By my lights you can altogether dispense with the studio LP on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma double-album package. Too much empty noodling from solo Floyds unbound. But the live LP stands as a certain template for how it was getting done in the psychedelic era proper: choice live cuts from different shows, four songs total, two per side, all coming in long (8:25, 8:47, 9:21, 12:51), and all recorded with faces figuratively turned to the night sky. I heard it first as a 15-year-old and consider it still my introduction to space-rock. Only two of the four openly evoke outer space (or the travels therof in the mind)—Syd Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine” (from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, an album generally more favored as a Floyd psychedelic peak) and Roger Waters’s “Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun” from their second album. It was the Waters song that caught me. The comically somber tone establishes the levels of heavy at 11, and the wandering, systematic build-up unfolds from splashy cymbals and a pattern on the toms to a doleful bass line and eerie space-wind keyboards. Ultimately the vocals come crawling in: muttered, semi-audible. They are worried about something, or they have been hypnotized and overtaken by a strange alien race. They seem to be piloting a vessel. “Set the controls for the heart of the sun,” one tells another in a calibrated emotionless tone. Does that sound like a good idea? What is happening out here in the solar system? There are similar unsettling notes in “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which started as the B-side of a single that basically went nowhere (“Point Me at the Sky”). The title is jokey (like who’s Eugene, brother?), and the music at first seems intended as a kind of gentle mountain meadow for the mind. Then they insert a few minutes of a horror movie into the middle. “Careful with that axe, Eugene,” someone says emerging from the layers, which is followed by wanton titanic screaming folded into and flailing out of the mix for a minute or more before we are returned to normally scheduled programming, the whole attack amplified and intensified for the meditative finish. It reminds me of the great “One of These Days” on the Meddle album, which is mostly an instrumental but someone wanted to add, “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.” Where does Pink Floyd get these terrifying ideas? They are like the bruises that make fruit almost too sweet. I’m going to guess Waters, whose dour and rancid views would come to dominate the band over the years, but I can’t say for sure. “Astronomy Domine” kicks it all off nice and hard with another nod to erstwhile mate Barrett. It’s a real rouser and a good start. The last piece, “A Saucerful of Secrets,” is broken down into four parts: “I. Something Else,” “II. Syncopated Pandemonium,” etc. Beware of long tracks broken down this way. Yes, it can work, e.g., Yes, “Close to the Edge,” but more often, as here, it does not. It’s nearly 13 minutes but I’m willing to call it the only flaw in this mighty majestic set, now unfortunately derided per Wikipedia by the band and others. Lighten up, folks. This is the good stuff.
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