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.
