real time, running from 4:30 in the morning to a little past 5:11, and this track is the scene stamped 5:06. The dreamer, a man named Reg who looks an awful lot like Waters himself, has been out on the road in his head, weighing a marriage against the pull of a hitchhiker, a truck stop, and the old call of the wild. By the time this song arrives he is in a diner, and a waitress with a heart of gold gives him back a scrap of faith. He looks around the room and sings that he recognises himself in every stranger's eyes. Then he wakes.

Waters has been plain about what the record was for. He called it the only album he ever made that was only about sex, the subconscious weighing the pros and cons of living with one woman inside a family against the itch to run. The wife in the dream is American, same as his own wife at the time, and the road keeps bending toward rural America before it dumps him back in suburbia, lonely and a little clearer. Kurt Loder, writing in Rolling Stone when the record was new, heard the redemption in that diner scene and said the man finds a new love and even a cause for hope, coming around, in the best hippie tradition, to recognising himself in every stranger's eyes. That line is the whole chorus of the thing, and it is why the song still lands with the long-haired end of the room.

The path to this record runs straight through Pink Floyd's fork in the road. Back in 1978 Waters played demos of two ideas to the band. One became The Wall. The other became The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. The band took The Wall. Their manager, Steve O'Rourke, thought the hitchhiking dream was the better piece. Waters kept it in his pocket, refined it in the early eighties, and cut it between February and December of 1983 with Michael Kamen co-producing and playing piano. Eric Clapton took the lead guitar and a bit of synth, Andy Newmark sat in on drums, and David Sanborn brought the saxophone. Clapton's lines on this particular song are the ones people still point to, sliding in with Kamen's piano after Waters starts it as a plain acoustic ballad. It was pulled as the second single on 11 June 1984, backed with "4:56AM (For the First Time Today, Part 1)," on Harvest in Britain and Columbia in the States.

The sleeve caused nearly as much talk as the music. Gerald Scarfe drew it, and the photograph in the middle was a rear view of the model Linzi Drew, unclothed. Some folks called it sexist, some went further, and poster ads got torn down. Waters later said they had to slap a black sticker over the woman's backside, which he thought was pathetic, given that the record was about sexual fantasy and he had put a beautiful woman on the cover on purpose. In some territories the picture was censored outright. The album itself crept to a modest chart place and took until 1995 to go gold in America, which tells you how sideways the solo bow landed next to the Floyd machinery. On the road in 1984 and 1985 he took the dream out with Clapton for a stretch, then without him, folding in older Floyd songs for the rooms that wanted them. Lyrics from the following track, "5:11AM (The Moment of Clarity)," even wandered into The Wall film, a little ghost of the record that lost the band vote.

George Roger Waters came up in Great Bookham, Surrey, in September 1943, and the story starts with an absence. His father, Eric Fletcher Waters, a schoolteacher and a second lieutenant, was killed at Anzio in February 1944, when Roger was only a few months old. His mother, Mary, raised him and his older brother, and the family settled in Cambridge. He was no prize at the County High School for Boys, though he did fall in with a classmate named Roger Keith Barrett, the kid everybody would come to call Syd. A Spanish guitar showed up around age fourteen and did not take right away. He tried mechanical engineering, walked away from it, and lit out on a hitchhiking run through Europe and into the Middle East. That trip sits under this album like a foundation stone. When he came back he enrolled at Regent Street Polytechnic in London to study architecture, and that is where the band actually formed.

At the polytechnic he met drummer Nick Mason and, soon enough, keyboard player Richard Wright. They lost interest in the drafting tables, moved into a flat owned by a part-time tutor named Mike Leonard at Stanhope Gardens, and started playing in a revolving student outfit. The names came and went: Sigma 6, the Meggadeaths, the Abdabs, the Screaming Abdabs, Leonard's Lodgers, Spectrum Five, the Tea Set. Waters began on rhythm guitar. Rehearsals happened in a tearoom in the basement. When Barrett came down from Cambridge and took the singer and guitar chair, Waters moved to bass, the instrument he never really left. Another band already called the Tea Set was booked on the same bill one night, so Barrett reached for the names of two Carolina bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and the Pink Floyd Sound was born. By early 1966 it was simply Pink Floyd. Waters's first writing credit landed on the 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a short sharp thing called "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk." After Barrett came apart and David Gilmour stepped in, Waters spent the next decade pulling the band from Syd's whimsy toward his own political and philosophical concerns, the long road that runs through The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall, and then out the door into this hitchhiking dream.

If you want the man's own porch, the official site is rogerwaters.com, and the works list there still carries The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking right alongside the Floyd records. He keeps a verified page on Facebook, posts as rogerwaters on Instagram, and holds the handle on X. For the deep shelves, the fan archive at Neptune Pink Floyd walks the 1984 album scene by scene, including the truck-stop chapter that belongs to this song. A long-running Roger Waters group on Facebook has been gathering listeners since 2010, the sort of room where the deep cuts still get argued over. That is the company this record keeps. A dream, a diner, a waitress, and a man who finally sees his own face in the strangers around him. Let it play.