Former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters has been criticised for pasting an advertisement over the Elliott Smith memorial wall in LA.
The ad was part of a "street" campaign for Waters' upcoming The Wall Live tour, in which he will play the classic Pink Floyd album in its entirety. Waters reported hired street artists to paste a anti-war quote from President Eisenhower around New York and LA. The quote reads as follows:
"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."
However, Elliott Smith fans were outraged to see that the quote was pasted over a memorial wall for the late singer songwriter in LA. The wall appeared on the cover of Smith's 2000 album 'Figure 8' (above) and was deemed a memorial following his tragic suicide in 2003. The wall had suffered extensively from graffiti already, but now it looks like this:
Roger Waters apologised for the "accident" via the Los Angeles Times.
"It was absolutely an accident. I didn't want to disrespect Elliott Smith's fans, and I've instructed (the 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."
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