The Wall (1979)

The other day I saw a social media post asking about albums worth listening to in their entirety, from beginning to end. I was surprised to find this double-LP behemoth among the most frequently mentioned, not least because I had spent the summer playing it that way and found myself crawling up the walls, so to speak. “Dreary blob of audio,” I noted one day. The other odd factor for me was that I never had listened to it that way in the first place—I never owned it (nor Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, for that matter, the other big burger from that autumn). I liked “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb” enough that I did not turn them away when they came up on the radio. In retrospect this is where the Roger Waters takeover was complete. Pink Floyd had looked to me like a bloat job anyway since at least Dark Side of the Moon, though I’ve since found some (not a lot of) interest in Wish You Were Here and Animals. Waters wrote every bit of the music on The Wall and also scripted the freaking 1982 movie directed by Alan Parker (Midnight Express, The Commitments). I saw it when it was new and it left me, er, uncomfortably numb from the assault of bleak paranoia. The grit felt ground into grime. The album is just a lot of weak sauce. I wonder if anyone mentioned to Waters that “Goodbye Blue Sky” scans way too close to “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday” in the clinch of the chorus. But the song also has some effective moments of tension, so all right. “Vera” harks to Vera Lynn, the iconic World War II UK singer who hit with “White Cliffs of Dover” and especially “We’ll Meet Again,” for a weird-toned moment of genuine nostalgia (I think) in this mess. “The Trial” strains for the Kurt Weill note. And I don’t know about you, let alone Waters, but I do not find children singing “We don’t need no education” to be at all a comforting sentiment. The only saving grace about this puffed-up operatic strudel may be that the libretto is essentially incoherent (except the occasional lines and dramatic readings about public school failings). You have to study The Wall, including a look at the movie, to get the heavy bring-down vibe. My recommendation is don’t study it. In fact, I think you can skip it altogether—I know, 50 years too late again. The one bright spot musically is David Gilmour who steps in, seemingly only when Waters allows it, and chips in some very enjoyable guitar solos and the best music here.

12. Pink Floyd, Ummagumma (1969) – Live LP

[2016 review here]

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.

Ummagumma (1969)

Pink Floyd's fourth album was a double-LP package, with one record devoted to live recordings of four songs and the other to individual studio projects by each of the four principals at the time (David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright). I've never much connected with the studio projects, which seem more aimless and empty ego-driven exercises of some kind. The live album is open to criticism too—the songs are simplistic, the playing rudimentary, and the recording not particularly inspired. Nonetheless, the performances mark a kind of fantasized rock concert ideal that appealed to me then, and still appeals to me now, and not as nostalgia. What I mostly like are the simplistic songs and the rudimentary playing, almost perfectly unself-consciously capturing the essence of a late-'60s rock concert, at least as I understand them from the stories. There's a lot of play with dynamics on all this music, as every song stretches out eight minutes and more. They bring it down to soft bass notes, softly brushed guitar chords, casual keyboard notes or chords, and drums barely tapped and poked at. Then it becomes loud again, with sound arriving like a tidal wave. In many ways they are inventing a kind of rock staple. The ideas are not yet fully developed but the excitement of their discovery makes it irrelevant. It's easy to imagine a crowd listening to this sitting on a filthy floor and zonked out of their minds. Among other things, it's excellent stoner fare. There is a drum solo, of course. Syd Barrett's "Astronomy Domine" gets the honors for kicking it off, but my favorite of the four songs is Roger Waters's spooky "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," a strange and doomy ride aboard a spaceship with astronauts who sound hypnotized. Their mission: see title. (Maybe this is post-HAL fallout from 2001?) Another song with a descriptive title, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" is a collaboration of all four of them. It reminds again of Pink Floyd's flirtations with certain tropes of horror cinema, also seen, for example, two years later in Meddle's opening track, "One of These Days" (you have to pick it out of the production but the monster voice there is saying "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces"). I'm assuming this is more of Roger Waters's lifelong anger management sorting-out? At any rate, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" only has the title phrase and some uncomfortable screaming to explain itself, which is no explanation at all. Mostly it's a moody arguably overlong guitar showcase. I am not making that argument, though I could do without the screaming. At worst, the set is merely quaint, lightweight, and silly. You bet a song like "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" is easy to mock. I swear it works, however. I've been listening to it all my life.

Syd Barrett

005 Syd Barrett
Ah, the travails of the rock mythologist -- this must be where I make my peace with Pink Floyd, not that any of them ever cared a fig for my torments. I can see now, from the Syd Barrett-centric view of matters (generally before my time, or at least, seen only fleetingly in peripheral vision for years), a story parallel to that of Brian Jones, Jonathan Richman, and/or Brian Wilson. Whether for reasons of mental illness, drug abuse, pathological proclivity to daydream, just plain low levels of motivation, or any combination of the above, all have in common that something of great interest flashed around them and then somehow went suddenly seemingly awry. This, then, must be chapters from "The Story of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

Pink Floyd, "Astronomy Domine" (1969) The live LP of the double album Ummagumma has always been my favorite more or less album by Pink Floyd. (The studio LP of the set on the other hand is just bad.) Recently, I was disappointed to hear drummer Nick Mason on the radio pronouncing the title with the dead schwa, as in "um" or "gum," which I suppose does make the most sense. For all those decades I had taken the side of the krautish (or so I thought of it, giving it an umlauted/"ü" kind of twist) and used the vowels sounds of "room" or "zoom." Another illusion shattered the more's the pity. (8:29)
Pink Floyd, "Astronomy Domine" (1967) From The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. (4:12)
Pink Floyd, "Julia Dream" (c. 1967) From bootleg All Movement Is Accomplished. (2:21)
Pink Floyd, "Julia Dream" (c. 1967) From bootleg All Movement Is Accomplished. (2:32)
Pink Floyd, "See Emily Play" (c. 1967) From bootleg All Movement Is Accomplished. (2:54)
Syd Barrett, "Dolly Rocker" (c. 1971) From Opel. I like how he sounds offended that he has to explain what the song title means. (3:00)
Syd Barrett, "Effervescing Elephant" (c. 1970) Twee, of course, but the willfully deadpan delivery undercuts that in a weird way. (1:04)
Syd Barrett, "Gigolo Aunt" (c. 1968) Heavy version, my favorite. Bad sound. From Magnesium Proverbs. (4:54)

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