by Will Romano
When Pigs Fly
LANDING ON THE MOON HAS ALWAYS BEEN A metaphor for the impossible. Some said it could never be done. We all know that the act of rocketing to our nearest satellite is no longer impossible (conspiracy theorists notwithstanding), but the expression has stuck and continues to articulate mankind’s hunger to explore the unknown and touch the outer cosmos.
Proponents of progressive rock, in all its many forms, attempted to do the same within the context of the musical universe: expand the boundaries of accepted music and musical knowledge while stretching their individual abilities as performers, musicians, artists, and people to achieve works that, today, seem unimaginable and even unattainable.
Pink Floyd were one of the first important bands to experiment with rock music, offer a new wav of thinking about and hearing sound, offering intonation and interpretation for the ineffable, inevitable, and incontrovertible while leaving their unique footprint on the progressive rock landscape.
A cult band that transformed themselves into a global musical phenomenon, Floyd have become simply untouchable, their lives and times the stuff of rock music legend. When, at a crucial early juncture in their development as a creative unit, they lost their charismatic front man—when even their managers thought they were doomed—the Floyd pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, recruited a new guitarist, and set out on a course that would make them the biggest rock band in the world.
When the band were at their most dispirited, they wrote, recorded, and completed an album that sat on the U.S. charts for a cumulative and unprecedented fourteen years.
Unlike other progressive rock contemporaries who attempted to re-create (sometimes in very literal terms) the sound of an orchestra, Floyd would not be seriously tempted by the lure of this particular strain of progressive music (though they did dabble in it, too), and instead explored more organic aural territory that seemed to capture the sights and sounds of the outer and inner cosmos.
The Floyd remain firmly within the genre while (largely and incredibly) escaping the stereotypical fantasy-imagery silliness, faux profundity, psychobabble, apparent pursuit of technical prowess, and (sometimes) overwrought classical tendencies that have made so many of their contemporaries victims of their own excesses.
Yet the classic Floyd lineup of bassist/vocalist Roger Waters, guitarist /vocalist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist/vocalist Rick Wright—despite infighting, inconsolable sadness, madness, regret, guilt, and loss—changed the face of progressive rock forever and turned cult popularity into superstardom.
COSMIC BO DIDDLEY
George Roger Waters was born in Surrey, U.K., but raised in Cambridge by his mother, reportedly a strict schoolteacher (his father, Eric Fletcher Waters, died in World War II in Anzio, Italy, in February 1944, when Roger was just an infant).
Waters left Cambridge in 1962 to pursue a degree in architecture from London’s Regent Street Polytechnic, where he met drummer Nick Mason, a Birmingham native, and both joined the band Sigma 6, of which future Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright was already a member.
Guitarist/vocalist Syd Barrett (born Roger Keith Barrett in Birmingham in 1946), a childhood friend to Waters (and teenage buddy to his replacement, future Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour), joined the group that eventually became Pink Floyd—a moniker Barrett had concocted by fusing the names of obscure Piedmont blues artists Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
The four-man lineup of the Pink Floyd, as they were sometimes referred to, supplied, along with the Soft Machine and a handful of select other bands, the sonic backdrop to London’s hip, underground psychedelic circuit in the latter half of the 1960s.
“A lot of what the band played were old blues songs and things, but the solos, instead of being wailing guitar solos, there was this wall of sustain and noise,” says former comanager Peter Jenner. “Rick and Syd had Echoplex on their instruments, so I couldn’t make out where this noise was coming from. I remember walking around the stage, trying to figure out who was playing what.”
“They . . . made you stop and say, ‘What the fuck is that?’” says keyboardist Billy Ritchie, formerly of the influential British progressive rock bands 1-2-3 and Clouds. “I couldn’t even judge Rick Wright as a player: He was concentrating on using [keyboards] as a sound instrument. It was all very original. I’d never heard anything like it.”
At the close of 1966, Floyd secured a deal with EMI for five thousand pounds (to the dismay of some in the underground scene who thought the band had “sold out”) and treated the studios at Abbey Road as their own sonic playground while recording 1967’s groundbreaking Piper at the Gates of Dawn with producer Norman Smith (who’d worked with the Beatles but had admitted to never being a big fan of Floyd).
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was a Top 10 British hit, but even before its release, the Floyd were already showing signs of busting loose of the constraints of the underground music scene and becoming their own band. The songs “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” were Top 20 and Top 10 British hits, respectively, in the spring and early summer of 1967, but Floyd were soon to be known as an album-oriented band—and later an FM radio sensation—interested, it would seem, more in the idea of presenting the album as a complete artistic statement than as merely a collection of possible hits.
“Pink Floyd were, straight off the bat, a band that could deliver a catchy hit single but had this other urgent desire to experiment with kaleidoscopes of sound,” muses Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson.
“Floyd was really the first rock band signed to EMI that was considered an album act,” says Jenner. “From then on, they had the freedom to extend themselves artistically.”
Fronted by the charismatic, good-looking, dark and mysterious rock poet Barrett, Floyd, while spinning music that was itself a mind-altering experience (awash in waves of noise, seemingly less compositional than textural), were plugged into the pulse of the psychedelic circuit.
“I think Syd went from someone who would go for a jolly walk down the street into a music shop to buy some guitar strings, to someone who was suddenly a pop star and was asked the meaning of life,” Jenner says. “He was not political or philosophical in that way, even though he was seen as some sort of leader of an underground movement.”
But as a leader of the underground, he was also subject (and vulnerable) to the same kinds of experiences (and vices) as everyone else in the scene. That involved overindulgence of hallucinogens, which may or may not have been the cause of his mood swings, general despondency, and stubbornness regarding the band’s creative direction. For example, Barrett legendarily walked out on a Floyd performance on the Top of the Pops television program (the last of three appearances the band were making on the show).
“Syd simply didn’t have the same motivations as other people,” says filmmaker Anthony Stern, who befriended Barrett in the 1960s and included Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” featuring Barrett, in his 1968 documentary, San Francisco: Film. “He just wanted to play his music. It was like that [1962] film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, in which this rebellious young working-class lad stops about fifteen yards before the finish line during the big race. ‘If it matters so much to you, you can win. I don’t care.’ Syd simply felt like he shouldn’t conform and play to what other people’s expected game is.”
“Syd wrote very quickly,” says Jenner. “That was another problem. We always said, ‘Come on, Syd. Write us another hit.’ I think that was part of the pressures that did him in.”
Barrett vacationed in Spain, taking some time off from writing and the band, but he returned, it appeared, even more damaged than when he left, some say. He’d become paralyzed onstage, staring like a deer in the headlights, or else detuning his guitar while on the bandstand, as if sabotaging the band in midperformance. Barrett was slowly withdrawing from the world, seemingly becoming lost in his own mind.
Some speculate that Barrett was simply ingesting too many drugs to be effective as a performer—and tha
t those drugs may have triggered a latent predisposition to some form of mental illness. (It should be stated that Barrett was never diagnosed, then, or later in his life, with a mental illness.)
“Syd’s mistake, I suppose, was he became greedy for the [LSD] experience,” says Stern. “It was a bit like a guru or someone who . . . forces himself to stay in this high level of Samadhi, a highly evolved state. Normal bodily systems break down.. . . The brain is not made for that.”
The band had long since stopped asking why this was all happening and had begun formulating plans to quietly phase out Barrett but continue to work with him as a songwriter, much in the way Brian Wilson operated with the Beach Boys.
The combination of an acid overload, the impact of losing his position in the band, the agonizing regret of recording for a commercial entity such as EMI before he really had a chance to take Floyd into other musical dimensions, and, some say, his inability to move past the death of his father, Max, when he was just fifteen years old, may have pushed Barrett over the edge.
“What the drugs did was bring out what was there and amplify it and exaggerate it,” says Jenner.
“I think it’s fair to say that his mind would have been destroyed one way or another fairly soon,” says Stern. “If it wasn’t LSD, it would have been something else.”
SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN
Guitarist David Gilmour, a friend of Barrett, was at the ready and joined as the band’s fifth member for a little while. But this setup was awkward and uncomfortable. Barrett was not pleased with Gilmour’s presence, and the new guitarist felt out of place for a time.
However, it soon became apparent how valuable—and necessary—Gilmour was. Barrett had finally gone off the deep end, and Gilmour was the perfect replacement.
“The first time I had heard Dave play, he mimicked Jimi Hendrix and then Syd,” says Jenner. “Dave is a wonderful guitar player, but earlier on, he was an incredible mimic. He now plays David Gilmour, but when he started, he played other people.”
Gilmour would evolve and combine the best instincts and aspects of blues-oriented guitarists of the day: Perhaps a bit like Eric Clapton and B. B. King, Gilmour proves that it’s the emphasis and emotional impact of each note played that counts, not the speed by which those notes are delivered that gives music its power.
If Barrett was the spacey conceptualist, then Gilmour was, by comparison, the better technician; much more tied to the traditional blues-rock mythos of singing guitarist as a shamanic figure with the ability to extract base and complex emotions from the instrument.
Barrett would make one more appearance with Floyd on the band’s 1968 LP, A Saucerful of Secrets, which contains only one Barrett-penned track, the closer, “Jugband Blues.”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard his song, ‘Vegetable Man,’ but that’s one he wrote around that time, and it’s a description of who he was,” says Jenner. “It wasn’t used by the band, I think, because it was too much for them. They just couldn’t handle where the song was coming from.”
Despite the exclusion of “Vegetable Man” and another song titled “Scream Thy Last Scream,” the Floyd were progressing at an incredible rate without Barrett’s input, creating music that had a psychological punch. “Let There Be More Light” certainly plays into the paranoia and perceived paranoia of a hallucinogen-scrubbed mind (catch the reference to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”).
The chiming, metallic pings of vibraphone, Mason’s incessant boxy patterns (guided by the listless vocals), ghostly organ tones, and the constant, repetitive nature of the opening riff make “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (the title taken from a Michael Moorcock sci-fi novel called The Fireclown, aka The Winds of Limbo) is something akin to sonic tantra, a distant cousin to a hypnotic one-chord Delta blues.
Other songs offer a magic window into the band’s craft and psyche, such as the chilling, kazoo-laced antiwar ditty “Corporal Clegg” (its message on the psychological effects of war would be a subject Waters would dive into with more regularity and depth later in the 1970s); “A Saucerful of Secrets,” a horror show of noise, featuring piano bashing, oscilloscopic-like sonic whirlies, and organ drones that hint at a funeral procession; and Wright’s melancholic Mellotron-enhanced avant-pop tune “See-Saw.”
The closer, Barrett’s “Jugband Blues,” begins with folky guitar (with what sounds like recorder) and the line “I’m almost obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here.” It then descends into auditory madness, with horn players seemingly operating of their own accord and playing separately, barely (if at all) listening to one another. Then the chaos cuts off. It simply ends. An acoustic passage follows, as if nothing that came before it really mattered.
It’s difficult to know whether the song represents Barrett’s self-awareness or his confusion, or if it is a kind of sly yet scathing indictment of his bandmates for slowly pushing him out of the band. Whatever its meaning, “Jugband Blues” is disjointed and disturbing and can be interpreted as a kind of waking dream, a nightmare, really, and an eerie conclusion to Barrett’s work with the Floyd. Even more strangely, the song was a Top 10 British hit—and Barrett’s final act as a member of Pink Floyd.
MORE, UMMAGUMMA
After Barrett faded away, Floyd began searching for a new course. With the release of albums like More, Ummagumma, and Atom Heart Mother, the Floyd were no longer chasing dreams of psychedelia in an attempt to hang onto Syd’s music and memory. These are not the strongest Floyd efforts, but they show a band attempting to define itself.
More (recorded as a sound track for Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film of the same title) runs the gamut of natural sounds, jazz, world music, whooshing gong overtones, semi-acoustic folk-rock ballads, and blues-informed guitar dirt and became a Top 10 British hit in June 1969.
The stoic, paranoia-laced musical step toward the band’s future beloved space-age prog rock was further solidified by 1969’s double album, Ummagumma (the title taken from a slang expression for sex), which contains live material (the entire first disc), band collaborations, and solo spotlights.2
Mason has called the live material appearing on Ummagumma “antiquated,” and he was half right. Songs like Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine” (which at times approaches the raucousness of the Who), “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” the gothic “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” (released as a single in 1968), and “A Saucerful of Secrets” are from the band’s past, but they also possess a primal and mystical quality that rivals their psychedelic studio counterparts.
The second LP features five compositions by the four Floyd protagonists: Wright’s four-part keyboard suite “Sysyphus” (sometimes brilliant, sometimes gothic, sometimes ponderous), reflecting his classical training and jazz soul; Waters’s gentle acoustic “Grantchester Meadows” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” (a collage of vocal effects, echoes, and tape loops that ends with a reference to Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary”); Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way,” a precursor to the blues-based cosmic prog of The Dark Side of the Moon; and Mason’s multitracked experimental-sound-effect-and-percussion solo, “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party.”
Ummagumma, a Top 5 hit in Britain, demonstrates how far ahead of other bands Floyd was: By highlighting the talents of the individual members of the band, Floyd had, essentially, handed Emerson Lake and Palmer—which had yet to be formed—a blueprint for their 1977 double LP, Works Volume 1.
ATOM HEART MOTHER
After scoring music for Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 movie/faux documentary on the counterculture, Zabriskie Point, Floyd recorded 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, featuring the orchestral, choir-based side-long epic title song, written in collaboration with interactive sound installation/electronic/TV and film composer Ron Geesin (who had collaborated with Waters on the 1970 sound track Music from the Body).
Ironically, the more inter
esting parts—the brass, choir, and cello bits—belong to Geesin. That they do is not much of a surprise: The band’s constant touring was beginning to tire them—and this listlessness shows a bit on Atom Heart Mother.
The second side recalls the second disc of Ummagumma, with Gilmour, Waters, and Wright penning a song apiece. Mason collaborated on the inane elongated closer, “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast: Rise and Shine, Sunny Side Up, Morning Glory,” based on Floyd roadie Alan Stiles’ inner dialogue regarding breakfast choices.
The song features the wonderful snap-crackle-pop of preparing and then eating a morning meal complete with coffee, scrambled eggs, toast, “flakes,” bacon, and (who could forget?) marmalade. Stiles’s activity gives way to a pleasant though quasi-silly pastoral rock hymnal.
It’s a strange ending to a record that simply feels (at times) unnecessary, and one that seems to do little to advance the band’s overall direction. In some ways Atom Heart Mother was even more disjointed than Ummagumma, but the album would, incredibly, become a number-one hit in the U.K. (the band’s first to do so) and break within the Top 60 in the U.S.
Floyd seemed to be at a crossroads: They were achieving success, but they were clearly on the down slope artistically. What was their next move, and would they continue to experiment with sound effects and orchestration? Would they do something else entirely?
MEDDLE
By early 1971, Floyd were quite bored—and fed up—with their live set (too many older numbers were being requested by audiences) and disenchanted by the succession of film work and imperfect releases such as Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother.
But seemingly out of nowhere came a breakthrough: The band exploded with creativity and began writing material for a 1971 record that would eventually be titled Meddle.
Certainly, Barrett is still ingrained in the band’s music, in songs like “Echoes” and “One of These Days.” But, on the whole, here was a simpler, much more powerful Floyd, sometimes building tracks via small musical increments, behind the strength of Mason’s straightforward rock grooves and Gilmour’s soaring and scintillating blues-rock riffs.