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.
