Back in the day, I wasn’t much of a Pink Floyd fan. My tastes went more for hard rock, Led Zeppelin-style stuff, with some country rock and swamp rock thrown in. Pink Floyd was a little to psychedelic for me at first.
Over the years, though, they grew on me, as I gained enough wisdom to know talent when I saw it. Pink Floyd had already been around for a while, having formed up in London in 1965, making them officially part of the British Invasion in rock & roll. The first lineup included Syd Barrett on guitar and vocals, Nick Mason on drums, Roger Waters on bass and vocals, and Richard Wright on keyboards. David Gilmour joined the group in 1967, and the band began to gather listeners.
It’s hard to narrow down a Pink Floyd playlist, but I gave it my best shot; and be prepared, because, necessarily, all three parts of Another Brick In The Wall are included, and I only counted them as one song, so you get some bonus tracks this week.
Let’s get started.
Money (1972): This is kind of a rock take on the old Biblical warning that the “…love of money is the root of all evil,” noting all the bad things a lust for money can bring. That may be true, although I’ve been well-off and I’ve been broke, and I have to tell you, I like well-off much better. Ironically, this song and the album it appeared on, The Dark Side Of The Moon, sold like literal hotcakes, with over 34 million copies sold, and made Pink Floyd a lot of money, proving once again that capitalism always wins in the end.
Wish You Were Here (1975): From the album of the same name, this one has a darker origin. About the time the band was recording this album, founding member Syd Barrett was struggling with schizophrenia. Roger Waters was taking on the chore of songwriting, and this tune was partly about the band’s struggles with all this. In 2022, Roger Waters, who had based this song on a poem he had written about Syd, told podcaster Joe Rogan that this song was at least partially about Barrett; about that, Waters said, “And I do with he was here.”The again, there was… The Wall. 1979 was the heyday of the rock opera, including such far-reaching albums as The Who’s Tommy, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ, Superstar, David Bowie’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and Frank Zappa’s notorious Billy The Mountain. And then, there was Pink Floyd, with The Wall. To mark that, here are the three parts of the best-known bits of that work, Another Brick In The Wall.That was my idea to bring in these recordings of antique clocks, all recorded one at a time, on a portable tape machine, and then we transferred them all onto a multi-track tape, made them all tick and chime in sync. Pink Floyd liked that.
Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 1 (1979)
Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2 (1979)Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 3 (1979)Hey You (1979): Written by Roger Waters and a key part of The Wall, this one was actually about the breakup of Waters' marriage. He later said:Comfortably Numb (1980): Another Roger Waters work, this was recorded in 1979 and released as a single in 1980. That was the year I graduated high school, and as I recall, this song was getting a lot of radio play at night, making us young bucks feel all sophisticated when we blasted it out of the 20-ounce speakers in the back decks of our muscle cars. Waters claimed the song was about when he contracted hepatitis, and how the sedatives he was given to deal with the pain made his hands feel like “two toy balloons.”The Final Cut (1983): And, finally, this seems like a great last choice. This album, also called The Final Cut, was thought to be a sequel to The Wall, but it really wasn’t, although it was made up in large part of songs written for the 1982 movie treatment of that great Pink Floyd rock opera.Have any Pink Floyd tunes you like, that I missed? Let us all know.It's about the break-up of my first marriage, all that misery and pain and being out on the road when the woman declares over the phone that she's fallen in love with somebody else. It's a complete disaster, especially if you're someone like I was. I was flotsam on the turgid seas of women's power (laughs). Hopeless, really, I could do nothing but go fetal and weep. But the song is also partly an attempt to make connections with other people, to say that maybe if we act in consort, some of the bad feelings will go away. In community, there is comfort. The line, 'Hey you, out there beyond the wall/ Breaking bottles in the hall'- that is an exhortation to come closer where I live so we can help each other.
Pink Floyd is still putting out albums, amazingly, after well over half a century. Check it out. And, I’m sure you all have a Pink Floyd story or two as well – a concert, a party, you name it. Tell us all, as the comments, as ever, are all yours.
