Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Several of the eleven songs that would be recorded for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn had been in the group’s set list since at least October 1966, and possibly earlier. While the band’s live shows of the era were built around extended, often free-form musical excursions, the songs on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn are models of conventional, concise pop songwriting, albeit filtered through the musical sensibilities of Barrett and his band mates. In fact, when writing or speaking candidly on the subject, it’s the rare artist or performer who does not characterize their first album as a document of their live set. In contrast, it’s perhaps most accurate to suggest that Piper represented one side of the band. Syd Barrett seemed to understand this before the band was ever signed; in a January 1967 interview with Nancy Bacal of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, he admitted, “I think our records will be very different from our stage shows.” He added, “Listening to a gramophone record in your home or on the radio is very different from going into a club or into a theater and watching a stage show. They’re two different things that require a different approach.” And he was emphatic: “We think we can do both.”

  “Astronomy Dominé” opens the album—and Pink Floyd’s album catalog—in grand fashion. Voices effecting a “NASA Mission Control” vibe—actually Peter Jenner reading off the names of constellations and such, his voice filtered through effects—introduce the tune while Barrett lays down a stuttering, repetitive guitar figure. “I did the intro on the megaphone,” Jenner recalls. “That was just an excerpt from half a page of an encyclopedia-type thing about space.” Waters initially doubles the guitar part on his bass guitar. Richard Wright enters, mimicking Morse code on his Farfisa organ, and Nick Mason follows, hitting his floor toms with mallets instead of the more common (in rock context) drum sticks. After the dramatic introduction, dual lead vocalists (and co-composers) Barrett and Wright sing the tune’s space-themed lyrics in a deliberately icy manner.

  That dispassionate demeanor is merely the setup for the song’s chorus-after-a-fashion, a descending chord progression adorned by some near-falsetto, wordless vocalizing. As a template for the so-called space rock associated with Pink Floyd, “Astronomy Dominé” is a glorious introduction. The beginning moments of “Astronomy Dominé” are remarkably similar to a song by American psychedelic rock group the Electric Prunes. The B-side of a 1966 single, “Are You Lovin’ Me More (But Enjoying It Less)” reached #42 on the UK charts in 1966, so it’s reasonable to assume that Barrett heard the song before entering the studio to record Piper with Pink Floyd. Both songs feature an ethereal, foreboding introduction built around a single repeated note, and both songs build to a crescendo after the introduction.

  Curiously, when EMI’s American subsidiary Harvest Records reissued The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (packaged in a two-LP set with the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, as A Nice Pair), the studio version of “Astronomy Dominé” was replaced by a live version taken from Ummagumma, Pink Floyd’s hybrid live/studio double LP released in 1969; the studio version would thus be largely unavailable to American consumers until the CD reissue of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1987.

  A Syd Barrett song about his cat, “Lucifer Sam” again employs a descending guitar riff. It also features a keening Farfisa solo courtesy of Rick Wright. It’s among the most conventionally hard-rocking songs on the LP. Had Pink Floyd gotten a commercial foothold in the United States—and followed the American practice of releasing album tracks as singles—the catchy “Lucifer Sam” might have done well there.

  The first song recorded for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, “Matilda Mother” is among its most tuneful. Yet again, Barrett builds his verses upon a foundation of a repeated phrase of descending notes; in those verses, Wright’s Farfisa plays sustained chords that preview the approach he would develop more fully in the post-Barrett years. Close harmony vocals from Barrett and Wright add a dreamlike ambience to a song that already makes explicit mention of “wondering and dreaming.” Barrett’s lyrics combine idyllic images of childhood—fables of ancient kings—with something vaguely more sinister and foreboding: the fear and loneliness of perceived abandonment.

  The instrumental break in “Matilda Mother” features some impressive, almost bluesy organ work from Wright, while Barrett provides wordless vocalization that previews “Pow R. Toch H.,” a song that would also appear on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Though he holds off at the beginning of the song, Waters’s nimble bass work adds significant interest to Barrett’s rather simple melody. Mason’s drums are atypically low in the mix throughout “Matilda Mother.” Cutting the tempo in half, the song’s “outro” features some lovely three-part “ahh” harmonies, more single-note work from Wright, and—somewhat frustratingly—the opening strains of a lead guitar solo from Barrett as the song fades into silence.

  An LSD-laced version of a childlike sense of wonder is among the most oft-remarked attributes of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. (Though by most accounts, Barrett was the only member of Pink Floyd to take the drug.) Perhaps nowhere are those qualities so vividly showcased as on “Flaming.” With an opening that borders on the abstract, initially the song seems to be heading in a particularly dark direction. But a mere fifteen seconds in, the sound changes radically. While Wright plays a see-saw melody, Barrett trills his lyrics about blue clouds, unicorns, lying in fields of eiderdown, and games of hide-and-seek. (Childhood games were favored lyrical fodder for Barrett, who had explored the theme on “See Emily Play,” released two months before Piper.)

  If “Flaming” is a textbook example of anything, it’s Syd Barrett’s happy refusal to be constrained by the normal rules of pop song convention: the song has no chorus. Instead, it’s a series of vaguely poetic lyrical lines wherein the only rhymes are internal. After about one minute and forty seconds, “Flaming” dissolves into a collage of impressionist aural images, taking the place of what—in a “normal” song—would be the solo or instrumental break. After one more verse, “Flaming” resolves with a melodic ending, one so conventional that it seems almost to belong to another song.

  Sequencing of songs on a finished album is an important task; the manner in which tracks flow from one to the next is a critical part of achieving a unified effect. With that in mind, “Flaming” serves as the ideal musical gateway to “Pow R. Toc H.,” which opens upon a wild cacophony of whooping and other vocal effects set against a malevolent instrumental backing. Once that madness subsides, Richard Wright’s single-note piano excursions are laid atop an arrangement that feels like a theme to an American cowboy western. Mid-song the freakout returns—against some trademark descending note figures—and then the song fades into abstract, hall-of-horrors sounds. Barrett’s guitar works as an effect, while Wright adds spooky organ and piano lines. Waters’s hypnotic bass figure joins Mason’s tom-tom work—cymbals are all but absent on the song—and as the tune reaches its end, all of the instruments dissolve into a hazy oneness. In many ways, the wordless “Pow R. Toc H.” is the track on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn most representative of Pink Floyd’s live set; that the song’s composition is credited to all four band members underscores this fact.

  “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” is Roger Waters’s sole composition credit on Piper, and it displays a marked improvement in the bassist’s songwriting abilities over “Walk With Me Sydney.” With Barrett’s repeated “doctor, doctor” phrase serving as a kind of percussive device that aids and abets Nick Mason’s insistent, tribal drumming, “Stethoscope” is, for lack of a better phrase, one of the most conventionally psychedelic songs on the album. The lyrics are an early example of Waters’s growing fascination with medical and biological matters, themes he’d explore in greater detail on a collaborative 1970 album with Ron Geesin. And the band’s instrumental attack borders on the sinister, an approach Pink Floyd would also develop more fully on their albums right up to Waters’s departure in the mid-1980s. The title of “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” is an oblique reference to t
he New Testament (John 5:8); Waters would mine Bible texts once again—Ecclesiastes this time—for a new, extended Pink Floyd work in 1972 initially known as Eclipse. That project—minus the Biblical recitations—would eventually be retitled The Dark Side of the Moon.

  “Interstellar Overdrive” is, along with “Pow R. Toc H.,” the spot in which The Piper at the Gates of Dawn comes closest to Pink Floyd’s live shows. The band recorded more studio versions of this song than any other, including at least two for film soundtracks, one for Piper, and at least one for broadcast on the BBC. In perhaps another case in which Barrett drew influence not from American bluesmen of old but from current-day American West Coast rock groups, Syd Barrett was inspired to write “Interstellar Overdrive” after hearing the Burt Bacharach–Hal David song “My Little Red Book” in a hard-rocking, proto-punk cover version released in 1966 by the hip Los Angeles group Love.

  Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner had heard Love’s version somewhere—“maybe a record shop,” he suggests—and mentioned it to Barrett. “I said, ‘I heard this great new record.’ So, I started singing out a tune incompetently, and Syd picked up a guitar and said, ‘Oh, like this?’ and played his version of that. And that became ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ which was just that one riff, really,” Jenner says. “And then they improvised it from there on in. That was the absolute backbone of their initial year or eighteen months.”

  A largely improvisational work, “Interstellar Overdrive” varies greatly in its many versions. The recording made for Piper runs nearly ten minutes, an eternity for an album track in 1967. Barrett’s descending riff serves as the basis for free-form musical excursions on the part of all four members, guaranteeing a unique reading each time it would be played. Only by refraining that descending phrase could Barrett pull his band mates back into the structured part of the song. Though Pink Floyd would never be considered a jazz group (their tune “Biding My Time,” discussed in a future chapter, possibly excepted), the practice of playing a “head” (basic melodic theme), improvising at length, and then returning to the head is a common practice among jazz players. In the rock idiom, perhaps only the Grateful Dead would explore this approach in any kind of detail.

  Syd Barrett’s playful track “The Gnome” brings Piper back to its regular state: whimsical songs with fairytale-like lyrics. The story of one Grimble Gromble, “The Gnome” is perhaps the most dated track on Piper. It’s an exemplar of Barrett’s style, and shows a direction he would follow on his fractured solo albums. Notably, however, it would also represent a style from which Pink Floyd would distance itself once Barrett departed.

  Equally psychedelic yet more creatively successful is “Chapter 24.” Again dispensing with formal verse-chorus structure, Barrett’s fanciful tune features a hypnotic piano figure from Richard Wright (plus an overdubbed countermelody on Farfisa organ), with minimal guitar, and little or no drumming from Nick Mason. Roger Waters’s bass figure provides linkage between the song’s sections.

  “The Scarecrow” is built upon a growing set of clip-clop percussive figures, with free-form verses by composer Barrett. The singer rushes certain vocal phrases to make them fit into his (still quite nonstandard) melody. The brief song’s second half is given over to another Wright solo on Farfisa.

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn ends as it began, in remarkable fashion. “Bike” is another instance in which Syd Barrett dispenses with rules pertaining to phrasing, meter, and melody. The song’s deeply textured production is easily producer Norman Smith’s finest contribution to the album. The song itself runs under two minutes; the remaining minute and a half is filled with countless clocks being wound and chiming—yet another sonic idea that would be resurrected five years later on The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Time”—and truly bizarre treated vocals that presage Roger Waters’s “Several Small Species of Furry Animals Gathered Together and Grooving on a Pict” on Pink Floyd’s 1969 double LP, Ummagumma.

  According to research by Pink Floyd historian Glenn Povey, EMI session notes suggest that a Barrett song called “She Was a Millionaire” was recorded in April; no further evidence of the song exists. A few months later, a similarly titled song did appear briefly in the group’s live set: a September 1967 bootleg recording of a Copenhagen concert includes a song possibly titled “One in a Million.” Sung by Roger Waters, the six-minute tune did not surface as part of The Early Years.

  Pink Floyd would quickly return to the studio in late October 1967, beginning sessions for what would eventually become A Saucerful of Secrets, once again with Norman Smith producing. But the results of the initial sessions would take the form of “Apples and Oranges,” released as Pink Floyd’s third UK single. A relatively slight and self-consciously psychedelic number, “Apples and Oranges” would fail to chart in England, nor—despite the band gamely supporting it via multiple television performances—in the United States.

  No more successful was its B-side, “Paint Box.” But “Paint Box” would be significant as the first released Pink Floyd track with a sole Richard Wright songwriter’s credit. Wright’s tack piano is the song’s defining instrumental characteristic; the unique effect is achieved by pressing thumbtacks into the felt-covered hammers inside an acoustic piano; the resulting “metallic” effect recalls the feel of saloons in the American west of the late 1800s.

  Critical reaction to Piper was generally positive, though more than a few writers expressed their thinly veiled bewilderment at the music. “If you must call a group ‘psychedelic’—and admittedly labels are convenient—then it should be the Pink Floyd,” wrote a reviewer for the Detroit Free Press in November 1967. “This English group has gotten deep into the electronics of pop music and uses feedback and other effects knowledgeably. The album isn’t easy to listen to and you may not like it, but it shows you the far reaches of pop.” Reviewing the album somewhat belatedly, the February 1968 issue of American music magazine Hit Parader singled out “Interstellar Overdrive” and called it “dazzling” yet “two-dimensional,” and ultimately “about three and a half minutes too long.”

  Taken as a whole, the eleven songs on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the other singles recorded and released in 1967 are very much of their time. Released during the so-called Summer of Love when psychedelia was in full bloom—and before some of that scene’s darker elements would manifest themselves—it has nonetheless worn quite well in the more than half a century since its release. Speaking in a 2016 NPR radio interview (with All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen) about the “Arnold Layne” sessions he produced, Joe Boyd described the tune as playful and “almost folk, nineteenth-century . . . almost like schoolkids’ rhyming songs.” Boyd could have just as easily been commenting on Syd Barrett’s songwriting in general.

  Avowed Syd Barrett fan Robyn Hitchcock started making records with his first professional group, the Soft Boys, near the end of the 1970s. While he’s a wholly original artist with more than twenty albums to his credit, Hitchcock’s style owes an acknowledged debt to Barrett. “I think Syd Barrett was a magician,” he says. “Not just [his] words, but his way of writing a song with this very natural, almost nursery-rhyme [quality] . . . but also very unlikely.”

  Hitchcock remarks on Barrett’s unconventional use of melody. “He’d start a song in [the key of] E, and then he’d realize it was in A,” he chuckles, “but it didn’t sound forced.” And he turns a bit wistful when he thinks about Barrett’s relatively brief time in the spotlight. “While he was still ‘there,’ there was an incredible character personality coming off Barrett’s work, one which was more intense than most other people’s,” Hitchcock observes. “It’s almost as if he was just compressing all his life into two years. So it had a density like dark matter.” Hitchcock believes that Syd Barrett’s peculiarly original songwriting stood apart from other artists, who would tend to “write what they think they ought to write.”

  Along with the singles released in 1967, the songs on Piper sharply defined the music of Pink Floyd as ha
ving a particular nature and style; that style was undoubtedly the product of creative collaboration among the group’s four members, but the indelible and unmistakable fingerprints of Syd Barrett were perhaps the most enduring quality of the music Pink Floyd would make in this period. With only minor exceptions—and though the band didn’t quite realize it as 1967 drew to a close—Pink Floyd would never again produce studio work with the creative input of its leader. Instead, the group would begin a new chapter in its creative journey, one that was both a reaction to and an attempt to follow on with the work created with Syd Barrett.

  Chapter 3

  Happenings and UFOs

  Like most every other band of their era (and most others), the musicians who would eventually call themselves Pink Floyd started as a group playing “covers,” songs written by others. Various pre-Floyd aggregations included songs as varied as the jazz standard “How High the Moon” and “Long Tall Texan,” the latter recorded by the Beach Boys and others. But once Pink Floyd signed a recording contract, the band would never again play a cover. In a January 1967 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Roger Waters summed up the change in the band’s approach: “It stopped being sort of third-rate academic rock; it started being sort of an intuitive groove, really.”