GUN CONTROL

GUN CONTROL

By Lowell Yaeger

“…from my cold dead hands.”

                                                - Charlton Heston

Sandra Hackett was a card-carrying member of the one percent, overburdened with what jaded, poorer people would call White People Problems. There was this huge house to keep clean, two SUVs to keep maintained, appointments to keep (hair/nails/yoga/shrink), and the 3-year-old apple of her eye, Stefan, who was keen on stirring up trouble. If, on the night of September 19, 20--, you had told her she only had about an hour left to worry about all her problems, her terror-to-relief ratio would probably run somewhere along the lines of 60:40.

                She was trying to make dinner (it was beef stroganoff night, except for Stefan, who seemed to subsist wholly on juice boxes and Goldfish crackers) when her husband, David, entered the house. It was that pre-twilight hour when everything outside glows slightly, and shadows become long and foreboding. It was also the usual time for David to come home from his job at the hospital, so Sandra didn’t think anything of it when he let himself in and proceeded directly to the basement.

                Outside, someone set off a string of firecrackers. The kids in this neighborhood love to make noise, Sandra had found. The small detonations were followed by a bloodthirsty cry of unmistakable savagery. She assumed it was kids (Christ, Stefan’s going to be a hellion just like the rest of them, I just know it) and continued to stir the ground beef in its pan.

                She heard David farting around underneath her, in his “rumpus room,” as she liked to call it, and felt a twinge of anger. Shouldn’t she get a kiss, or at least a wave or a perfunctory “Home, hon,” before he ran downstairs to his den? This had better be imp—

                David came back up the steps and all of her thoughts stopped; her brainwaves hit a baseline of terror and confusion that made all rational thought impossible. Maybe it was the gun in David’s hand, the Smith & Wesson Model 27 his father had given him years ago when they bought the house. Maybe it was the look on David’s face, a rictus of exertion that made it seem as if he were having a heart attack or passing an extremely large bowel movement, or maybe both. Maybe it was the eyes buried in his bright red face, eyes that were scared and sad and, worst of all, a little resigned.

                Maybe it was many of those things, or all of those things, but probably not. The thing that really caused her to shut down was the fact that David was aiming the gun at her. This close, the barrel looked enormous.

                She started to say his name, but all that came out was a little gasp. It wasn’t enough. David wasn’t a great shot, didn’t go to the gun range, didn’t think of the gun’s very existence 99% of the time, but he was at point blank distance, and that meant when he fired the pistol, beef stroganoff became brain stroganoff. Her body slumped to the floor, the final look on her ravaged face one of utter perplexity.

                More detonations sounded from outside. David didn’t notice. He loaded another bullet into the chamber and went looking for his son.

                What happened across town at the 119^th Precinct headquarters in Dalton, Connecticut (the sign at the expressway exit cheerfully reminded commuters that if they lived here, they’d be home by now) would have summoned the press in droves, had the press not been experiencing their own unique problems on the night of September 19. To put it succinctly, everyone on duty went ape shit. That’s not the technical term for it, but by the time September 20 rolled around a few hours later, those who applied technical terms to things were neck-deep in a rising tide of inexplicable violence.

                Officer Matt McDaniel was experimenting with the department’s perpetually-on-the-fritz Keurig machine when two other officers bolted past him. One of them struck him a good one in the upper arm with his elbow, but didn’t slow; McDaniel was not his target. At least, not yet.

                The two officers (McDaniel couldn’t identify one of them right away, but the other was Gus Chalmers, a 17-year veteran who didn’t even go on patrol with his ticket book anymore, he was so laid back) rounded the hallway corner, which meant they were only going one place: the weapons locker. McDaniel forgot all about the Keurig and ran off in the other direction, towards dispatch. Something was up.

                Something was up, all right. Everyone in dispatch was on the phone. The switchboard glowed like a nuclear power plant approaching meltdown, and the volume of conversation was so high that he couldn’t make out any one voice. A young girl of about 22, a new hire, looked at him and shrugged as she continued listening to her headset.

                There was a huge explosion somewhere behind him; it sounded like a thunderclap confined to a janitor’s closet. McDaniel had been on the force six years now, and although Dalton wasn’t a hotbed of violence, he had heard enough gunshots to recognize the sound of a double-barreled shotgun going off. Working on reflex, he dropped to his knees, one hand pulling his service revolver from its holster on his thigh.

                He turned. Dispatch was located at the end of a short hallway; at its other end was a T-junction which led to either the armory (left) or the rest of the complex (right). There was a huge amount of blood on the floor at the T-junction, and someone just out of sight around the corner. This person was lying down on the job (taking a siesta was the insane thought that went through McDaniel’s rapidly working brain), only his department issue shoes visible. The shoes belonged to either Gus or the other, unrecognized officer, but McDaniel never found out, because just then an arm appeared above the shoes, tossing an active tear gas canister down the corridor toward dispatch. It rolled right past McDaniel’s horrified blue eyes and into the dispatch area. It was the last thing he saw, because the unrecognized officer (his name, for the record, was Randall Lopez, and he usually worked a different shift) took aim with the 28 gauge Winchester Model 37 he held in both hands and blew a tremendous hole through McDaniel’s neck.

                Inside dispatch, the operators were crawling around on the ground, hacking and coughing and throwing up. They made easy targets. Lopez walked up and down the rows of cubicles, calmly executing every last one of them. The expression on his face was one of sweet relief. When Vera Adams, a member of the accounting department, walked into this scene of carnage carrying a Kel-Tec P-11 semi-automatic pistol she had liberated from the weapons locker, she aimed it at Officer Lopez’s stomach.

                Lopez actually had the temerity to hold up one hand and say “wait,” but Ms. Adams was under the same impulse that had caused the armed officer to slaughter twelve innocent people; he might as well have been speaking Swahili. She shot him three times, his body dancing as the slugs pounded into him. His narcotic, vaguely fugue-like smile transformed into a rictus of mortal agony as the life ebbed out of him.

Vera, a 72-year-old grandmother who attended church every Sunday, lowered the gun to her side and left the room in search of more things to kill.

Colonel Waldo Reynolds had an itch he couldn’t scratch. He had woken up with it and it had wormed its way through his brain while he went through his daily duties at Paula Air Force Base.

Reynolds was a clinical Air Force psychiatrist, which meant he spent most of his time behind a desk, filling out paperwork, making phone calls, and, occasionally, listening to one of his “birds” as they sat across from him and assailed him with their miseries. The colonel wasn’t a math man – he had nearly flunked statistics in college – nor was he a betting man, couldn’t see the value in it. But he’d probably bet half, if not all, of his take home pay on the fact that ninety five percent of his patients didn’t have anything legitimately wrong with them. They just liked to complain.

Of the five percent or so who were truly afflicted with something you could find in the DSM-V, most were kept in line with a regimen of antidepressants and semi-regular talking therapy. (The bottom line, the one percent, usually so unstable Waldo had no idea how they got into the service in the first place, were given honorable discharges and told to go home.) One of those patients, a young man named Alex Tworkowski, was very much on his mind today. He didn’t know why.

Tworkowski was stuck with a raging, textbook case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Everything had to be in perfect alignment around him at all times, or he got unbearably anxious. He would seize on thoughts, sometimes normal ones, sometimes ones that made no sense, and think about them “until my brain is just about exploding.” Corners, such as the place where the walls met the floor, and their cleanliness, tended to dominate his thinking. He told Colonel Reynolds he felt like he had an itch between his shoulder blades no backscratcher could satisfy. The itch, he said, was buried somewhere in his mind.

On September 19, 20--, Reynolds had discovered he could relate.

Reynolds was a pragmatist; he was also a psychiatrist. He saw Tworkowski’s condition as a medical problem, the result of an improper balance of brain chemistry. He let Tworkowski drone on and on about his boyhood in Iowa, working on the farm, the car accident that took his father, blah, blah, none of it adding up as precipitants to his disorder. God had given his brains a stir on the assembly line, that was all. After about seven months of therapy and different medicine combinations, a 200 mg dosage of Zoloft every night was finally making things more bearable.

Right now, sitting at his desk in the mid-afternoon, nineteen days after September had ushered fall into this section of the country, Reynolds could not stop thinking about Tworkowski. Or guns. Mostly guns. Tworkowski was kind of a side thing at this point, actually. Once Reynolds found he could identify with the nervous young pilot who always, always, put on his pants left leg first, thoughts of Tworkowski became rather academic.

Big guns, little guns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns. He could almost feel them all around him, little blobs of psychic heat. Everyone on the base carried some kind of firearm, and as he listened to people walk by in the corridor outside his office, he wondered what kind of firearm they were carrying. A semiautomatic? A revolver? A bazooka?

Thinking about it made the itch of it a little better and a little worse. When he was a boy, Reynolds had developed a severe case of eczema on the backs of both knees, and now he remembered how those spots had itched, and how scratching them had both relieved and aggravated the itch. The result was a vicious cycle of stimulation-satisfaction that left him with bloody fingernails.

These ever-revolving gun thoughts were kind of like the eczema. As the afternoon drew on and he neglected his duties, he grew increasingly likely to cut himself his own Zoloft prescription and walk over to the base pharmacy. But something told him that wouldn’t cut the mustard. It would be like putting ointment on the itch, as he had done with the eczema as a child. It might do the trick, but it wasn’t as satisfying as digging in and scratching.

He did not know when he removed his Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol from its shoulder holster, couldn’t recall putting it on his desk, had no memory of loading it. He was staring at it lovingly for over an hour when, about half a minute before all hell broke loose, the door to his office opened. It was Tworkowski. He was carrying a rifle, but Colonel Reynolds didn’t have time to identify what kind. His last thought, before he was riddled with bullets, was that Tworkowski didn’t have an appointment today.

Bruce Ecklund was a certified Federal Air Marshal, listed with both the Transportation Security Administration and the United States Department of Homeland Security. He had spent the first twenty years of his working life as a detective for the New York Police Department. When he retired, he couldn’t make ends meet anymore with just his pension (what pension, ha ha), so he took this job, and now lived much of his life in a small space high above the planet, protecting the sheep from wolves in turbans. He had been on the job seven years, and had yet to find a situation problematic enough that it required him to draw his sidearm.

On September 19, he was stationed on Delta Flight 37 from LAX in Los Angeles to Logan in Boston. Without knowing why, without even fully being aware that he was doing so, he had walked into Walmart about an hour and a half before the plane was scheduled to take off and bought several boxes of .357 SIG pistol cartridges for his sanctioned firearm, a SIG Sauer P229. He had stashed them in his carry-on bag, along with a t-shirt that said “Property of the Green Bay Packers” and a battered Dean Koontz paperback.

Now he was thousands of feet in the air, a carpet of clouds below the fuselage’s windows, probably above Colorado or who cares? Who cares? He had been thinking about what he was going to do all day, the way a kleptomaniac thinks lovingly of the things he will steal, the way a chronic masturbator floors it home from work to station himself in front of the computer. It should have bothered him; it should have terrified him. But it didn’t. The lines in his mind between action and consequence were down, perhaps permanently.

He thought of them as sheep, and he the shepherd. Usually he meant that in the nicest way. These people, whose continued existence was fundamental to something or someone, were his charge, his flock. They had to be protected from the wolves. The wolves came in many forms. They came with guns, they came with box cutters, they came trying to blow up bombs contained in their shoes. Sometimes they wanted the plane; sometimes they wanted the passengers. They were out there, and if 9/11 had taught Ecklund anything, it had taught him that the price of freedom was eternal vigilance.

Not today.

Today, he was the wolf.

Once the drink-and-pretzel service was over and the central aisle of the Boeing 747 was empty, Ecklund removed his SIG Sauer P229 from its shoulder holster and placed it on the tray table in front of him. He opened up his carry-on satchel and removed the boxes of ammo, placing them neatly next to the gun.

He turned to the man next to him, a business-type in a three-piece suit who was staring at him silently. The look on Mr. Three-Piece’s face was the kind of reaction saved for people who suddenly sprouted horns. Or, say, suddenly took out a gun on an airplane.

“Relax,” Ecklund said. “I’m an air marshal.” Then he picked up the gun, which he had loaded in a filthy bathroom at LAX, and shot Mr. Three-Piece once in the ear. Blood, bone, and brains splattered all over both Ecklund and the pretty young thing sitting across the aisle. She began to scream, but not for long, because Ecklund shot her next.

He got up, stepped neatly over the dead businessman, and entered the aisle. The sheep were craning their necks around the backs of the seats to get a better look. Ecklund, who frankly didn’t know shit from Shinola as far as sheep behavior was concerned, wondered if they just sat there while a wolf ate one of their own, or if they went crazy and bolted for the hills.

In this case, in his case, it was fifty-fifty. He killed another seven people in the next six seconds, simply aiming and firing, until the gun jammed and someone punched him in the face, hard enough to send splinters of his nose into his brain. The gun fell from his nerveless fingers and he collapsed onto the cheap carpeting of the plane’s center aisle.

The person who had hit him, Stuart LeCroix from Brookline, had just finished his vacation in Los Angeles and enjoyed it just fine. He looked down at the lethal handgun. He had not been thinking thoughts of murder and guns all day, had been thinking about getting back to work at the insurance company and whether or not the blonde from the hotel bar had given him her real phone number. Nevertheless, he reached down, feeling perfectly right with the world, picked up the gun, and continued the slaughter. It was fast, it was unexpected, and when it was over, LeCroix – slathered from forehead to sneakers in other people’s gore – blew out the lock on the door between him and the cockpit. The lock should’ve held, but hey, coulda woulda shoulda. LeCroix could kill the pilots; would he? Should he?

The plane crashed into a mountain in Colorado. A lot of planes crashed on September 19.

Tommy Huntington used to be a very successful entertainment lawyer, until 9/11. The events of that day, and the wars to follow, convinced him the world was no longer a safe place. Every safe place had to have rules, and during the W administration all rules had been thrown out the window. The longer things went on and the crazier shit got, the more convinced Tommy became that the only rule that counted was “he who has the high ground rules.”

To that end, he quit his job at the firm of Parkman & Parkman, much to the protest of both Parkmans (wizened and miserly Jews, the two of them), liquidated his holdings, and bought a cabin deep in the woods of central Maine. He assumed no one could touch him there. They could blow off all the nukes in the world; nobody was going to waste an expensive warhead on the forest wasteland of central Maine. His money bought him a very nice, large, isolated cabin, and some nice, large, highly illegal weapons. Just in case.

On September 19, Tommy was filled with regret. It wasn’t exactly buyer’s remorse over the cabin; he felt quite confident about that decision. It was just that something felt… missing.

Tommy had no family to speak of, really. He had a brother somewhere. He had never married, never spawned another Huntington even accidentally. The solitude of living alone in the cabin was not a problem for him. In fact, on most days it exhilarated him. He could do whatever he wanted, had no one to answer to, and no one to witness it.

So he wandered about his cabin, making himself a sandwich and then throwing it away, watching television (“the lie detector test says you are the father!”), wondering what was missing. Twice he found himself in the basement, staring at his arsenal of firepower, no idea how he got there.

The second time he left the basement, he brought his favorite firearm, an enormous Kalashnikov Series AK-47, up with him. He did not recall loading it. He put it down in the living room, next to the recliner, and continued watching television. Something was missing, and he probed his mind for it like a tongue feeling out a socket where a tooth had recently been.

Around five o’clock, as the setting sun was glowing in the trees of the forest that surround Chez Huntington, he realized what was missing: other people. He had no one to kill. And he wanted to kill. The need was very bad. He had quit smoking cigarettes four years ago, and he had thought the need for a smoke would drive him crazy for the first two weeks, but gradually, he had gotten used to it. This need was sharper than that, a thousand times sharper. His need could cut atoms.

But there was no one else around, and Bangor was so far away. So he shot himself instead.

Charlie Hetfield, star of such films as Guns of New Mexico and The Last Stand of Hood Creek and two-term president of the National Rifle Association, also had a fortress, only his was located on Rodeo Drive in the sunny city of Los Angeles. The walls around his estate were over ten feet tall and three feet thick. The craftsmen who had forged the front gate, the only means of entrance to Charlie’s home, had assured its buyer that it could withstand the impact of a tractor trailer going upwards of forty miles per hour. Three to six guards roamed the property with pit bulls and taser guns at any one time. The house within was wired with the finest state-of-the-art security systems, and one of the bedrooms on the second floor had been modified to accommodate several monitors, which were wired to the hundreds of cameras scattered throughout the estate; this gave Charlie a look at his domain at any time, from almost any angle.

                In addition to his wealth, his stature in the Hollywood community, and his enormous ego, Charlie Hetfield also had the distinction of being one of the few individuals on September 19 who didn’t feel a compelling need to commit homicide with a firearm. Even without this compulsion, Charlie knew some serious shit was going down. CNN showed image after image of rioting and mass destruction before going off the air altogether; the last thing Charlie saw on that channel was Anderson Cooper aiming a prissy little pistol at Erin Burnett.

                Shortly after he turned off the enormous curved flat-screen television in his palatial living room, he radioed security to find out what was going on. Nobody responded. Rather than go outside to investigate personally, he went to the monitor room and began playing with the computer that controlled the cameras.

                First he scanned the grounds of his estate, which were mostly empty. The only exception was the southeast corner, where Charlie found both of the on-duty security guards. One of them was dead, sprawled against the inside surface of the perimeter wall. There was a lot of blood behind his slumped head, splashed across the wall like a Pollack painting. The other guard was crawling around on his belly. There was a growing red stain on his back, and a small, cratered entry hole near the base of his spine. (Charlie, a gun aficionado if ever there was one, knew the exit wound has probably disemboweled the man, and he was somewhat surprised the guard was still alive.) One of the estate’s pit bulls was gnawing on the dead man’s ankle and occasionally eyeing the crippled security guard. He did not do so surreptitiously; he was merely sizing up dessert.

                He switched the view to the gate that faced Rodeo Drive. It was chaos outside. What seemed like thousands of people, all of them bearing some kind of firearm, were swarming like angry bees on the street in front of the gate. At first, it looked like they were planning some sort of massive siege on Charlie’s home, but he looked closer and got the reality of it: These people were simply shooting each other. Those with dexterity, luck, and a lot of ammunition seemed to be winning the fight, but locked into this murder-dance, it was clearly going to be a game of Last Man Standing. As he watched, someone managed to scale the perimeter wall and, precariously balanced on the top, opened fire on the crowd below. He was riddled with bullets within seconds, and plunged into the grass near the dead security guard. Charlie switched back to the camera in the southeast corner. The crippled security guard was now dead. The gunman who had climbed the wall was also dead. The pit bull was smiling, insomuch as a dog can smile, his chops dripping with viscera.

                That was it. Charlie had seen enough. He went into the basement and locked himself in his bomb shelter cum panic room, determined to remain there until the world regained its sanity. Like his estate, the panic room was state-of-the-art, with a landline phone, Internet-ready computer, and large supplies of non-perishable food. Unlike his estate, a lot of corners were cut when it was built, and the new conditions outside had made matters worse. The food was nearly inedible, having gone over a long time ago. The sink in the corner failed to produce water within forty-eight hours. The phone was useless. And on the fifth day, when he had mustered up enough courage to leave his sanctuary, he discovered that the lock had gotten damaged upon his entry, and he was sealed up in his panic room better than a pharaoh in his sarcophagi.

                This proved too much for Charlie. The panic room had a small weapons locker with a variety of pistols and rifles. Charlie chose a semiautomatic handgun and blew his brains out. At absolutely no point during this process – from Anderson Cooper going mental to his interment in the bomb shelter – did he consider his part in the situation, as an NRA president, as a 2^nd Amendment cheerleader, as a passionate lover of long-range weapons and things that go boom. Rigor mortis set in a few hours after his suicide, and the hand which still held the gun tightened. If you wanted to disarm Charlie, you’d have to pry the weapon from his cold, dead hand.

                Night fell. Mankind’s hold on earthly dominance was slipping in a tidal wave of insanity, and it remained to be seen who would be left to pick up the pieces. If the survivors had access to all the information they needed, they might have been shocked to hear that there were 718 school shootings on the day of September 19. The majority occurred toward the end of the day, when most of the students had gone home and the only ones left were practicing some kind of extramural sport or activity. Consequently, most of the victims in these shootings were custodians and teachers. As for the shooters, most of them were either custodians or teachers.

It was the guns. As September 19 became September 20, every firearm in the world had somehow gone from a passive device of destruction to an active weapon demanding prolonged use. It happened everywhere. America. Britain. Russia. In Mexico, the cartels ripped each other to pieces. Israel forgot all about the Holocaust that had been visited on their people decades earlier, and enacted one of their own, mowing down Palestinians and bringing a violent end to the “Middle Eastern crisis” overnight. Across the globe, old scores were settled, gunshots deafened the populace, and madness rooted itself firmly in the minds of approximately seven billion people. Social services shut down. The hospitals were as dangerous as the streets. The moon that rose over the East Coast, several hours after the party had started, was full and red and it gazed down balefully at the global massacre that was playing itself out, one bullet at a time.

Smith & Wesson. Glock. Kalashnikov. Uzi. ArmaLite. Thompson. Beretta. Browning. Bushmaster. Remington. Pistols. Revolvers. Rifles. Shotguns. Submachine guns. You can kill anyone with anything, but as midnight drew near, it was the guns that sang the loudest song.

Sunrise, September 20.

The little boy had been hiding behind the sofa all night, trembling, occasionally crying. Although he was potty-trained, he soiled himself twice. He was in a trauma of confusion and psychic pain. His father had shot his mother, and then something had happened to his father: He had put a hand on his chest and simply fell to the ground, which meant nothing to the boy, but was sign language for a heart attack to anyone else.

All night, the sounds. He could hear people running in the street, and the pop! pop! of gunfire. At one point, the house had shuddered as a car plowed into one of its corners, and the boy had screamed until his head felt fit to pop. Mommy had told him there were no monsters in the dark, but she had been wrong, hadn’t she?

He cried himself tearless around five in the morning. As the sun began to rise over a world that looked significantly different than it had twenty four hours ago, he began to peek out from behind the sofa at his father’s corpse. He did not recognize the gun as a Smith & Wesson Model 27, but he knew what it was nevertheless.

By noon, he knew what he had to do. Smith & Wesson in hand, Stefan Hackett, barely out of diapers, opened the front door of the house and walked out into the street, weapon raised, to greet this terrible new world.

Under Construction

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The Massed Gadgets Of Hercules

This week is Pink Floyd Week. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, the band rereleased its entire back catalogue on Tuesday in neat little remastered digipacks, along with a boxed set exhausting every last angle of Floyd’s masterpiece, The Dark Side Of The Moon (more on this later). To add to the fun, the band members are appearing throughout the week on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (or whatever it’s called) along with more modern groups like Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. Personally, I think all of this michigas is prelude to a reunion announcement, but I’ve been disappointed before.

So I thought it high time I did a feature here on Chin Slinky about Pink Floyd, my favorite band and one of the first groups to turn me on to this thing called “music.” When I was a teenager, blissfully ignorant of everything short of Top 40 radio, my dad heard Floyd’s second live album, Delicate Sound Of Thunder, at work, and brought home just about everything they ever recorded. The rest of my puberty was spent with Floyd in the background, so it’s little wonder that they grew on me. (Funny story: One day my dad left The Final Cut on after leaving me, my sister, and a friend behind at the house. My friend decided to fuck with the switch that activates the heating gas in the house – something I had been advised by my parents never to do – until I told him to stop. A few moments later, the explosion that ends “Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert” resounded through the house in stereo. I grabbed my little sister under one arm and dove out the front door with my friend, convinced the house had just imploded. Well, I find it funny.)

Anyway. I’m going to provide a bit of a history lesson here, and along the way, I’ll touch on the albums that make up the boxed set Discovery, released this week, that make up the bulk of the Floyd catalogue. The only omissions are Relics, a largely redundant rarities collection, and a couple of live releases like PULSE and the aforementioned Thunder.

Pink Floyd formed as “The Pink Floyd Sound” in 1964, with Roger Waters on bass, Rick Wright on keyboards, Nick Mason on drums, and Syd Barrett handling guitar and vocal duties. They released their first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (named after a chapter in the children’s book The Wind In The Willows) in 1967, after gaining popularity on the backs of a few popular singles like “Arnold Layne.” A major band in the then-burgeoning psychedelic rock scene, Pink Floyd were from the start a very visual animal – their concerts were filled with projections, whirling lights, and various other props and distractions. It was no place for an epileptic to be, that was for sure.

A lot of people swear by Piper; I’m not one of them. People think Syd Barrett, the most influential member of the group at this time, was some kind of genius, and although the sound of Piper was incredibly ground-breaking, I don’t think it’s aged very well. Sure, there are some great tracks here – “Interstellar Overdrive” is an amazing freak-out instrumental, and “Bike,” with its musique concrete ending, is fantastic – but overall the sense of wide-eyed childish whimsy pales in comparison to what the band would later produce. I mean, half of the songs are about cats and garden gnomes, for Christ’s sake.

At the end of 1967, Barrett entered the end of what had been a long psychological downward spiral. His use of hallucinogens, coupled with the fact that the fucker wasn’t entirely there to begin with, made him a sporadically-functioning musician, to say the least. To bolster their live performances, guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour was brought into the fold… and Barrett was driven out of it, a move that caused enough consternation and guilt among the band’s members that it would later provide the basis for some of their most moving material.

The follow-up to Piper, A Saucerful Of Secrets, was released in June 1968. Barrett only featured on a few songs, most notably on the closer, “Jugband Blues.” Clearly somewhat aware of his condition and his surroundings, Barrett penned lyrics to that effect, singing

It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here

Elsewhere, the band, written off by the music press due to Barrett’s departure, was trying on new styles and sounds. The fairy tales on Piper were given a bit of an edge and more of a propulsive sound, with tracks like “Let There Be More Light” and “Corporal Clegg” (the latter being the band’s first, but not only, anti-war song) showing a clear evolution from their earlier counterparts. The title track uses “Interstellar Overdrive” as a jumping off point for their obsession with long multi-part suites. “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” is an ominous bass-driven song whose lyrics are cribbed from a book of Chinese poetry.

In 1969, Pink Floyd recorded the soundtrack to a hippy flick called More, and while the album that resulted is mostly forgettable, one can hear the beginnings of hard rock on the proto-metal “Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar.” Of greater interest is the follow up to that soundtrack, the double album Ummagumma, which was divided into a live record and a studio record. The live record is pure gold. Its four tracks are all superior to their studio versions, stretching the sound out longer and harder than ever before. It was clear, from this point, that something significant was going on, and the talent on display was enough to make most music critics eat their earlier words about Pink Floyd’s future.

The studio record is another matter altogether. The band “breaks up” here, with each member doing his own thing for a quarter of the record. Rick Wright’s contribution, a keyboard piece called “Sysyphus,” drags and drags; Nick Mason recorded “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” a suite for percussion, and it really is beyond boring.* David Gilmour fares little better with one of his first compositions, “The Narrow Way.” The only really solid material here comes from Waters, who provides the pastoral “Grantchester Meadows” (whose 3D sound, which finds headphone listeners hearing bees buzzing in first one, then the other ‘phone, would later become an integral part of the band’s repertoire) and the funny “Several Species Of Small Furry Animals…” which might be the world’s first techno track.

About a year later, the band regrouped and released Atom Heart Mother, which is an interesting album in a formative sense but an average one in a critical sense. The title track, recorded in collaboration with professional whackadoo Ron Geesin, incorporates an orchestra into its 23:44 length; although you might not listen to it again, it provides a sense of where the band would go in the future with tracks like “Echoes” and their later albums, which are often one long song divided up into multiple tracks. There were also three “solo” tracks, and then there’s the failed experiment of “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” which may simultaneously be the most promising-sounding and disappointing song in the band’s arsenal.

Meddle was released in 1971. This is where shit gets really interesting. Things kick off with a brilliant instrumental, “One Of These Days,” a truly otherworldly bit of charging guitar and drums that also finds the space to incorporate (natch) the Dr. Who theme. “Fearless” is a good, standard rock song that ends by interpolating a billion drunken soccer fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” But both pale in comparison to the closing track, which fills up all of side two, the epic “Echoes.” I simply don’t know of 23 minutes that passes by so quickly. From the opening guitar chords, which sound like a pinging sonar, to the majestic choruses and wigged-out sound effect center, everything that makes Pink Floyd “Pink Floyd” is firmly in place.

The band’s follow up to Meddle was a soundtrack to the film La Vallee called Obscured By Clouds, and it sucks. That’s all I have to say about that. (Except to add that nothing in the Floyd catalogue truly sucks – their worst shit is better than most band’s masterpieces – but Clouds, as much as it pains me to admit it, is eminently ignorable.)

All of which brings us to the 1973 release of The Dark Side Of The Moon. This wasn’t a case of several shorter tracks supporting a central, larger piece. This was one long song, drawn out over 43 minutes. A study of modern life and madness in all its glorious forms, Dark Side went on to sit on the charts for 741 weeks. 741 fucking weeks. Holy shit. If that’s not an indication of how good this album is, then nothing is going to do it for you. At this point, Floyd was firing on all cylinders, making use of everything they had thus far learned: 3D sound effects (there’s a reason everyone used this album to test out their car stereos), incredibly tight composition, and themes that found universal acceptance.

To say the album is about insanity is a little like saying the Declaration of Independence is about freedom. It is insanity, whether it’s the madness of war (“Us And Them”), politics (“Brian Damage”), mortality (“Time”), or just plain old lunacy (“On The Run”). At this point, almost forty years after its release, it’s pretty difficult to say something about Dark Side that hasn’t already been said. Put simply, this album changed music more profoundly than Nirvana’s Nevermind, in both the hearts of those who accepted it (every prog-rocker ever), and those who rejected it (the entire punk rock movement).

(The recent re-release of the Floyd catalogue also includes a very large boxed set dedicated to this album; similar sets are set to be released for Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Even as a Floyd fanatic, I cannot recommend this boxed set, laden as it is with so much DVD and Blu-ray garbage. It’s virtually bankrupt in terms of b-sides – which don’t exist in the Floyd universe because they almost never released singles – and demos. Avoid it, and its hefty price tag, at all costs.)

Fresh off their success, the band toured for a while, performing Dark Side mostly in its entirety long before anyone got the idea into their head that albums should be performed live in their entirety. In 1975, they released Wish You Were Here, which, along with Dark Side, forms the binary star at the heart of the Floydian universe. I say this because this is ultimately where the band found its biggest success, and this was the culmination of all four members having an equal say, something that wouldn’t last much longer.

Wish was built on a dual premise: a fond tribute to Syd Barrett (who materialized during the album’s recording as an almost unrecognizable gutter fool) and an attack on the music industry. The immortal “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” divided into two parts and spanning the better part of 26 minutes, remembers Barrett as the idealist that he was, while “Welcome To The Machine” and “Have A Cigar” eviscerate the record-making monster that the band was beginning to find itself chained to. The title track, one of the most beautiful numbers Floyd ever recorded, is (you guessed it) an anti-war song.

After Wish You Were Here, things started to get a little strained in the Floyd camp. Wright and Mason were begin marginalized by the escalating creative war between Gilmour and Waters. Waters was (is) a control freak who wanted to dominate the band’s songwriting duties. Wright was a cocaine addict whose ego simply couldn’t withstand Waters’ brow-beating, and Mason was a happy-go-lucky sort, eager enough to go along to get along. This left Gilmour to try and stand up for the rest of the band. By no means a weak man, Gilmour still found his hands full with Waters’ tyrannical approach to leadership, and it was here that a fracture began to grow.

Animals, released in 1977, was the first of three albums that would come to classify the “Waters era” of the band. A concept album (aren’t they all?) built around Orwell’s Animal Farm, Animals divides the human race into three groups: the power-hungry movers and shakers (“Dogs”), the sanctimonious makers of social dogma (“Pigs”), and everyone else (“Sheep”). Despite the straitjacketing concept and the lack of input from the rest of the band, Animals is still an excellent album. Its three central tracks are all long and convoluted and complicated, prime examples of what later got dubbed “space rock” and full of excellent lyrics to boot. (Only Waters could pen a mouthful like “It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around” and have it sound like poetry.)

Entering the studio to record the next album, the band found itself at a Waters-dictated crossroads: either they were going to record The Pros & Cons Of Hitch-hiking (which eventually became Waters’ first solo album) or they were going to dive into a massive double album undertaking called The Wall, complete with stage show and film accompaniment. They chose The Wall, a fundamentally flawed but conceptually stunning examination of a rock star’s disintegration, mental collapse, and cathartic recovery. Abandoning the long song structures, Waters, under the watchful eye of uber-producer Bob Ezrin, turned out pop hit after pop hit in service to his muse: the emotionally wrenching “Mother,” the soaring “Comfortably Numb,” the surging “Run Like Hell,” and of course, the tour de force “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2.” “Brick” was essentially a disco-rock hybrid whose central refrain, “We don’t need no education,” became the rallying cry of disenfranchised youth for decades to come.

The central conceit behind The Wall was the rocker’s alienation from his audience, a theme that Waters was obsessed with. During the Animals tour, he had become increasingly disillusioned with playing gigantic arenas, to the extent that he finally lost his cool one night and spat in a fan’s face. Envisioning a way of bricking himself off, he devised the central concept for The Wall, and the songs simply followed from there.

The tour behind The Wall, which found the band caged in by an actual wall of Styrofoam bricks, bankrupted most of the band and left them virtually empty-handed. (The exception to this was Rick Wright, who had been fired and then re-hired as a session musician. Wright, collecting what was essentially salary, was the only one to walk away from The Wall tour with anything like a paycheck.)

Ideally a follow-up of companion songs to Waters’ magnum opus, The Final Cut changed its sound on the outset of the Falklands War. Waters, who grew up without a father thanks to World War II, hated war with a passion. So he took the tracks that never made it to The Wall, mixed them with some art rock and anti-war rhetoric, and released The Final Cut. The last Floyd album to feature all four members, Cut is essentially a Waters solo album – it even says so, on the back cover: “A Requiem For The Post-War Dream, By Roger Waters.” Gilmour, Wright and Mason had little, if any, say over the album’s style, format, or release. Nor would they want to. A caustic piece of soapbox sloganeering, The Final Cut is a love-it or hate-it propositions for most fans (Kurt Loder actually gave it five stars in Rolling Stone), and its songs have yet to be performed live by any incarnation of Floyd the group; its inclusion on subsequent greatest hits packages has been more of a tip of the hat to Waters than any kind of graceful acceptance into the Floyd milieu.

Declaring Floyd “a spent force,” Waters, who no longer felt he needed the other three, moved to dissolve the group. Gilmour took his case to court – fuck you, Roger – and won the right to keep the Pink Floyd name. Without Waters to contribute, the band’s sound changed radically.

An attempt to both pick up where Wish You Were Here left off and to incorporate a more modern sound into the Floyd persona, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987) fails on both counts. Which is not to say it doesn’t have any good songs – it does. “Learning To Fly” is a great rock song, “Sorrow” is perfectly haunting, and “One Slip” and “Terminal Frost” simply don’t have enough fans, as far as I’m concerned. But overall, it’s just not as good as the other Floyd albums. This is Floyd at the other end of the bell curve, and despite its popularity (and the massive tours that followed), Lapse signaled the beginning of the end for the once proud band.

If Lapse isn’t very good, the last Pink Floyd album, The Division Bell (1993), is downright dreadful. Abandoning all concessions to pop and rock, Bell is a turgid affair devoid of humor and warmth. Only its final track, “High Hopes,” sounds remotely Floydian; the rest, divided between meandering instrumentals and poorly disguised stunts like guest star Stephen Hawking, just falls flat on its face. That a solid Floyd fan like me went into the record store on that late winter day in ’93 and bought Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails records instead goes a long way towards hammering closed the coffin.

After touring for The Division Bell, the group decided to call it a day. Gilmour released solo records, Mason wrote a book, and Wright did whatever it was he felt like doing (cocaine, probably – I’m sorry, that’s harsh and purely conjecture). The band milked its catalogue for the better part of two decades over the course of live albums and greatest hits compilations. The four men grew into old men. (Bizarrely enough, Gilmour, who was a good-looking young man, grew into an ugly old man. Waters, on the other hand, who was a horse-faced, toothy monster of a young man, is quite a handsome older fellow. But I digress.)

In 2006, Barrett, living in seclusion and obscurity, passed away. Rick Wright died of cancer in 2008. But before he passed away, the group put aside its previous animosity (perhaps in deference to Wright, who was almost certainly sick at the time) and performed four songs at Live 8.

It remains to be seen whether Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and David Gilmour will ever play together again. For a while, the stars seemed aligned in their favor: Gilmour and Mason appeared at a Waters solo concert to perform songs from The Wall, and this recent series of appearances on Fallon may be a sign of good things to come. Then again, Waters has publicly announced plans to continue touring his solo version of The Wall for the foreseeable future.

Regardless of their future plans, there is no denying this band their legacy. Profoundly moving songwriters of the highest quality, Pink Floyd’s music will grow and expand and continue to influence musicians for decades, if not centuries, to come. As for me, they remain a strong link – nay, anchor – to my past, to my formative years, and to the reasons why I came to love music in the first place.

And they will always remind me of my father. Rest in peace, Dad. Wherever you are, may you always Shine On.

*I’m going to digress a little here to expound on the merits, or lack of therein, of Nick Mason and Rick Wright. These two are really not the most talented individuals. Mason can keep a beat and Wright can play the piano, which is more than I can do, but in the pantheon of technically gifted musicians, they rank pretty low. Waters and Gilmour aren’t so hot either. (Actually, Gilmour is pretty good. Waters is an average bass player.) The distinction I often offer newcomers to Pink Floyd is this: the band is made up of fantastic writers, but not so great musicians. This may be why Floyd’s live shows are so filled with light shows, props, and other distractions – because they just aren’t that shit-hot. Consequently, anyone expecting a truly mind-blowing jam at a Floyd concert is bound to be a bit disappointed.