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Pink Floyd was and
still is the premier space-rock band. Since the mid-60's, their music has
relentlessly toyed with electronics and all manner of effects to push pop
formats to there most outer boundaries. At the same time they have fought with
lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on
an almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. Despite their
astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the 1980's by decidedly
mundane power struggles over leadership and even ownership of the band's very
name. Since that time, they've been little more than a dinosaur act, capable of
filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular
recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot
disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they
were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and especially in the
studio.
While Pink Floyd is mostly known for their grandoise concept albums of the
1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after
they first began playing together in the mid-60's, they fell firmly under the
leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and
sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with
Roger Waters (Bass), Rick Write (Keyboards), and Nick Mason (Drums). The name
Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the fist names of
two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink
Floyd was a much more conventional act than the act that they would eventually
evolve into, concentrating on the rock and r&b material that was so common
to the repertoires of mid-60's British bands.
Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild
instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback, electronic screeches
created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as rolling ball bearings
up and down guitar strings. In 1996, they began to pick up a following in the
London underground: onstage, they began to incorporate light shows to add the
psychedelic effect. More importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic
gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements with catchy melodies and
incisive lyrics that viewed the world a sense of poetic, child-like power.
The group landed a recording contract with EMI in the early 1967 and made the
Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, "Arnold Layne," a sympathetic,
comic vignette about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic "See
Emily Play," made the Top Ten. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn, was also released that same year, may have been the greatest British
psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by
Barrett's songs, the album was a charming funhouse of driving, mysterious
rockers, odd character sketches, childhood flashbacks, and freakier pieces with
lengthy instrumental passages ("Astronomy Domine," "Intersteller
Overdrive," "Pow R Toch") that mapped out their fascination with
space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time: it was like no
other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far
more humorous, pop-friendly, and light-hearted that those of their subsequent
epics.
The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only
one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around the middle of 1967, the
prodigy began showing increasingly alarm signs of mental instability. Syd would
go catatonic onstage, playing music that had little to do with the material,
let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their
vision and material, the rest of the group was nevertheless finding him
impossible to work with, live or in the studio.
Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who
was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. The idea was that
Gilmour would enable Pink Floyd to continue as a live outfit: Barrett would
still be able to write and contribute to the records. That didn't work either,
and within a few months Barrett was out of the group. Floyd's management,
looking at the wreckage of a band that was now without its lead guitarist, lead
singer, and primary songwriter, decided to abandon the group and manage Syd as
a solo act.
Such calamities would have proven insurmountable for the 99 out of 100 bands in
similar predicaments. Incredibly, Pink Floyd would regroup and not only
maintain their popularity, and eventually become even more successful. It was
early in the game yet, after all; the first album had made the British Top Ten,
but the group was still virtually unknown in America, where the loss of Syd
Barrett meant nothing to the media. Gilmour was an excellent guitarist, and the
band proved capable of writing enough original material to generate further
ambitious albums, Waters eventually emerged as the dominant composer. The 1968
follow-up to Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets, made the
British Top Ten, using Barrett's vision as an obvious blueprint, but taking a
more formal, somber, and quasi-classical tone, especially in the long
instrumental parts. Barrett, for his part, would go on to make a couple of
interesting solo records before his mental problems instigated a retreat into
oblivion.
Over the next four years, Pink Floyd continued to polish their brand of
experimental rock, which married psychedelia with ever-grander arrangements on
a Wagnerian operatic scale. Hidden underneath the pulsing, reverberant organs
and guitars and insistently restated themes were subtle blues and pop
influences that kept material accessible to a wide audience. Abandoning the singles
market, they concentrated on album-length works, and built a huge following in
the progressive rock underground with constant touring in both Europe and North
America. While LPs like Ummagumma (divided into live recording and experimental
outings by each member of the band), Atom Heart Mother (a collaboration with
composer Ron Geesin), and erratic film soundtracks each containing extremely
effective music.
By the early '70s Syd Barrett was a fading or nonexistent memory for most of
Pink Floyd's fans, although the group, one could argue, never did match the
brilliance of that somewhat anamolous 1967 debut. Meddle (1971) sharpened the band’s sprawling epics into something
more accessible, and polished the science-fiction ambience that the group had
been exploring ever since 1968.
Nothing, however, prepared Pink Floyd or their audience for the massive
mainstream success of their 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon, which made their
brand of cosmic rock even more approachable with state-of-the-art production,
more focused songwriting, an army of well-time stereophonic sound effects, and
touches of saxophone and soulful female backup voices.
Dark Side of the Moon finally dubbed Pink Floyd as superstars in the United Sates, where it made #1. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprensible 741 weeks on the Bilboard album chart. Additionaly, the primary instrumental textures of the songs helped make Dark Side of the Moon easily translatable on an international level, and the record became (and still is) on of the most popular rock albums worldwide.
It was also on extremely hard act to follow, although the follow-up, Wish You
Were Here (1975), also made #1, highlighted by a tribute of sorts to the
long-departed Barrett, "Shine on You Crazy Diamond." Dark Side of the
Moon had been dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the cold sterility
of modern life; Wish You Were Here and Animals (1977) developed these morose
themes even more explicitly. By this time Waters was taking a firm hand over
Pink Floyd's lyrical and musical vision, which was consolidated by The Wall
(1979).
The bleak, over ambitious double concept album concerned itself with the
material and emotional wall modern humans build around themselves for survival.
The Wall was a huge success (even by Pink Floyd's standards), in part because
the music was losing some of its heavy-duty electronic textures in favor of
more approachable pop elements. Although Pink Floyd had rarely even released
singles since the late '60s, one of the tracks, "Another Brick in the
Wall," became a transatlantic #1. The band had been launching increasingly
elaborate stage shows throughout the '70s, but the touring production of The
Wall, featuring a construction of an actual wall during the band's performance,
was the most excessive yet.
In the 1980s, the group began to unravel. Each of the four had done some side
and solo projects in the past; more troublingly, Waters was asserting control
of the band's musical and lyrical identity, That wouldn't have been such a
problem had The Final Cut (1983) been such an unimpressive effort, with little
of the electronic innovation so typical of their previous work. Shortly
afterward, the band split up for a while. In 1986, Waters was suing Bilmour and
Mason to dissolve the group's partnership (Write had lost full membership
status entirely); Waters lost, leaving a Roger-less Pink Floyd to get a Top
Five album with Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987. In an irony that was nothing
less than cosmic, about 20 years after Pink Floyd shed its original leader to
resume its career with great commercial success, they would do the same again
to his successor. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nothing more than
moderate sales and attention, while he watched his former colleagues (with
Wright back in tow) rescale the charts.
Pink Floyd still has a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy
about their post-Waters output. They know their formula, they can execute it on
a grand scale, and they can count on millions of customers -- many of them
unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was
ever a member -- to buy their records and see their sporadic tours. The
Division Bell, Their first studio album in seven years, topped the charts in
1994 without making any impact on the current rock scene, except in a marketing
sense. Ditto for the live Pulse album, recorded during a typically elaborately
staged 1994 tour, which included a concert version of Dark Side of the Moon in
its entirety. Waters' solo career sputtered along, highlighted by a solo
recreation of The Wall, performed at the site of the Berlin Wall in 1990, and
released as an album. It was reported in the summer of 1996, that Syd Barrett
was lying ill in a Cambridge Hospital, unable or unwilling to regulate his
diabetic condition. Although, since then it has been reported that he is not
blind, that he has been doing much better since, and that he continues about
his life as usual.