PINK FLOYD Before The Wall: COME IN ROGER WATERS, YOUR TIME IS UP

PINK FLOYD Before The Wall: COME IN ROGER WATERS, YOUR TIME IS UP

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by

Dave DiMartino

It’s Miami sometime in the mid-60’s, I don’t remember exactly when. Been pumping my little red bicycle home from St. Lawrence Catholic School, a plain-looking concrete mixture of Jesus and scrawny nuns, little white penguins who still pop up swinging metal rulers in my Binky-Brownest dreams. I’m in a hurry because—get this—I don’t want to miss The Pat Boone Show. Lately Pat’s been straying from his creamcheese talk show format and popping up with some surprisingly hellhound programming. Last week, H.P. Lovecraft. Before that, Blue Cheer. This week, today at 4:30, Pink Floyd, whose dopey, psychedelic album cover has been staring up at me for weeks now at the nearest Discount Records. BUY ME, it said, I’M BETTER THAN VANILLA FUDGE. And I turn on the color TV and watch a Pink Floyd I can’t remember now. Did I like what I saw? Can’t remember, really, but I know I probably wentback to Discount Records in a few days to buy Anthem Of The Sun or Vincebus Eruptum by two bands who were GOING TO HELL FOR SURE and really knew how to play guitar.

Two years later, when money was less of a problem and I was taking chances on bands that would probably never play at the Sunday Afternoon Love-In at Greynolds Park, I saw a Pink Floyd album and bought that, less because I was “hip” than because it had a pink sticker on it that said SPECIAL BUY! CONTAINS TWO COMPLETE LP’S and money really wasn’t that less of a problem. And when I took Ummagumma home I played it over and over again, thinking about that quaint little Pop Band I’d seen on Pat Boone and how it couldn’t be the same band because this music sounded like what music must sound like in outer space, this Pink Floyd sang about Setting Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and Saucersful of Secrets. I liked it so much that two friends and I formed a band and called ourselves The Intergalactic Space Force and we tried to sound like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine and Terry Riley and Captain Beefheart and even Sun Ra, whose Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Vol. 2 had an even neater cover than Ummagumma and sounded just like we thought it would. And the only time we played that I c an still remember ended up with nine-tenths of our senior class walking out while the other tenth threw tomatoes and bagels at us. Pink Floyd wouldn’t have liked Miami either.

Inevitably, Pink Floyd changed. Atom Heart Mother was stuffy, loaded with what I would later come to regard as self-indulgence but at the time thought mere eccentricity, a “funny” album with cows on the cover and song titles like “Breast Milky” and “Funky Dung.” They’d made the big switch from outer to inner space, and even though “AlanV Psychedelic Breakfast” showed the same fascination with windowpane lysergia as Pink Floyd Past, it never really gelled, never really approached “Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Tdgether In A Cave And Grooving With A Piet” despite the equally cute title.

And with Relics, a reissue capitalizing on whatever small popularity Pink Floyd had managed, the Pop Band I’d seen on Pat Boone was reintroduced. At the time it seemed not so much a step backwards as a step sideways, a temporary detour from the depressingly orchestral pastures of Atom Heart and a welcome side-road into new territory where Syd Barrett made an essential difference. “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” were as sharp as British pop could come: image-laden, characterfilled, and as obviously psychedelic.as Jeff Beck’s guitar-blast intro to “Over, Under, Sideways, Down.” And with even more melody; like the best Who, like the Nazz and their “Forget All About It,” it hinted at a sophistication that bands like Cream and Big Brother were unknowingly seeking to bury behind their fat the time) novel walls of noise. There wasn’t much that could touch the Floyd/Barrett combination at its best; one band, Tomorrow, came close, but even their reissued album is as forgotten as the original was.

And where’s Syd Barrett? His postloonie Madcap Laughs and Barrett give some indication that he and his old band were heading in opposite,minimalist vs. maximalist directions, and of course his legend lives on. The few bootlegs circulating occasionally feature his “Scream Your Last Scream, Old Woman With A Basket,” and snobbish Floydophiles nod knowingly at each other, mumbling their if-onlies while dismissing the current Floyd as pale shadows of their former selves. Which is, of course, ridiculous.

That Roger Waters was coming into his own was never more evident on his and Ron Geesin’s Music From The Body, a film soundtrack with novelty farting/burping noises and much more. Waters’ scattered compositions, usually performed with as accoustie guitar backing, touched on themes he’d be dwelling on in much greater detail years later: the cycle of life, from infant to middle age and beyond; the rape of the landscape by industry; nervous anxiety; the futility of life, and Other self-directed topics that would, in later years, be dismissed as irrelevant by bands more concerned about fascist regimes and white riots.

When Meddle arrived invearly 1972, Pink Floyd were a better band—guitarist David Gilmour had especially improved, finally perfecting a style so obviously his own that Chris Spedding later parodized it in his “Guitar Jamboree.” But as listenable as Meddle was, only “One Of These Days,” with its frenetically sexual pulsings, broke any new ground. “Echoes,” the side-long showpiece on Side Two, attempted to merge Ummagumma’s spaciness with Atom Heart Mother’s deluded grandeur and only ended up being boring and much too long.

And when Obscured By Clouds followed, it seemed a holding action, an incomplete work crammed with pleasant filler and not much else. More, which I’d gone back and bought after Ummagumma, was simply a better soundtrack, the one I still listen to years later. I thought Obscured By Clouds was a boring record by a band who shouldn’t have been boring.

With Dark Side Of The Mopn a whole new generation of Pink Floyd fans emerged, intrigued by “Money” and thereby force-fed what are probably Roger Waters’ gloomiest lyrics ever. It all made great pop music, of course, and the irony of it—the LP’s success, the blind/bland acceptance of the keynote theme, life sucks and will make you crazy—makes Dark Side a great record on many levels, including sociological ones.

The multi-platinum success of Dark Side was all Pink Floyd needed to go off the deep end, taking two years to come up with the barely acceptable Wish You Were Here, a “tribute” to Syd Barrett that couldn’t conceal the fact that Roger Waters had nothing new to say. Melodies were weaker, andthe LP’s only good track, “Welcome To The Machine,” was about life in the music biz, possibly the lamest, least interesting lyrical concept there is. Problems were further compounded by the release of Animals, an ultimately tedious follow-up featuring the same songs the band had been performing in concerts two years previously: “Dogs was ‘You Gotta Be Crazy”, “Sheep” was “Raving and Drooling.” Sometimes I’d get drunk and play the part of the album where the dogs barked just to see what my dog would do; otherwise, I left it on the shelf. It’s probably the least interesting Pink Floyd album around.

With two-year gaps between albums and Waters’ inspiration at an apparent all-time low, solo LP’s by other band members were inevitabilities. Richard Wright, whose keyboards were such an integral part of Ummagumma and whose “Paint Box” was one of Relics’ best, released Wet Dream, a nondescript, occasionally pleasant LP that’s nothing very special. David Gilmour produced the better album, featuring the perfect encapsulation of the Waters/Floyd psychedelic existentialism all in one song title, Gilmour’s “I Can’t Breathe Anymore.”

And two years after Animals, The Wall cast things in an entirely different light.

[Next MonthForced to stay in Hempstead, Long Island in order to see Pink Floyd at Nassau Coliseum and have an actual opinion!]