Pink Floyd and Philosophy

But anyone with a copy of London Calling can tell you that it didn’t turn out that way. Depending whom you ask, the end of this musical idealism was either the violence at Altamont, John Lennon’s musical opt-out on the White Album’s “Revolution,” or perhaps the revelation—Joe Boyd’s or Curt Kobain’s, for example—that pop music for many is nothing more than a catchy tune or “pretty song” embraced without a clue to “what it means.”² For me, the wake-up call was on the local news one evening in 1978 (I think) as the Sex Pistols worked their way across the United States. Their call for musical anarchy was apt, for American airwaves once carried genuinely jarring, existential critiques of contemporary culture (think the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” or Simon and Garfunkel’s “Seven O’clock News/Silent Night”) or anthems for social equality (like “Respect”). But pop music had lately become bland and uniform. It seemed part of a corporate design to keep happy, uncritical consumers humming along (with Tony Orlando, Peter Frampton, or The Eagles) until the next advertisement. There were exceptions, of course, like Bruce Springsteen, Frank Zappa, and Punk’s American forebears. But pop music as a whole drifted in the 1970s toward light, happy, feel-good songs that even Archie Bunker might enjoy whistling. And then, at the end of the decade, when it seemed impossible for pop to become thinner and more inconsequential, it actually did. Zappa called disco a “social disease” and tens of thousands agreed when they frisbeed their Bee Gees albums into the flames at Chicago’s “Disco Demolition” in 1979.

But disco was not the only symptom of rock’s failed aspirations. According to many critics and music journalists, the bands most responsible for driving pop music into the ditch belonged to art-rock or progressive rock and were were more interested in Mozart than Motown. Bands like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Yes, and Genesis often eschewed the formalities of verses, choruses, and 4/4 beats and produced compositions featuring abstract and cryptic lyrics set to bizarre time signatures. In Yes’s epic “Close to the Edge,” Jon Anderson sang, “Guessing problems only to deceive the mention / Passing paths that climb halfway into the void.” Critics were at the edge of their patience. Disco, at least, had no pretentions of being more than music for dancing and (euphemistically) rocking and rolling.

For many, Pink Floyd was at the very top of the progressive rock pile. In the mid-1970s, it was riding high on the record-setting success of Dark Side of the Moon, and was proving with Wish You Were Here and Animals that it had mastered the art of long, elaborate, and meticulously produced songs that often ignored pop’s rules and conventions. By the end of 1979, the band had produced a second record-setting album, The Wall, and were poised to translate that success into film with Alan Parker and Roger Waters’s film adapation.

But that doesn’t explain why Johnny Rotten singled out Pink Floyd for that famous T-shirt. In fact, Pink Floyd climbed the charts as an exception to the perception that rock and pop contained no serious ideas or criticisms of culture or “the thin ice of modern life” (as Roger Waters put it in The Wall). Far from contributing to the post-Sixties musical malaise, Pink Floyd helped prevent pop music from becoming saturated with the soapopera soundtracks of “California Rock” or the grunting repetition of disco. So, if you were a musician seeking to stand out as the next big thing, there wouldn’t be much point in declaring “I hate Styx” or “I hate Disco.” Lots of people hated them, too. Much better to stick a safety pin through your cheek, call the Queen of England a fascist, and insult as many fans and music critics as possible. Johnny Rotten’s T-shirt declared “I hate Pink Floyd” because he (or perhaps his fashionista-handler Malcolm McLaren) figured that it would annoy the greatest number of people. He was right. In the 1970s, everyone loved Pink Floyd.

In the music trade, the album is one of the few for which “legendary” is not hype or exaggeration. Insiders will tell you that there’s a CD pressing plant in Germany that exclusively presses Dark Side CD’s, while nearly every article about the history of pop music (such as one I recently found in an in-flight magazine) will genuflect to its “591 weeks on the Billboard 200—a feat equaled by no other record in history” or point out that it continues to generates more revenue than major album releases by leading hip-hop artists today.⁴

The prism stamped the popular culture of the Seventies much as the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper stamped the 1960s. Both bands are British quartets who did their most famous work at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. And both perfected their craft over the course of several albums before creating sonic masterpieces that took very large musical steps ahead of their predecessors. One difference, though, is that it took Pink Floyd about six years to find its way to Dark Side after they first hit the airwaves (with the single “Arnold Layne”) in 1967. The Beatles needed only about four years to arrive at Sergeant Pepper after their first singles, but they did not have to grapple with the decline of their founder and main songwriter.

Syd Barrett first propelled Pink Floyd to success, but then quickly succumbed to ... something. The consensus holds that Syd was done in by a combination of lurking mental illness (perhaps schizophrenia) and an over-indulgence in LSD. But some (and some writing in this book) think that Barrett was more in control of his withdrawal than the acid-casualty story suggests. Everyone wants to be a rock star, right? We assume that anyone who opts out after a few singles, a well-received album, and appearances on “Top of the Pops” must have been derailed by something outside of their control. Maybe. But Syd had a way of seeing things differently, as his music suggests. Pending a more definitive biographical or cinematic study of his life, there will perhaps always be room to wonder whether Syd was at least content, if not positively relieved, to find himself no longer the leader of an up-and-coming rock band.

Whatever the truth about Syd, his bandmates had no doubt in 1968 that he could no longer effectively lead the band. His behavior and performances became unpredictable, and his personality and appearance changed dramatically. “Arnold Layne”’s producer Joe Boyd, seeing Syd for the first time after a few months at Club UFO, recalled being shocked to see that Syd’s eyes had suddenly lost their famous sparkle.⁵ The crazy diamond stopped shining and the songs he wrote for his band now seemed tossed off. One, Roger Waters and others recall, featured chord progressions that changed every time the song was played (it was titled, appropriately, “Have You Got It Yet?”). With live dates scheduled, and hopes high for success, the band recruited one of Barrett’s oldest friends, Dave Gilmour, to back up Barrett on stage with singing and guitar playing. But he soon replaced Barrett altogether. All of them—Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, keyboardist Richard Wright, and bassist Waters—began to write songs on their own.

Waters’s talents and passions as a songwriter eventually provided a new rudder and vision for the band to follow. But for a couple of years, the band floundered. Sometimes they traded in Syd’s penchant for psychedelic explorations like “Interstellar Overdrive” or “Astronomy Domine” (from Piper at the Gates of Dawn) for something more like Beethoven or Karlheinz Stockhausen. Atom Heart Mother, for example, sets the band against a choir and symphony. They also turned to modern electronic music, specifically the techniques of musique concrète for building compositions out of recorded sounds of everyday life. Sound effects and spontaneous recordings would become part of the band’s signature sound, but not before they learned the hard way (through “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” at the close of Atom Heart Mother, for example) that adding the sounds of dripping faucets and frying eggs to a recording does not automatically make it more interesting or compelling. The band even tried their hand at a singer-songwriter approach, writing threeminute, acoustic songs often for film soundtracks. Some of their contemplative songs for filmmakers Barbet Schroeder (More, The Valley) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point) would not sound too out of place on an early Crosby, Stills and Nash album.

Some thought that Pink Floyd without Barrett was doomed. Even their original managers thought so. The band’s future seemed precarious, especially on the double album Ummagumma, for which—White Album–style—they recorded songs as individuals, each controlling one LP side. Gilmour admitted later that his contribution was a picture of “desperation” and “waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together” in the recording studio.⁶

“Echoes” can be understood as something like Pink Floyd’s proof of concept—a demonstration that a fairly simple song with three verses and an instrumental break can be variously stretched, magnified, broken-apart, rearranged, and greatly slowed-down to create an exhilarating twenty-minute musical experience. “Echoes” ebbs and flows, and sometimes changes dramatically and suddenly. Yet it retains a sense of unity and purpose as it gradually circles back to its last, final verse.

Thematically, “Echoes” was a milestone, as well. Lines from the second verse—

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me—

laid the framework for what Roger Waters would later say was the political and philosophical question driving Dark Side of the Moon (and posed most clearly in “Us and Them”): can human beings identify and sympathize with each other, instead of antagonizing, mistrusting, or exploiting each other?⁸

Still, Pink Floyd remained in the shadow of The Beatles. “Echoes” nods self-consciously to’ “I Am the Walrus” (“I am he as you are me ...”) and “Across the Universe” (“... exciting and inviting me”). But after several months inside Abbey Road studios, they emerged with a new album that accepted the method of Sergeant Pepper and other so-called concept albums—that a collection of songs should intertwine and support each other as a thematic whole—and took things a few steps farther. Most concept albums of the early 1970s used an idea or concept, such as a rock star from Mars, or a deaf and blind boyprophet, to organize an album and tell some kind of story. But on Dark Side of the Moon, abstract concepts and ideas become more than tools. They themselves have become the subjects of the songs. Waters and the rest of the band stepped to the back of the stage—after Meddle, no photos of the band members appeared on major albums—to let the spotlight illuminate some of the metaphysical and phenomenological furniture of modern life, such as death, fear, time, alienation, and anxiety.

Syd continued to live in London and Cambridge and, for the first years after leaving the band, cross paths with his former bandmates. Both Gilmour and Waters continued to work with Syd occasionally and helped him produce two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (both 1970).⁹ After that, the band they fell completely out of touch with Syd until, some five years later, he turned up at Abbey Road studios while they were recording Wish You Were Here. Nick Mason recalled noticing a stranger kicking around in the control room—some bald, overweight man with “a fairly benign, but vacant, expression on his face.” “More than twenty years later,” Mason writes, “I can still remember that rush of confusion” upon being told that this seeming stranger was Syd Barrett, a man he remembered so differently “seven years earlier, six stone lighter, with dark curly hair and an ebullient personality.” One aspect of that “rush of confusion,” Mason admitted, was guilt. “We all played some part in bringing Syd to his present state, either through denial, a lack of responsibility, insensitivity, or downright selfishness.” ¹⁰

Regardless of how these and other feelings played out within the band, Syd is in plain sight in Dark Side’s lines about lunacy and estrangement (“if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes”). And he is the addressee of Wish You Were Here’s musical postcard that seems to ask, How exactly did things go so wrong?:

Did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war
for a lead role
in a cage?

“Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine” both describe the ugly guts inside the music industry’s beast. The protagonist in both is an individual, “a dear boy,” a “son,” a genius Wunderkind who is lured into the industry’s machine only to be caged, commodified, and controlled by executives happily “riding the gravy train.” Pop stardom, the album would have us believe, is something like a very nasty trick.

Barrett makes less of an appearance in “Animals,” but perhaps only incidentally. Waters’s main focus here is a quasi-Orwellian world inhabited by pacific sheep, backstabbing dogs, and greedy capitalist pigs. But he returns in The Wall as an amalgamation of Waters himself, “Pink” the fictional drug-addled, alienated rock star, and that once sparkling diamond that strolled into Abbey Road studios on June 4th, 1975. Syd’s legendary status was ratcheted higher by the album’s success and the film by Alan Parker in which Bob Geldof portrayed “Pink” in all his Barrett-like eccentricities and outbursts.

Syd had become a recluse and, as far as the music business goes, a has-been. Yet his legend and his talent continued to inspired musician as successful as David Bowie, Robyn Hitchcock, and Robert Smith, each of whom at different times emulated Syd’s attitudes, clothes, make-up, playfulness, and rock star magnetism. Lesser known artists remained fascinated with Syd, as well. Four years after Waters sang, “Nobody knows where you are,” the Television Personalities released their song, “I know where Syd Barrett lives.” In the 1980s, The Dukes of Stratosphear released two albums filled with Barrett-style songs and lyrics. Only the voice of Andy Partridge revealed that the Dukes were disguised former-punkers XTC wishing in their own way that Barrett were here.¹¹

By the 1980s, Barrett himself was living quietly with family in Cambridge. With rare exceptions, he was not talking. But the larger conversation with him, and about him, continued as Pink Floyd’s classic albums from the 1970s addressed Syd’s departure, his breakdown, and the lingering anxieties and disappointments of the resulting estrangement. The albums remain a sustained examination—alternately sarcastic, bitter, and furiously angry—of the realities and dangers of modern life that seemed to deprive Pink Floyd of a once dear friend and propel them into realms of international stardom, wealth, and commercial obligation that, judging from what happened after the 1970s, the band may not have really wanted in the first place.

There were, however, more arguments. Waters commenced his official solo career with The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (1984) and reasonably assumed that Pink Floyd no longer existed as a band or commercial entity. Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, however, saw things differently and carried on as Pink Floyd without Waters. After legal wrangling and recriminations in the press, the two factions eventually agreed upon terms that allowed Pink Floyd without Waters to continue—with A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994)—while Waters continued his solo career—including Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Amused to Death (1992), and his opera Ca Ira (2005).

Neither faction, even the most ardent fans are likely to agree, has managed to produce music that moves out of the shadow of the classic Pink Floyd albums or that covers new ground with the same originality. Pink Floyd (without Waters) continued to record sonically immaculate songs built largely around the warmth of Gilmour’s voice and the graceful architecture of his guitar playing. But something—more than Roger Water’s steady bass playing and occasional singing—was obviously missing. For Waters had taken with him both his sarcastic anger toward the tragedies and idiocies of modern life as well as his hopes that music might somehow illuminate, if not mitigate, these problems.

Once again, it turned out, Pink Floyd was faced with the prospect of making rock albums with buckets of talent and recording-studio know-how, but no overriding passion, vision, or axes to be careful with. The result pleased radio audiences and underwrote profitable tours. But the commercial success of post-1970s Pink Floyd seems unthinkable without the band’s classic work from the 1970s that remains the core of its live shows. The band’s newer material plainly recycles the riffs and sound effects, the saxophone and lilting female backup singers, that first debuted on Dark Side.

Waters’s solo work has perhaps the opposite problem. It has no shortage of musical ideas and critical stances on modern culture. But it also tends to either recycle classic Floyd musical textures (without Gilmour’s distinctive guitar and voice) or aims for new ones under the guidance of mainstream producers (like Madonna producer Patrick Leonard). Not unlike the postbreakup work of Lennon and McCartney, these separate musical projects seemed to lack the spark and creative tension that once pushed their collective work to places that no single leader or producer could have envisioned or planned.

In this regard, Pink Floyd’s artwork and visual imagery—the most famous designed by Storm Thorgerson—continues to be as suggestive and compelling as ever. The cover of The Division Bell presents a frozen conversation between two enormous steel heads that face each other silently and motionlessly. Like the cow on the cover of Atom Heart Mother, they sit in a meadow. This is Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett circa 1975—separated and not speaking, yet staring intently, in confused wonder. This is Waters and Gilmour circa 1985 (or 1995), firm in their resolve and antipathy, speaking to each other only through lawyers, yet unable to pull themselves away from their shared musical past.

Looked at in the right way, the two heads are also halves of a whole—a single face peering directly at us from beneath a steel mask or helmet, or perhaps a human heart that is at war with itself and frozen in steel. “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,” Gilmour sang (and Waters wrote) in the song “Wish You Were Here.” Decades later, the two halves remain locked in place, at least in the eyes (and ears) of ardent Pink Floyd fans who were tantalized by the momentary lapse of discord in the Summer of 2005, when the band reunited and performed in London. And at the tribute concert for Syd Barrett in 2007, though they did not perform together, both halves of the heart were present along with the many other musicians and fans for whom Syd remains a diamond that helps them keep their hearts intact and their hopes alive.

Well, punk has come and gone, and so has his name, since he now goes by John Lydon. And he might still hate Pink Floyd.¹³ But fans know that the standard complaints about the unthinking vacuity of corporate rock in the late 1970s has nothing to do with Pink Floyd. If punk music was all about rejecting authority, getting back to basics, paying attention to what you really feel and think and dream (and not what commercial interests tell you to what to feel and think and dream), then Pink Floyd was punk long before The Ramones and the Sex Pistols.

Pink Floyd never sounded punk because they embraced the sonic capabilities that EMI and other major labels offered them with state of the art studios and top-notch audio engineers. But that’s not to say that they sounded like most other progressive rock bands, either. They may have played the same stadiums as Genesis, Yes, or Styx, but they never aspired to be virtuoso instrumentalists or vocalists. Under Waters’s leadership, they had an ax to grind, but they sharpened it methodically and carefully—with the well-turned phrase, a spine-chilling sound-effect, or just the right thud from Nick Mason’s drums. They chopped away at the inauthenticity, alienation, and tragedy of modern life not with two-minute songs played at breakneck speed but words and music meticulously produced to reveal something, or at least share something with listeners, about the corrosive qualities of life and commerce that they saw from the inside of the music industry. The pen may not always be mightier than the sword, but the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd—as the essays in this book show—almost always turn out to be mightier and weightier than punk rock’s power chords.

The Four Lads from Cambridge

From Waffling to Meddling

The Crazy Diamond

Wish You Weren’t Here

Does Johnny Rotten Still Hate Pink Floyd?