PINK FLOYD

"Mother do you think

they'll try to brake my balls...? ”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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"B+" 

Main Decade:

70's 

Main Eras:

Psychedelia (1966-1969)

Progressive (1968-???)

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Key Members:

Syd Barret, Guitar 'til 1968

Roger Waters, Bass

David Gilmour, Guitar

Nick Manson, Drums

Rick Wright, Keyboards 

 

Key Songs: 

Comfortably Numb, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Dogs, Astronomy Domine, Interestellar Overdrive, Wish You Were Here, Another Brick In The The Wall pt. 2, Time, Sheep, Money, One of These Days, Echoes, The Great Gig In The Sky, Have a Cigar, Set The Controls To The Heart of the Sun, Us And Them, Mother, Breathe, Welcome to the Machine, Pigs (Three Different Ones), One Of These Days, High Hopes, In The Flesh, A Pillow of Winds 

 

After the many bands I've known, three are tied for third place in my personal tastes. Of these, the Doors and Led Zeppelin followed in chronological order, immediately after I discovered the Beatles and the Stones. Today I'll focus on the third, which I discovered much later, and which slowly rose in my personal ranking to a shared third place; although recent polls (damn them) place them as the best band of all time: Pink Floyd, which my favorite radio host (that Claudia Angélica, whose smile was recognizable behind the microphone) introduced as "Music that is danced with the mind."

Pink Floyd was three bands. Three bands that were a three-headed monster and that made several of the most perfect albums in history. I'm not exaggerating. Each Pink Floyd has many cons, but many more pros. Barrett's madness, Waters' atmospheres, and Gilmour's precision made Pink Floyd a band for three different generations but with a common root. My first exposure was, of course, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2, their most commercial song, but not for that reason bad. At least not that bad; but wait, let's go in order.

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It took me a long, long, long time to find a taste for Syd Barrett, the leader of the first Floyd era; but when I did, I was able to fully appreciate the subsequent eras and was able to elevate the band to such a high level in terms of my tastes. Barrett was only on the first album, 1967's The Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, but his madness was present as a shadow at least until '71. Pipers is at least among the 10 most important albums of '67. Why? Because it was perhaps the most revolutionary in terms of sound, within a year in which the sound itself, almost everything that was made, was revolutionary. The album's cosmic aura can only be perceived after multiple listens. I deplored it at first, and honestly, it seemed like the work of a madman. It is, but in the best of ways, and that's hard to grasp, with H. Only Cream's Disraeli Gears, with Clapton's greater lucidity, managed to portray the pure psychedelia of the era as well, from a different angle. PATGOD shines with sharp lyrics, neurotic sounds, spacey atmospheres, songs that fray the nerves to the point of enjoyment, to the point of sweet sonic masochism...

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Barrett was a misunderstood genius. It doesn't surprise me that many of Floyd's supposed fans ignore his name. The music he made while with the band wasn't at all commercial, and the music the band made in the years immediately following his departure was even less so. Nope, Syd didn't need to kill himself with an overdose to forge his legend: He just went crazy, which is why the legend isn't as well-known. It's incredible to think that just a year earlier, in '66, the Floyd were making bad, trippy surf covers. But Barrett planted the seed for one of the bands that would later take Progressive out of the underground, music that was very difficult to digest, yet which never lost its aura.

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Barret didn't just go crazy with the abuse of LSD and other, perhaps stronger, drugs; nope, he proved it by a mile. The Pipers' sound bears the signature of acid, combined with the psychosis that this drug caused. Still, the album was somewhat successful, enough to earn a television guest appearance, where Syd, I don't know if he was unhinged or more lucid than anyone would guess, would stop playing and freeze like a statue while the recording was being done, leaving everyone in suspense. And when the recording was stopped to lecture him, he would begin to play like he'd never played before. But back to the music; that early Floyd was a faithful reflection, both in rhythm and lyrics, of what was happening in 1967: a total loss, but a loss that had utopian overtones. "Astronomy Domine" is one of the densest songs of that year, a song violent in terms of musicalization, where you could already perceive the progressions of the other musicians trying to compose the path of something that didn't make much sense. The rest of the album is a slightly less accomplished sequence of that masterful opening. We'll analyze it in more depth.

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Months after the album, Syd, feeling he couldn't handle the challenge of being himself, brought David Gilmour into the band to replace him. Even on the second album, A Sourceful of Secrets, he would play with them, barely a couple of songs, since they were remnants of the previous album, and the title track, with the five Floyds for the only time. The overall result wasn't very healthy, due, among other things, to Syd being too far gone and the others having trouble finding another leader or a style of their own. Barrett was supposed to dedicate himself to writing while the others performed (and reaped the success of) the music, but it seems that was impossible. So Syd made a couple of solo albums, with some consolation prize help from the others, and then he suffered his first death, the musical one. Listening to those albums, I don't know what would have happened if the rest of the band had performed them. It's obvious that Floyd's early sound is more psychedelic than progressive, and those stripped-down songs by Madcap Laughs and Barret have impressive potential. But on their own, abandoned to the acoustic performance of a demented genius, they sound very childish, certainly sincere, but not very good to my taste. Which makes us think that the rest of the band—Waters, Wright, Mason, and (last but not least) Gilmour—had potential, and it wasn't all about the frontman.

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The following years were years of adaptation and democracy. Floyd already had a certain reputation, at least in the United Kingdom, and they did everything possible to maintain it. If Ringo asked himself when he joined the Beatles, "What's a moron like me doing with guys like these?" I wouldn't be surprised if David asked himself, "What's a guy like me doing with morons like these?" Gilmour joined the band for two reasons: One, because Floyd was a group that started out very successful, that is, with fame and money, lots of money; And two, because he was the one who had taught the guitarist to play that way, that is, with levers. The fame and money didn't work out for him, at least not in the first five years. However, he himself had evolved enough (or his student had, who knows) that by that time the sounds were very different. On subsequent albums (Sourceful, Ummagumma, Atom, and chronologically, Obscured), Floyd was a gap trying to fill another gap. I'm not denigrating those albums at all, but you can hear Syd's ghost in the sound, the search for madness that had initially catapulted them, but which, after the debut, was nothing more than a shadow that led Floyd to live underground and suffer a commercial decline.

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Those years of searching finally bore fruit in 1971. Although Obscured by Clouds saw the light of day in '72, it was because he had been locked away for over a year. After the creation of this album, but before its release, came Meddle (something similar to Let It Be and Abbey Road), the first masterpiece of the Floyd sound as we know it. In Meddle, a maturity is already perceived, not merely semi-projected sounds. The creation of atmospheres begins, particularly in Echoes, where Roger's leadership begins to be noticed, making a string of spectacular, quite ambitious albums throughout the rest of the 70s—perhaps not more ambitious than before, but at least now with a much clearer sense. Likewise, David's solos became millimetrically precise, astute, sometimes lacking in sincerity and very cold, but fitting perfectly into the musical setting and enhancing it greatly. In short, the band sounded like a professional, mature band, creating sounds they had perhaps long intended but were only just now managing to land. While Meddle wasn't a commercial success, and Obscured sounded like a throwback in '72 (for reasons mentioned above), '73 would catapult them into history with a practically perfect, sublime album that would lead them to the glory they had been denied. I'm referring, of course, to Dark Side of the Moon.

 

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For many, it's the best album in the history of rock. With an overproduction that, without intelligence, would have ruined any other album, on this one, the sounds, the choruses, the laughter, the effects, Gilmour's sometimes theatrical guitar, Roger's obsessive bass playing, Clare Tory's impressive voice, all come together to create very disparate atmospheres. Neurosis, melancholy, despair, hope, eroticism... An overly ambitious work, as I've already said, but only by aiming for the sky can you achieve anything. With this work, Floyd managed to recapture something that was being lost from the heritage of the 70s: Rock as Authentic Art. And perhaps it was this work that consolidated what had been initiated by other bands in '66 and '67. If Zeppelin reigned supreme in the early years of the decade, things happened so that Floyd's prime arrived at the precise moment Led Zeppelin's best days were beginning to decline, resulting in a technical tie as the two best of the 70s.

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The Floyd already had what they wanted: fame and money to spare. After finding a style that bordered on progressive and psychedelic without being fully either of them, they maintained the same formula for a few years. It's not that prog was completely ignored until then; even DSOTM strikes me as an album that, more than good progressive, is very intelligent, well-produced and arranged pop. But it was this album that gave a tremendous boost to the entire movement. Despite the album's grandeur, in my opinion, it managed to shake up the musical world so much that progressive and classic rock ideas quickly became exhausted in their attempts to reach this "peak," subsequently leading to a musical decline. And I'm not talking exclusively about the band. Movements like Disco and Punk emerged as a counterattack to Prog, and we already know which genres triumphed. The album's influence, then, was not only musical, but sociological and cultural.

 

Anyway. After taking a break for the first time in six years and being overwhelmed by the thought that they would never surpass DSOTM, the Floyd released Wish You Were Here in '75. If it weren't for its tremendous insincerity, it might be my favorite album by the band. And maybe it is, depending on my mood and the weather. WYWH is a tribute to Syd Barrett, the old frontman they hadn't heard from in years and whom they had idealized. From that idealism was born a gem in which Syd's ghost can be felt, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, another work composed of multiple parts, as in the beginning, but with a very precise musical and intellectual idea. The band masterfully manages the tension, building a crescendo from the very first moment, placing millimetric solos, lyrics that, without being corny at all, are moving with their intelligent nostalgia… The rest of the album is also sublime, with the sharp lyrics of Waters, who already had absolute mastery of composition, and the mathematical solos of Gilmour, who tried to correct the compositional errors with his guitar. The result is sublime. The detail is that Syd appeared to them in the flesh in the recording studio. He was bald, fat, and without eyebrows. It took them a while to recognize him. When they finally did, they hugged him, invited him in, and showed him what they had from the album. The best-known legend says that after this, they politely asked him to leave the studio and never saw him again. Other rumors say that Barret continued to appear in the following days, even with his old guitar, until the security guard prevented him from entering, and he spent the entire day playing alone in the street. Whatever the truth, the fact is that the man they were paying tribute to had been kicked like a dog. That was Syd's second death, the symbolic one. And that hypocrisy and lack of loyalty taints even the impressive social critique they achieved with their next album, Animals. Incidentally, (before getting into this album), Barrett used his madness as an excuse to take delicious revenge for this betrayal, implying from the 90s onward that he didn't remember being the founder of any band and that he didn't even know who the hell Pink Floyd was (sometimes being crazy has its advantages; I personally don't think I would have forgotten).

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During the recording of Animals, the tension between Waters and the rest of the band grew alarmingly. Musically, it's not noticeable. The album is another of Floyd's highly ambitious works, based on Orwell's "Animal Farm" to critique social stratification, politics, armies and war, and the lack of action taken by the people in the face of oppression. The result is breathtaking: the music perfectly reflects the moods conveyed in the lyrics, ranging from the despair, anguish, and fear of the sheep; the anger, savagery, rage, and blindness of the dogs; to the obsession, ambition, arrogance, and greed of the pigs—sorry, politicians, pigs. The other third of the time, depending on the weather and my mood, this is my favorite Pink Floyd work.

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After another brief break, which Waters used to plan what he would consider his "masterpiece": The Wall. This time, why not say it, the most ambitious work of a band that is itself ambitious. The attempt at Rock Opera, which isn't very clear on the album but in the film, has many chiaroscuros. Waters is so obsessed with highlighting a vital process, but he forgets that he already did so successfully with DSOTM, and his convoluted nature this time makes the album have ups and downs. For a change, Gilmour rescues the work with his guitar and with the best composition on the double album, Comfortably Numb. However, the rupture is made. The tyranny with which Roger carries out the album makes the barriers insurmountable. And if the rest dare to put their name on the next album, Final Cut, it's an action I don't understand, except for the fear of expelling another member for an even more insane madness than the last time. Final Cut is a paradoxical name, and perhaps it wasn't a mere coincidence.

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After the lengthy trial that stripped Waters of the rights to the Pink Floyd trademark and after his expulsion (although some call it desertion), Manson, Wright, and Gilmour returned to being a leaderless band disguised as a democratic band on their next album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. In reality, David would take the band on his shoulders (meaning he established another dictatorship) to create Division Bell in the mid-90s. Once again, the refined sound, the precise solos, and lyrics almost as incisive as Waters's augured a new life. After P.U.L.S.E., his best live album, Floyd didn't breathe again until the brief reunion to welcome the 2000 anniversary in Egypt and later a reunion with Waters for LIVE 8, a performance that stole the show more than the event itself.

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Pink Floyd's legend, unparalleled music, masterful solos, concerts in unheard-of venues, four perfect albums in a row, and various crazy ideas transformed into genius survive. In addition to the many rumors following their brief reunion: a world tour, a new album, a concert on the moon, and other impossible things. But most importantly: experimental music with which they came close to perfection.

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Lineup: Roger (Syd) Barrett on guitar and vocals; Roger Waters on bass and vocals; Rick Wright on keyboards; Nick Mason on drums. In 1968, Gilmour joined the group on guitar and vocals for the recording of their second album, while Barrett left during the recording process by unanimous decision and irreversible insanity. And perhaps we should mention Clare Tony as the sixth Floyd for her masterful and unparalleled vocal performance on Dark Side.

 

By Corvan 

Sep/23/2007

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