| Pink Floyd rose from the ashes
of an otherwise forgotten
London band, Sigma 6, in 1965.
Syd Barrett, Rick Wright, Roger
Waters, and Nick Mason toyed
with various names, including
The Meggadeaths, before
settling on Pink Floyd, inspired by American blues artists Pink
Anderson and Floyd Council.
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| Despite their astral image, the group were brought down
to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles
over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very
name. |
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Since that time, they've been little more than a dinosaur
act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but
offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day
staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of
the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.
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While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandoise concept albums of the 1970s, they started as
a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s,
they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write
and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters
(bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so
far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and
Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were a much more conventional act that the act into which
they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the
repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.
Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental
freak-out passages incorporating feedback, electronic screeches, and unusual, eerie sounds created
by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In
1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; onstage, they began to
incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to
compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the
haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the
world with a sense of poetic, child-like wonder.
 The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn
, released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt.
Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming funhouse of
driving, mysterious rockers ("Lucifer Sam"), odd character sketches ("The Gnome"), childhood
flashbacks ("Bike," "Matilda Mother"), and freakier pieces with lengthy instrumental passages
("Astronomy Domine," "Interstellar Overdrive," "Pow R Toch") that mapped out their fascination
with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink
Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and
light-hearted than those of their subsequent epics.
The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded
under Barrett's leadership.
Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of
mental instability. Syd would go catatonic onstage, playing music that had little to do with the
material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and
material, the rest of the group were nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the
studio.
Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in and Syd Barrett left shortly after. It was reported in 1996 that Syd was lying ill in a Cambridge hospital, unable or unwilling to regulate his diabetic condition.
The 1973 release of Dark Side Of The Moon
finally broke Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it
made #1. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of
the Moon spent an incomprensible 741 weeks on the Billboard album chart. Additionally, the
primarily instrumental textures of the songs helped make Dark Side of the Moon easily translatable
on an international level, and the record became (and still is) one of the most popular rock albums
worldwide. more
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