Pink Floyd: Pompeii, The Wall, and Syd

For my birthday, my brother got me multiple items, including a tribute album devoted to Pink Floyd The Wall, done by various stoner rock bands, The Wall (Redux).   For the most part the bands did a fairly decent job of reminding me about this album.  The lyrics came back to me despite not having listened to the album or watched the movie in a long time.

I had an earlier blog, “Which One Is Pink?”, but over the years I’ve had occasion to rethink some of what I said and I’d like to revisit this topic. 

Pink Floyd is a band which can be divided into three phases.  Working backwards, the least substantial is the third – New Shit Without Roger - with David Gilmour (guitar & vocals), Rick Wright (keyboards) and Nick Mason (drums) continuing on without Roger Waters (bass & vocals) for three albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (11/14).  They have much of the musical style of the prior phase without any of the pretension or strong themes which the Waters-era material had.  Fans tend to prefer The Division Bell and often consider A Momentary Lapse of Reason to be a David Gilmour solo album which happens to have Mason and Wright contributing.  I like them both.  I wouldn’t consider them any better than Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, or Animals, but as far as I’m concerned they do beat Waters’ self-indulgent critique of the Falklands War, The Final Cut, the last Floyd album with him.  The Endless River, released in November 2014, is half-finished fragments cleaned up a bit and apparently intended as “this is it, this is what we’ve got.”  It belongs with the other two by default rather than quality. 

Before that, you have the Weird Shit and the Classic Shit.  Each is capped off with a movie.

Weird Shit:  Piper at the Gates of Dawn (8/67), A Saucerful of Secrets (6/68), More (6/69), Ummagumma (11/69), Atom Heart Mother (10/70), Meddle (11/71), and Obscured by Clouds (6/72).  Movie:  Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii.  Rather than separate out Piper as I did before, I’d say that, notwithstanding Syd Barrett’s departure almost immediately after, it still belongs together with the subsequent albums of this period.  We’re talking about psychedelic music: long and complex, material which is best enjoyed under the influence of marijuana, if not LSD or mushrooms, although by now I’ve learned to enjoy it in straight edge format.  My favorite would be the album with the cow on the cover, Atom Heart Mother, which also has the killer duo on the B-side, “Summer ‘68” (Rick Wright) and “Fat Old Sun” (David Gilmour).   Gilmour himself described this period as “weird shit”, and Mason laughed that “the record company had no idea what we were doing.” 

These songs can be seen performed by the band in Pompeii, Italy (right outside Naples and next to the famous Mount Vesuvius) along with clips of the band at Abbey Road Studios working on Dark Side of the Moon.  Starting with a VHS copy in August 1990, I got it on DVD as soon as it came out in that format and watched it several times with my Brazilian ex-GF Leila, with whom I also saw Roger Waters in concert in summer 2000.  The interviews with the band members are also fun to watch, Waters of course being the most arrogant and Gilmour smiling as he denies that the band is still “drug-oriented” (“You can trust us.”)

Classic Shit:  Dark Side of the Moon (3/73), Wish You Were Here (9/75), Animals (1/77), The Wall (11/79), and The Final Cut (3/83).  Movie:  The Wall.    This is the material you’ll hear on the radio.  Arguably much more enjoyable to listen to while high, it’s still well within the tolerance of the straight edge crowd.  Gilmour’s guitar gives it a strong bite and keeps it from drifting too far into a mellow, prog zone.  In fact, relative to the rest of their material I’d say The Wall is pretty much a classic rock album rather than a prog album.

I started watching The Wall in college, including a few movie theater appearances (don’t think I ever saw “Pompeii” in a movie theater).  Oddly, unlike Pompeii, the band itself makes no on-camera appearance, the persona of “Pink” being played by Bob Geldof.  There’s some excellent animation by Gerald Scarfe, who – by the way – ended up marrying Jane Asher, the long-time girlfriend of Paul McCartney.  The other funny thing is that lately Waters has been quite vocal in his condemnation and denunciation of Israel, leading to the obvious suspicion of latent anti-Semitism, so it makes the crossed hammers and Pink-as-Dictator sequences much more intriguing….

Gilmour on Guitar.  I recently picked up a live DVD of the Moody Blues playing Days of Future Passed in its entirety, along with more of their popular songs.  Justin Hayward plays his familiar red Gibson ES-335, but behind him is a classic Marshall stack.   Lo and behold, he has it set on crunch, and has some heavy soloing going on – not what you would expect with a prog band like them.

Likewise, it’s easy to forget that Pink Floyd has some stunning guitar soloing.  The solo in “Atom Heart Mother” and “Fat Old Sun” from Atom Heart Mother, the solos in “Time” and “Money” from Dark Side of the Moon, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, both sections, from Wish You Were Here, “Dogs” from Animals, and of course “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall.   His solos are blues-based and highly memorable.  Tune in on this: “of course Mother’s gonna help build the Wall…”

Syd Barrett.   Having pulled Piper back into the fold, I don’t want to devote an entire blog to Syd, so I’d rather do justice to him here.  Before his LSD-fueled meltdown in 1968, Syd was the creative focus of the band – long before Waters stepped up to the plate.  While the Grateful Dead were doing their Acid Tests in California, a similar scene was developing in London, with Syd’s Floyd acting as the house band for the London version of the Acid Tests.  Piper at the Gates of Dawn has two major psychedelic songs, “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” and the rest are fairly whimsical, e.g. “Lucifer Sam”, “The Gnome”, and “Bike”. 

In between his own consumption, and “friends” doing him a favor by dosing him with LSD without his knowledge or consent, Syd wound up frying his brain on LSD.  He didn’t go to rehab like Roky Erikson of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, but he did wind up in seclusion living with his mom.  By that point he was semi-comatose or repeating the same word over and over again, making live performances almost impossible.  Gilmour did help him put out his solo albums, The Madcap Laughs (1/70) and Barrett (11/70) – Opel (10/88) collects all the unreleased material as a compilation - and he made an unannounced studio visit while the band were in the studio recording Wish You Were Here (1975), including their tribute to him, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  Nick Mason, asked in an interview if fans ask about Waters’ absence at their Momentary Lapse of Reason shows (1987-89), replied that they get far more questions about Syd. 

Live.   I saw the Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour at RFK (6/88), followed by Paris (Bercy) (7/89).  Years later I saw Roger Waters solo tour at Nissan Pavilion (7/00) and more recently, Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets at DAR Constitution Hall (4/19).   All shows were highly enjoyable, and Syd’s picture was up on the screen for “Shine On”.   Now I have a nosebleed seat ticket, the cheapest available, for Waters’ upcoming summer tour.  I always say, if you like a band’s music, see them live, and Pink Floyd/David Gilmour/Roger Waters are no exception.   If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor while they’re still around….

"Cooking"

I had occasion to visit Bowling Green, Virginia, the other day, the second time my practice has sent me someplace picturesque.   But commenting yet again, after the prior post about Winchester, strikes me as overindulgent.  Is it possible to overdose on a natural high?  I dare say we’ll find out.

The irony is that I don’t consider the practice of law to be a line of work calculated to send you to all sorts of different places.  You’re limited to the courts in the state you’re licensed to practice in, usually the same ones over and over again.  And courts are, by their nature, in cities, generally in the center of town.  Then again, small towns and county seats have their courthouses too…I suppose.   It’s impractical to take and pass 50 state bar exams (+ DC) or even try to waive into all those jurisdictions.  But if you’re an immigration lawyer you can effectively practice nationwide.  But that, I’m not.  Too bad. 

So the topic will be something else.  I’m a bachelor and always have been.  I dare say I’ll die unmarried, but we’ll see.  In any case my two major romantic relationships were with foreign women – Brazilian and Chinese – both of whom were quite capable in the kitchen, and proud of their skills therein.  For my own part, I am right smack in the middle:  not burning water, but no gourmet.

As a practical matter I’m cooking for myself and myself alone, so I have only myself to please and only myself to blame.  I consider my tastes to be bourgeois.   I recall eons ago, talking to my dear departed father – need I qualify this by saying that, he was alive at the time (!) – about class.  “Are we middle class?”  (Look of sincere horror): “No…!  We are lower upper class!”   Not sure how we qualify as such, with no royalty or nobility in the extended family, nor anyone with extensive wealth, nor anyone highly placed in government.  For my part I’m happy to consider myself bourgeois, food included.

At one extreme would be food that doesn’t really need to be cooked at all.  Chips & salsa, sourdough baguettes sliced with habanero or pepper jack cheese slices inside.  Or “cooking with the phone”, now replaced by “cooking with the Internet”, resulting in a Domino’s guy at the front door.   Likewise when others are cooking my Chick-Fil-A, Chipotle, etc.  I won’t take credit for eating what others have cooked.

Next step up, is simple stuff.  Not sure many people would consider this cooking, as we’re talking about preheating the oven, putting the Freschetta, pizza bites, or taquitos in at the required temperature for the required period of time.  Aside from not forgetting about it until you smell something burning, how hard is that?  About as advanced as that gets is pasta – boiling water and letting spaghetti or rigatoni boil for 10-15 minutes, heating the sauce in a separate pot – or cooking chicken breasts with Shake & Bake, more of this business of leaving something in the oven at a specific temperature for a specific period of time, scaling back the time for the accompanying Stovetop, which takes 3-4 minutes for the water to boil and 5 minutes to cook.

At my most advanced are two things.   First is Toll House Cookies, which I would make with my mom.  I’d follow the recipe to the point of adding in the chocolate chips themselves, and she would round them into balls and cook them in the oven, a partnership which remained consistently effective.  

The second is about the only item where I exercised any imagination.  I’d take pita pockets, cut them in half.  Then take those chicken breast strips they give you for salads, stuff a few into the pocket.  Then take Cracker Barrell cheese square slices, cut them across the middle into triangles, and slide those in.  Then cook the whole thing for about 30 seconds in the microwave, which melts the cheese and heats up the chicken.  Delicious.  

Whitesnake

Reviewing my blogs I realized I’d never reviewed this band, per se, though I’d mentioned them earlier.  A proper blog entry is in order at this…juncture.

In 1976 Deep Purple had run its course, with the Mark IV line-up crashing and burning.  Although their sole album with guitarist Tommy Bolin, Come Taste The Band, was up to standard, it turns out he had a heroin addiction the rest of the band had no clue about – until they toured overseas in places like Indonesia where he couldn’t score from local sources and he buzzed out on withdrawal symptoms.  Hint:  “drugs are bad, m’kay?”

The band decided to call it a day and go their separate ways, Bolin himself dying of a heroin overdose a few months later. 

Ian Gillan, fired from Mark II a few years before, formed a solo band.   Ritchie Blackmore, who quit after two albums with Mark III, started his own band, Rainbow.  The most substantial project was Whitesnake, centered around vocalist David Coverdale.

Initially this was just the name of his first solo album (David Coverdale’s Whitesnake), followed by Northwinds.  Then he started a proper band, Whitesnake, with an EP, Snakebite, and an album, Trouble.  This early stage of the band was R&B, classic rock, with provocative album covers and a familiar sound.  Maybe too familiar – my high school buddy Sean C. dismissed them as Led Zeppelin clones.

Subsequent discography:  Lovehunter, Ready An’ Willing, Come An’ Get It, Saints & Sinners, Slide It In.  Of these, my favorite is a toss-up.  Lovehunter has by far the best album cover, with the attractively proportioned and above all naked woman riding an improbably large snake (which isn’t even white, by the way), but I’m less keen on the music itself.  I did get the t-shirt of the album before getting the album itself, even wearing it to high school on the last day   Saints & Sinners has my favorite collection of songs, including the original versions of “Here I Go Again” and “Crying in the Rain”, which resurfaced on the self-titled album, and the very first song I ever learned to play on guitar, the title track itself, “Saints & Sinners”. 

The line-up tended to change regularly, with singer Coverdale the constant along with guitarists Bernie Marsden and Mickey Moody.  Ian Paice and Jon Lord ( >> 3/5 of Deep Purple Mark III/IV) served a short stint, as did bassist Neil Murray.  Glenn Hughes was never asked to join.  This era ended with Slide It In, released in 1984.  Sadly, I never got to see this era live; my brother and I only started going to concerts in late 1984. 

At this point Coverdale took the band in a completely new direction, more hair metal, Dokken, Motley Crue, etc. with the self-titled album three years later (1987)  Having said that, he mastered the genre and the album sold like crazy.   It was this tour that I finally got to see them play live – Baltimore Arena, 2/4/1988.  “Still of the Night” is probably one of their best songs.

Whitesnake, Slip of the Tongue, Restless Heart, Good To Be Bad, Forevermore, The Purple Album, Flesh & Blood.

White I have all the prior albums, I don’t have all of these.  We did see the Purple album tour, at NYCB Westbury on Long Island (7/27/15), the night after seeing Deep Purple.   This album has Coverdale, with his current lineup, cover Deep Purple Mark III and IV songs, from Burn, Stormbringer, and Come Taste The Band.  Can’t say I enjoy these versions as much as the originals, but I certainly did enjoy hearing them again, along with the rest of the material, on Long Island. 

Gentlemen Comrades

Not to be confused with “Comrade Detective”, a miniseries which takes place in Bucharest in 1984, back when Ceaucescu was still running things.  That deserves a brief mention on its own merits.  All the actors are Romanian and speak Romanian (with English subtitles), but in addition to the subtitles, they are overdubbed in English by A-List actors such as Channing Tatum, who seem to heartily enjoy the whole thing.  It hit a soft spot for me, having been to Bucuresti in 2006 and having a failed romance with a buxom and provocative but unfaithful Romanian woman, Gia.  Maybe that affair deserves a blog entry – maybe not.  Anyhow.

This one is in Russian with English subtitles and takes place in early 1918.  It seems Bolsheviks took over and immediately fired all former Tsarist police officers, and/or Okhrana, Tsar’s secret police.  By way,  Okhrana, in 1904 (!!!!) was investigating whether someone would fly a biplane loaded with TNT into Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.  Decades before 9/11, and only a year after Wright Brothers flew, someone in law enforcement was already checking this out.  Amazing.

Anyhow.  Firing all former cops didn’t magically make crime disappear in USSR, and new Bolshevik cops, perhaps politically reliable, had zero experience chasing down ordinary criminals, so Reds reluctantly realized that maybe – just maybe – it might be a good idea to swallow their pride and ask a former Tsarist police detective, one they didn’t summarily execute or send to Siberia, to help out.   Fortunately for them, they found a very competent and patient man to do so: Varaksin.   They team him up with a new Bolshevik officer – still wearing his striped shirt from the Navy’s Baltic Fleet – Sokolov (catchphrase: “friggin’ soot!”) – and together they solve crimes in new U S S R.  Quite interesting.

I have several guns – not an Arsenal, of course – and if one of those guns figures prominently in a movie or TV show I can’t help but pull it out while I watch and enjoy.   In Season 4 of “Man in the High Castle”, rebels are equipped with Russian submachine guns and AK47s, latter of which I own, so naturally my all-black AK47 wound up in my arms as I saw Juliana and her comrades attack Nazi portal in Pennsylvania.  

Here, most prominent weapon is Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle – usually with bayonet attached.  (One character, Melnikov, accuses Bolsheviks of waving Mausers around, to which Sokolov replies that he prefers Mosin – although only weapon I see him brandishing on a regular basis is his revolver.)  I have 91/30 rifle, from its markings produced at state arsenal in 1932, full length with bolt sticking straight out (like original German Mauser Gewehr 98 of WWI) – carbine and sniper models have bolt turned down (like Mauser 98K of WWII).  Although I have bayonet, I prefer not to attach it to avoid accidents. 

Up to now there are 16 episodes.  No word yet on whether there will be subsequent seasons, as they haven’t even reached July 1918 when Tsar and his entire family were murdered in Sverdlovsk amidst the Civil War.  Latter only petered out in 1922 when Bolsheviks finally managed to defeat each of competing forces in turn (see my reprint of my Russian Civil War blog).   Intriguing that Bolshevik officers recognize Varaksin’s competence but also reliability, especially since Cheka is here in black leather jackets (English subtitles prematurely referring to them as KGB).       

Ghost Riders

At the end of World War II in Europe, things started getting pretty chaotic.   On two separate occasions, US and German forces wound up cooperating.   The earlier occasion, as described in The Last Battle, a castle housing high profile POWs came under attack by Waffen SS forces and was defended by a joint force of US troops AND regular German Wehrmacht, i.e. US and German forces fought alongside each other against the elite Waffen SS forces – successfully.   

The second occasion involved the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, Austria, which had been moved from Vienna to Czechoslovakia to escape Allied bombing, only to come under threat of winding up in the Soviet sphere of occupation.   The bigger issue was that the riding school had fancy Lippinzaner horses, Europe’s finest, but by that time in the war the Soviets were 99% likely to simply kill and eat the horses, which many considered suboptimal.

A dialogue opened between the Germans and US forces nearby coming under the command of Patton himself.  The complications were that remnants of the Second SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” were in the neighborhood, as were advance elements of the Red Army, and the latter were, by prior agreement, to have exclusive control over Czechoslovakia. 

Fortunately, conflict was avoided between US and Red Army forces.   Moreover, by this time what experience the SS had was compromised by its Tigers and Panthers being out of gas, reducing them to an infantry unit with zero air support.   US forces briefly scuffled with them, but unlike the other incident, did so without any regular Wehrmacht units fighting by their sides.   The horses were saved, “and there was much rejoicing”.

Remarkably, they made a movie of the incident the early 1960s, by Disney (!), featuring Roger Taylor and Eddie Albert. 

The Miracle of the White Stallions (DVD).  Ghost Riders helpfully noted that the events in question were dramatized in a Disney movie from 1963, this one.  It doesn’t follow exactly the same parties, but the story is essentially the same:

 

1.         The fancy horses are in danger

2.         Conscientious German officers (e.g. Robert Taylor as Pojhadsky and Eddie Albert as another high ranking German officer, identified as “Rider Otto”) move them out of Vienna,

3.         They determine that the Soviets will most likely end up with them and at the very least reduce them to pack animals (affected shudder of effeminate disbelief), if not actually eat them as juicy, delicious horse steaks washed down with vodka;

4.         Germans meet up with Americans and reach an agreement, including an appearance by General Patton himself who appears unimpressed with a horse show but eventually decides that the whole endeavor is still worthwhile;

5.         brief encounter between US forces and Waffen SS;

6.         No sign of Russians (not on best terms with them as of 1963)

7.         Horses successfully moved out of Soviet zone to safety in US zone, Bavaria

8.         1955 Horse show after everything sorted out.  Look!  Lippinzaners! 

Note that the only combat occurring in this whole business was between US forces and the Waffen SS (Second SS Panzer Division “Das Reich”).  I never thought I’d see the Waffen SS appear in a Disney movie.   The dot cammo uniforms are not authentic but close enough – only Waffen SS nerds like me are liable to notice, let alone care.  Bu they did have Mausers, MP40s and MG42s, which was nice and authentic. 

What’s funny was that although technically many of the German units still alive at this time – mid-April 1945 – still had some Panther and Tiger tanks, they were almost all out of gas, so they couldn’t go anywhere.  Around this time Hitler sent his remaining forces into Hungary, when Berlin itself was under siege by the Red Army, because with Romania long gone, the depots in Hungary were his last remaining source of gasoline for the German armored units.  Oh, and the Germans had long lost any air cover, so in the unlikely event they did scavenge enough gas for a tank to move anywhere, Allied fighter-bombers would blast them to oblivion.

 

Obviously the Americans in the movie are heroes, including Patton himself (not played by George C. Scott, though his “Dr. Strangelove” role was about this time), but it’s odd that with the exception of the brief appearance of the Waffen SS units in one combat scene, all the Germans in this film are effectively heroes as well.  Not only that, when they’re transporting the horses to St. Martin, the train comes under attack by fighters.  These are almost certainly Allied.  So we have the Germans as good guys and the Allied air forces as bad guys.  D’oh!