Shortly before Christmas 2016, Roger Waters visited his firstborn son, Harry, at his Santa Monica, California, home to deliver some rather bad news. Harry had spent the past 14 years playing keyboard and organ in his dad’s band, which included three extensive world tours, but Roger was making changes for his upcoming Us + Them tour. “I was fired,” Harry tells Rolling Stone. “It was pretty miserable.”

Harry claims he doesn’t know why his own father let him go. “I think he just wanted a change of blood, something new, something fresh,” Waters says. “I’m not sure of his exact reasoning, but everyone except two people [keyboardist Jon Carin and guitarist Dave Kilminster] got fired. But the other guys that got the sack weren’t his son, so it was doubly hurtful for me.”

It would be quite understandable if Harry Waters never wanted to perform his father’s music again after this hurt, but that wasn’t his attitude. He recently wrapped up a 57-date tour with Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade where he played Pink Floyd‘s Animals in its entirety every night with Claypool and Sean Lennon. And shortly before our interview, he agreed to play three shows with Brit Floyd, the world’s premier Pink Floyd cover band, alongside ex-Floyd background singer Durga McBroom and former Floyd saxophonist Scott Page.

“Their manager emailed me just a few days ago and asked if I wanted to sit in on some gigs,” Waters says. “I’ve never met any of them, but I’ll just turn up and play. I’ve been playing this music for 30 years or so. I think we’ll be OK without rehearsal. I think we all know the material pretty well.”

Many of Waters’ earliest memories revolve around Pink Floyd. When he was just two years old, his father brought him into the studio while they were recording The Wall to read the line “look mummy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky,” which kicks off “Goodbye Blue Sky.” “I certainly remember sitting there with a microphone and being asked to say some things,” he says. “Whenever I hear it, I go, ‘Oh God, that’s me.’ It’s quite weird.”

He grew up in southwest London just as the New Romantic scene was taking off, but was far more interested in musical acts from an earlier generation, including the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, the Allman Brothers Band, and Dr. John. “I just didn’t like the way music sounded in the Eighties,” Waters says. “It just sounds weird to me with that reverb on the snare drums.”

Being the son of a rock legend, he had the chance to sing “Barbara Ann” onstage with the Beach Boys when he was nine, see Bruce Springsteen play Wembley Stadium on the Born in the U.S.A. tour, and even share a tender moment backstage with Little Richard at Wembley Arena. “I had broken my arm, and it was in a cast,” Waters says. “He touched my cast and said, ‘I’m so sorry. God loves you.’ I’m an atheist, but it was still a very moving moment to have my childhood hero do that.”

He started taking piano lessons when he was eight, and grew quite proficient once he enrolled at a boarding school in Hampshire, England, a few years later. “The teacher there introduced me to Ragtime and Dr. John, and Chick Corea,” he says. “That’s when I got really, really into it.”

But he never seriously considered a career in music until he finished up his schooling, found work at a restaurant and an early internet service provider, and hated every second of it. “It was just shit,” he says. “I realized that doing anything that wasn’t music was just a waste of my time. I was miserable and just wanted to be in a band and making music.”

The first one that hired him was Boot-Led-Zeppelin, a popular Led Zeppelin tribute band. “I played all the piano and keyboards, and then second guitar,” he says. After four years in Boot-Led-Zeppelin, he switched gears and took a job playing keyboards in a Grateful Dead tribute band despite knowing nothing of their work outside of “Touch of Grey.” “They gave me a tape of the music, and I just loved it,” he says. “I love the Grateful Dead now.”

Around the turn of the millennium, he joined the indie-rock band Hubble Deep Field. He was happy to finally have the chance to play original material, but unhappy to find that it’s hard to draw a crowd when you don’t have “Stairway to Heaven” or “Friend of the Devil” in your repertoire. “We released a few singles, but it never really went,” he says.

Around this same time, his father was having a very different experience on the road. Roger Waters struggled to sell tickets in the Eighties when his former bandmates were packing stadiums as Pink Floyd, but David Gilmour quietly dissolved the band following the 1994 Division Bell tour. Waters was suddenly the only active member of the band, and he was filling large arenas worldwide. He offered Harry a spot in the band as a keyboardist in 1999 for the first leg of the In the Flesh tour, but he declined since he was still committed to Hubble Deep Field. When he offered up the same spot on the 2002 tour, Harry agreed.

His first show took place Feb. 27, 2002, in Cape Town, South Africa. “I was so nervous that night,” says Waters, adding that the job forced him to confront both the good and the bad of being the son of a mega-famous rock star. “The upside is that it gave me a foothold in the music business, and it exposed me to that lifestyle. I loved going on his tours and meeting other interesting musicians. The downside is that people are going to judge you that much harsher since you’re the ‘son of.’ You have to work that much harder to make a mark, almost prove yourself doubly, to stay in the door.”