Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Presumably inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus—the god banished to an eternity of rolling a large stone up a hill only to see it roll back down again—Richard Wright’s “Sysyphus” is a four-part work performed almost solely by its composer on keyboard instruments.

  Despite its popularity among the more innovative groups of the era (the Beatles, the Zombies, the Moody Blues, King Crimson), the Mellotron would not figure prominently in Richard Wright’s keyboard work for Pink Floyd. Each of the organ-style keys on the device triggers playback of magnetic tape; each tape features a recording of musicians playing the relevant note, and available sounds included flute, choir, classical strings, and the like. “Sysyphus, Pt. 1” is a notable exception for Wright, as it features the Mellotron as its central instrument. With a portentous tympani accompaniment, Wright layers multiple Mellotron parts to create a doom-laden introduction to his four-part suite.

  As the suite gives way to “Sysyphus, Pt. 2,” the tympani and Mellotron fade away, replaced by a piano solo. While the melody of “Sysyphus, Pt. 2” is not especially memorable, it does feature some beautiful piano work from Wright that displays his classical inclinations. Around the halfway mark of the three-plus-minute piece, Wright’s piano playing becomes more abstract and atonal; by the two-minute mark, he mixes jazzy, fleet-fingered right-hand work with fist-pounding in the piano’s lower register. A few abrasive scrapes of the piano’s internal strings and heavy doses of reverberation wrap up the track.

  “Sysyphus, Pt. 3” moves completely into abstract territory. Seemingly random stabs on the piano’s lower keys, occasional plucks at the instrument’s strings, and odd-time-signature percussion are the hallmarks of the track. Some odd sounds redolent of David Gilmour’s “humpback whale” guitar effect appear, but all available evidence suggests that Wright worked alone on the track. The cacophony builds to a noisy crescendo, and ends suddenly.

  Wright’s Mellotron returns for “Sysyphus, Pt. 4,” and features a minor-key melody similar to the sounds found on King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, recorded two months after Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. As the lengthy (near eight-minute) track unfolds, Wright adds vibraphone and organ. Just past the three-minute mark, a loud and violent stab of Mellotron punctures the listener’s reverie; rolling drums and crashing cymbals add to the musical maelstrom.

  Seconds later, another atonally played collection of instruments begins its work. Here Wright’s arrangement sounds quite like the more abstract sections of “A Saucerful of Secrets.” Most every instrument that has appeared earlier in the track returns once again, with little sense of order or structure. As the six-minute mark approaches, Wright reprises the low-register theme melody on Mellotron, again supported by tympani. The melody retards and ends with a dramatic flourish, aided by a strike upon a gong.

  Roger Waters’s solo contributions to Ummagumma’s studio disc touch upon both ends of the accessibility spectrum. “Grantchester Meadows” is a pastoral outing that would have fit seamlessly onto the More soundtrack. A recording of a chirping skylark extends across the entire length of the song, while Waters sings and plays gently picked acoustic guitar. His contemplative lyrics bear little of the acerbic social commentary that would become the defining characteristic of his later songwriting. An ode to the joys of an idyllic day outdoors, “Grantchester Meadows” represents a musical style that Waters would continue to explore on subsequent Pink Floyd albums (as well as on his outside project, the soundtrack to The Body). And the song’s guitar style would be echoed strongly on “Goodbye Blue Sky,” a track off Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album, The Wall, though in the latter case the guitar would be played by David Gilmour, not Waters. In 1969 “Grantchester Meadows” would be incorporated into Pink Floyd’s “The Man and the Journey” live performances.

  “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” represents Roger Waters at his most bizarre and self-indulgent. Not a song in any traditional sense, “Several Species” is merely five minutes of strange sound effects, most created by hand percussion and vocalizing. It’s very much a piece with the kind of tracks Waters collaborator Ron Geesin would create for The Body soundtrack. Here, Waters taps on a microphone, imitates various animals, wheezes and hums in exceedingly odd fashion, and eventually affects a faux Scottish burr spouting gibberish. When a reporter for the University of Regina Carillon in Saskatchewan, Canada, asked Waters about the track in a 1970 interview, he suggested the tune was an attempt to get inside the listener’s head. Waters agreed. “And,” Waters added, “just push him about a bit, nothing deliberate, not a deliberate blow on the nose, just to sort of mess him around a bit.”

  David Gilmour would provide the most musically accessible moments on Ummagumma’s studio record. His contribution to the album is a three-part track called “The Narrow Way.” A corkscrew-like tape-effect electric guitar opens the track, and then shifts quickly into a picked acoustic guitar melody. The track’s first section is a variation on the instrumental “Baby Blue Shuffle in D Major,” a track performed on the BBC in 1968. Gilmour’s multiple guitar overdubs—at least two acoustic guitars and one electric slide—create a sound reminiscent of a twelve-string guitar. Slide guitar would become a defining characteristic of Gilmour’s playing for the remainder of his career.

  The corkscrew effect returns in the later part of the song’s first section, joined by some additional effects-laden sounds. A final guitar figure that suggests a spring uncoiling signals the end of the first part of “The Narrow Way.”

  The second of three parts of “The Narrow Way” is built around a heavily distorted electric guitar figure, accompanied by hand percussion. As the hypnotic figure is played repeatedly, Gilmour layers more heavily processed guitar sounds atop it. Eventually, the distorted melody fades deep into the aural background, leaving abstract, atonal guitar sounds in its place.

  The third and final part of “The Narrow Way” provides the only part of Ummagumma’s studio disc that resembles that which most listeners think of as the Pink Floyd “sound.” A conventional song—one with lyrics, melody, verses, and chorus—“The Narrow Way, Pt. 3” presents a memorable song that switches between a minor key in its verses and a major key for its chorus. Stately, melancholy, and suitably mysterious and foreboding, “The Narrow Way, Pt. 3” showcases David Gilmour in one-man-band mode; he plays guitar, bass, piano, drums, and sings all of the tune’s vocal parts. Gilmour does an especially impressive job of mimicking Nick Mason’s drumming style, right down to his trademark tom-tom fills found on countless Pink Floyd tracks.

  Nick Mason provides a three-part instrumental work to close Ummagumma. “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” is, for most of its run time, a drum solo. But the brief first “movement” in the piece—subtitled “Entrance”—features a lovely flute solo played by his wife Lindy. The lengthy middle section (“Entertainment”) features odd bits of tuned percussion, gong, brief snippets of conventional drum kit work, and xylophone. A ghostly variation of Lindy Mason’s opening figure is recreated on a Mellotron, buried deep in the sonic mix. Were it not for the track’s mostly percussive nature, it could be considered ambient. Toward the end of the second part, the track conforms more to a conventional rock drum solo.

  Mason began his experiments with tape manipulation when creating “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” and the experience he gained working on the track would serve him and the group well on future Pink Floyd projects, most notably The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Released on EMI’s new Harvest subsidiary—home to more experimental-leaning rock acts—the double LP Ummagumma was budget priced to encourage buyers to pick it up. The album reached #5 on the UK album charts, doing equally well in the Netherlands. In the United States, Ummagumma made it only as high as #74 on the Billboard 200. Its experimental character may have made it ideal for airplay on FM radio stations, but the idea of releasing a single off Ummagumma was not even considered by EMI. Writing a decade la
ter in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Bart Testa described Ummagumma as “a failed but fascinating experiment in the construction of avant-garde rock.” In the pages of Inside Out, Nick Mason sums up the Ummagumma experience succinctly. “I don’t think we were that taken with it,” he writes, “but it was fun to make.” He goes on to note that the studio disc’s individual sections provided evidence that “the parts were not as great as the sum.”

  Quoted in Beat Instrumental in a 1970 interview, Rick Wright gave a quick summary of his thoughts on Ummagumma. “It was an experiment,” he said. “I don’t really know if it worked or not . . . but I like it.”

  While writing from a jazz-centric point of view (and for a jazz audience), Joachim Berendt wrote briefly about Ummagumma in the first English-language edition of his seminal work, The Jazz Book. Though less impressed with the group’s later work, Berendt—unlike many other music critics of his era—championed the importance of Pink Floyd’s 1969 double album. Ummagumma, Berendt wrote, “laid the foundations for a cosmic outer-space sound—that, in rock, had a similar function as Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra in jazz.” He went on to note (with some prescience) that the group’s work in that era would have “an immense influence on German rock groups,” and, adding a further bit of editorializing, “not always for the best.”

  While Pink Floyd was making Ummagumma, the band finally created a quasi-conceptual work for live performance. Constructed largely from existing material—and never seriously considered for release as an album because much of its material had or would soon appear in other forms—“The Man and the Journey” would be the band’s first attempt at linking multiple pieces of musical material into a cohesive, thematic work. Though record buyers would never hear “The Man and the Journey” in its original form until 2016, the extended work nonetheless pointed the way forward for Pink Floyd as the 1960s came to a close. And as it would happen, in the twenty-first century, one of those aforementioned German groups would release its own version of the work, calling it Pink Floyd’s “lost album.”

  Chapter 13

  The Man and the Journey

  In late March 1969, Pink Floyd debuted two new suites of music; no recordings exist of that performance, and the next scheduled concert was canceled. But the third planned show—April 14 at London’s Royal Festival Hall—would be recorded by an audience member. Most of the music performed on this Monday night wasn’t actually new; what was new was the manner in which it would be presented.

  Wanting to push the boundaries of stage performance in the direction of a show that was at once more structured yet still highlighting the group’s experimental tendencies, Pink Floyd went through its existing material and crafted two sets of music based around unified thematic elements. The concert debut of Pink Floyd’s “The Man and the Journey” has not been released officially, though film excerpts are included on DVD and Blu-ray in The Early Years box set, and audio of the entire performance circulates officially among collectors. But a later performance of “The Man and the Journey” is included in near entirety on The Early Years, allowing fans to experience a seminal work on Pink Floyd’s creative path toward The Dark Side of the Moon.

  The term multimedia was coined in 1966 by American visual artist and musician Bob Goldstein, and although the word had not yet entered into widespread use by 1970, in retrospect it succinctly describes the presentation that was “The Man and the Journey.” Rather than compose a clutch of new material, Pink Floyd set about arranging selected pieces into a form that took on a narrative of sorts.

  Much of the material that forms the two suites is instrumental, and audience members would not be provided with anything like a libretto to guide them through the putative narrative. And outside of an occasional “good evening,” “thank you,” or song announcement, neither Roger Waters nor his band mates directly address the audience between songs. So it is left to the music and onstage activity to convey the ideas the band hopes to put across.

  The first part of the live presentation, “The Man,” is a sort of distant cousin to the Beatles’ 1967 track “A Day in the Life.” Pink Floyd’s suite aims to portray an everyman’s typical day. The Roger Waters tune “Grantchester Meadows”—released on the studio disc of Ummagumma—serves as the opening. Retitled, as would be most of the material used for “The Man and the Journey,” for the purposes of the performance as “Daybreak,” the live performance begins with tape playback of skylark birdsongs. Roger Waters’s acoustic guitar forms the basis of the tune. The primary difference between the studio “Grantchester Meadows” and the live “Daybreak” is the latter’s more prominent featuring of David Gilmour on acoustic guitar and harmony vocals. Richard Wright reprises his Farfisa solo from the studio version. In all likelihood, although no film exists to verify this, Nick Mason remains offstage for the suite’s opening number.

  The gentle pastoral reverie of “Daybreak” is rudely punctured by the jarring sound of a whistle, summoning laborers to the start of their day jobs. This performance piece—one of a select few not based on existing material—is titled appropriately enough as “Work.” While Nick Mason lays down an insistent and forceful beat—one heavy on bass drum and hand-muted cymbal—Richard Wright plays all manner of clattering percussion, including vibraphone. Waters and Gilmour have put down their musical instruments, and instead have picked up various hand tools, including saws and hammers; rhythmic interplay and faux day labor ensues, with Gilmour and Waters assembling a table. On the Amsterdam tape, “Work” continues for four minutes; at the Royal Festival Hall five months earlier, the piece had extended over eight minutes; it’s likely that the group noticed audience attention flagging and shortened the “Work” period.

  Though it is not documented on the officially released Amsterdam concert tapes (nor on any of the tour tapes circulating among collectors), in the British tradition, “Teatime” follows “Work.” As part of “The Man and the Journey,” “Teatime” consists of Waters, Wright, Gilmour, and Mason taking seats onstage and being served tea by the band’s roadies. It’s quite possible that “Teatime” took place simultaneously to the second half of “Work.”

  “Afternoon” comes next. Though the studio recording of this song—eventually known as “Biding My Time”—would not be released until its inclusion on the 1971 compilation LP Relics, it was recorded in July 1969, just after the Ummagumma sessions were completed. Along with “San Tropez” and “Seamus” (both on Meddle), “Biding My Time” is one of the most anomalous songs in the Pink Floyd canon. Closer to cocktail jazz with a blues foundation than to anything in the rock idiom, “Biding My Time” is a lighthearted, wistful piece in which David Gilmour’s facility at playing so-called jazz chords is showcased. If Waters’s “Biding My Time” (or “Afternoon”) is a pastiche of non-rock styles, it’s a loving one, full of understanding with regard to what makes such an arrangement work.

  Both live onstage as part of “The Man” and on its studio release, the track builds in energy with each repeated verse (there is no chorus as such). And in a move that must have caught early audiences by surprise, “Afternoon” features Richard Wright on trombone. Gilmour turns up the blues feel of the song on later instrumental verses; by its conclusion, the song has shed all of its jazz feel, reverting to midtempo blues rock. But its playful nature remains intact.

  After the solid rhythm of “Afternoon,” a song that is (uncharacteristically for Pink Floyd) suitable for dancing, “Doing It” comes next. An instrumental, largely percussive work, “Doing It” is likely based upon Nick Mason’s “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Part 2: Entertainment)” from Ummagumma. Roger Waters adds percussion of his own, and David Gilmour provides occasional splashes of effects-laden guitar. Occasional, unintelligible pre-recorded voices are heard. Mason would employ similar techniques—a drum foundation with assorted sound effects and non-musical elements—for “Speak to Me,” the opening track on 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

  The opening strains of “Sleeping” may soun
d familiar to listeners acquainted with The Dark Side of the Moon. The recorded sounds of a ticking clock and heavy breathing provide the introduction to the tune. Eventually, Richard Wright’s vibraphone enters the sonic landscape, joined by David Gilmour’s eerie guitar lines. “Sleeping” represents the first point in Pink Floyd’s “The Man and the Journey” in which the band sounds much at all like its early improvisational works “Astronomy Dominé” and “Interstellar Overdrive.” Gilmour employs a guitar effect redolent of birds. Especially in its later moments, “Sleeping” bears some surface similarities to “Quicksilver” from Pink Floyd’s More soundtrack.

  Live onstage, “Sleeping” segues seamlessly into “Nightmare.” For only the third time in “The Man,” a song with lyrics is used to move the narrative along. “Nightmare” is an extended “Cymbaline” (also originally from the More soundtrack album), rearranged and extended. In sharp contrast to the quiet and understated acoustic studio version, the onstage “Nightmare” adopts a soaring, electric arrangement that provides David Gilmour the opportunity to showcase not one but two of his trademark expressive lead guitar solos. Richard Wright’s Farfisa solos—he takes two as well—have more in common with the studio recording, displaying a character that is both contemplative and exploratory. Nick Mason’s drumming is deeply expressive, and helps to guide the arrangement through its various parts that are in turn moody and exuberant. Even after “The Man and the Journey” set piece would be retired, “Cymbaline” would remain a central component of Pink Floyd’s live set for some time.

  An alarm clock rings, waking the piece’s putative central character from his dreams. The ticking of a clock is once again heard, signaling the beginning of yet another day for the Man. “The Man” thus ends with this short piece, titled “Labyrinth.”