Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Official and unofficial recordings from “The Man and the Journey” tour show that Pink Floyd did not take a break—or even pause for more than a few seconds—between the end of “The Man” and the start of “The Journey,” the second suite of songs performed live. Whereas “The Man” is conceptually based in the workaday life of a character meant to represent everyone, “The Journey” is a more abstract work, a musical representation of a mystical (some might say psychedelic) odyssey through an otherworldly landscape. Once again, the conceptual work is built around already existing material, including one number that dates back to Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn era.

  Fittingly enough, “The Journey” suite begins with “The Beginning,” otherwise known as “Green is the Colour” from the More soundtrack (fertile ground indeed for sourcing “The Man and the Journey” material). David Gilmour plays electric guitar instead of acoustic, and Richard Wright plays piano. With greater musical force and energy overall, the live reading leans more in a rock direction than its studio counterpart. Gilmour provides some “do do do” scat vocalizing that more or less doubles his lead guitar lines.

  As “The Beginning” reaches a crescendo, the mood changes suddenly; Pink Floyd is now playing the wordless “Beset by Creatures of the Deep,” otherwise known as “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” Roger Waters stays silent when he would customarily whisper “careful . . .” but still screams at the song’s halfway point. Gilmour contributes some additional scat vocals, once again using his lead guitar melody as a guide. The song fades out to the whooshing sound of wind.

  David Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way, Part 3” is notable as the only track in “The Man and the Journey” that never went by an alternate title. The live version is quite similar to the Ummagumma studio recording, save that here the entire band plays. Most existing live recordings of the song demonstrate that Gilmour—still a relatively new lyricist—may have written a vocal melody that pushed the limits of his voice; he strains badly to reach many of the high notes in the song’s chorus. Though some songs from the tour would remain in Pink Floyd’s repertoire well into the future, once the run of “The Man and the Journey” dates concluded in June 1969, “The Narrow Way, Part 3” would be retired from Pink Floyd’s live set.

  Pink Floyd may have called the next song “The Pink Jungle,” but to most listeners’ ears, it’s a faithful reading of “Pow R. Toc H.,” one of the few 1967 Pink Floyd tracks not composed solely by Syd Barrett (it’s credited to Barrett, Waters, Wright, and Mason). While the live performance of “Pow R. Toc H.” maintains all of the original’s mayhem, it does display Pink Floyd’s substantially more assured and controlled instrumental work.

  The recorded sound of someone—or something—careening earthward from the sky and into what sounds like a roiling cauldron leads the listener into “The Labyrinths of Auximines.” Similar to the instrumental midsection of A Saucerful of Secrets’ “Let There Be More Light,” the track features a hypnotic Roger Waters bass line and Nick Mason’s deliberate mallet work. Richard Wright conjures celestial tones from his organ, and Gilmour brings forth malevolent sonics using a slide on his heavily effected electric guitar.

  Three minutes of what is noted as “Footsteps/Doors” follows. By manipulating the joystick control of his Azimuth Coordinator, Rick Wright is able to control sound distribution through four speaker clusters situated about the concert hall. With the Azimuth Coordinator, Wright creates the “quadrophonic” audio illusion of someone walking down a hall, up stairs, closer, and farther away from the audience. Even once “The Man and the Journey” tour came to an end, Pink Floyd would continue to make use of these three-dimensional sound effects as part of their live shows.

  “Behold the Temple of Light” is an instrumental piece largely based upon previously unheard material. The opening strains of the tune are similar to the very beginning of “The Narrow Way, Part 3,” but the remainder of the tune is closer to the feel of the band’s More soundtrack material, albeit played here in a much more forceful and electric manner. Mason serves up multiple flourishes on cymbal and gong; Wright plays an organ solo that climbs and descends; Gilmour plays long, sustaining chords that serve more as rhythmic accompaniment than a solo. Eventually the song dissolves into near silence.

  “The Man and the Journey” ends in dramatic style with “The End of the Beginning,” otherwise known as the elegiac “A Saucerful of Secrets, Pt. IV: Celestial Voices.” Richard Wright’s majestic Hammond organ provides the foundation of the piece. As the song unfolds, Wright’s band mates join in one at a time, adding texture, increasing the volume and intensity of the performance. Roger Waters’s bass guitar leads the way, followed by Nick Mason (first on tympani, then on full drum kit), with David Gilmour’s electric guitar completing the instrumental scene. After an assured Nick Mason drum fill, Gilmour adds wordless vocals, Wright solos under the vocal line, and Pink Floyd plays “The End of the Beginning” to its conclusion.

  By the time “The Man and the Journey” tour wrapped, Pink Floyd had performed the work nearly thirty times, on stages in England, Northern Ireland, and West Germany. On a few occasions, the band would—after a brief thank-you—return to the stage to play an encore, a practice that had not generally been part of the group’s onstage set. Those rare encores generally featured older material such as “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (from 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets) or “Interstellar Overdrive” from Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut LP.

  Those who witnessed “The Man and the Journey” tour, or subsequent dates that featured parts of the work, were often impressed by its ambitious and somewhat unconventional nature, as well as its combining of visuals, extra-musical audio elements, improvisation, and paced structure. Bassist Lee Jackson of the Nice tried to describe the scene to NME’s Richard Green in January 1970. Referring to “Work” and “Teatime,” he said, “They had an amazing percussion thing with tea cups, nails, hammers and saws and things.”

  Lon Goddard—by this time a music journalist—saw Pink Floyd at the National Jazz & Blues Festival at Plumpton Racetrack in 1969, a show at which the band performed “The Journey” section of its live production. Having first seen the group with Syd Barrett at London’s Middle Earth in 1966, he could not help but marvel at the change in the band’s sound. “They were doing lots of stuff that was very patterned,” he says, “which to me was a vast improvement.”

  Reviewing the Royal Albert Hall date, Chris Welch described the scene this way in Melody Maker: “A silent, attentive crowd, joss sticks waving, a huge gong booming, and the Pink Floyd looning.” Praising the group’s gentle sense of humor, he noted, “The Floyd don’t claim to be great individual technicians, but between their collective playing and writing ability, and the secrets of the Azimuth Coordinator stereo sound effects system, they can create an unforgettable musical experience.”

  As a concert event, “The Man and the Journey” was an experiment that did indeed work. But when considered as a source of material and inspiration for a new studio album, it was found lacking. Nick Mason admitted as much when discussing the project forty-seven years later. “I think it was a bit too advanced, even for us,” he told the French-language Rock & Folk. “It worked onstage, but there was not enough stuff for people to buy it on disc.”

  Though “The Man and the Journey” would remain among Pink Floyd’s least-known works, its underground influence would persist. German rock group RPWL formed in 1997 initially as a Pink Floyd tribute group playing the latter’s most well-known songs to appreciative audiences across Europe. By 2000, RPWL had transitioned into playing its own original music, but the influence of Pink Floyd pervaded those songs. As a side project between release of its eleventh and twelfth albums, RPWL scheduled live dates in Germany and the Netherlands, setting aside the original material in favor of something quite different: a start-to-finish performance of “The Man and the Journey.” “I’m still impressed about how Pink Floyd began, and the roots of this music,”
says Yogi Lang, the band’s keyboardist, vocalist, and, with guitarist Kalle Wallner, founding member. The band wanted to respond to its fans’ repeated call to cover Pink Floyd live in concert, but wished to do it in a different way. Lang decided, “let’s do it really as a historic thing, and bring the people what they may not know.”

  More than forty years after its premiere, “The Man and the Journey” had lost none of its edge. As presented by RPWL, the work would confuse, entertain, and fascinate concert audiences. Lang laughs as he recalls reaction to “Teatime.” “Everyone there said, ‘What the hell are they doing? They’re doing a break! They’re doing a tea break on stage!’” RPWL’s choice of concert venues—theaters, much like the rooms in which the original work was presented—offered the intimate vibe necessary for “The Man and the Journey.” Lang contrasts that audience–band connection with Pink Floyd’s 1979–1980 tour for The Wall. “In ’69 there was a connection; you felt that they were playing for the audience, and the audience [was] reacting.”

  RPWL added some of its own character to the performances, most notably during the non-musical numbers like “Work.” Lang says that the musical textures the band brought forth were designed to complement the onstage visuals of him and his band mates with saws and hammers. “We thought of what the Floyd did: to make noises that combine this music with this work thing that isn’t nice,” he says. “The sound of work doesn’t sound ‘nice,’ this was a mixture of that.”

  The concerts were successful, and on October 28, 2016—two weeks before Pink Floyd released The Early Years with its own live recording of the show—the German group released RPWL Plays Pink Floyd’s “The Man and the Journey” on CD and DVD. Lang views the original 1969 concerts as a pivotal point in Pink Floyd’s development. “It’s the beginning of the new Floyd,” he says, “not only of the songs but also of thinking about how music should be and how music should be presented to people.” He sees a direct line between the conceptual presentation of “The Man and the Journey” and later works, specifically The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. And he notes that flow and structure became even more important for the band, even when a concept wasn’t central, noting that when one listens to the work, “you have this feeling that the first song is the first song, and the last song was the last song.”

  Ummagumma would be released four months after the final “The Man and the Journey” show at London’s Royal Albert Hall; the two-suite presentation would never again figure in the band’s live show, but much was learned through the experience of developing and playing “The Man and the Journey.” Its ideas about thematic linking, however tenuous, would inform many of Pink Floyd’s projects to come, culminating in 1973’s seamlessly unified work, The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Part IV

  Crumbling Land (1970)

  Chapter 14

  Love Scenes

  With “The Man and the Journey” and Ummagumma behind them, the four members of Pink Floyd could begin their next project, the soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. But the group had taken part in another soundtrack project of sorts mere days after wrapping “The Man and the Journey” tour. Invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation to play along to film footage of the United States’ Apollo 11 moon landing, the group traveled to BBC TV Centre’s Studio 5 in London. An hour-long episode of the program Omnibus titled “So What if It’s Just Green Cheese?” was broadcast at 10 p.m. on Sunday, July 20, 1969, minutes after the NASA lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility.

  For the broadcast, Pink Floyd would improvise five minutes’ worth of music, likely using some musical ideas that the group had been kicking around as potential song ideas. The improvisation—known among collectors as “Moonhead” and released officially in 2016 (as part of the Pink Floyd box set The Early Years 1965–1972) with that same title—has as its central motif a funky, minor-key Roger Waters bass line and melody. In revised and expanded form, the work would show up again two and a half years later as one of the band’s signature tunes, The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Money.”

  David Gilmour recalled the experience in a short 2009 essay for The Guardian. “There was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other,” Gilmour wrote. “I was 23.” Good-naturedly dismissing the piece as “a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues”—and ignoring its embryonic “Money” bass line—he wrote that Pink Floyd “didn’t make any songs out of the jam session,” and that the improvisation “didn’t have a significant impact on our later work.”

  In that same essay, Gilmour did recognize that in its own way “Moonhead” may have signaled the end of one Pink Floyd era and the beginning of another. He wrote that lyricist Roger Waters “was looking more into going inwards, going into the inner space of the human mind and condition. And I think [‘Moonhead’] was sort of the end of our exploration into outer space.”

  In late fall 1969, Pink Floyd set aside studio time—both in London’s EMI Studios and, for the first time, in Italy—for just over a month. The goal would be to create music for Zabriskie Point, a film by multiple-award-winning Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni. And like “Moonhead,” the Zabriskie Point soundtrack sessions would yield a landmark piece of music. This time, it would come from the band’s dark horse—keyboardist Richard Wright—and would find new life as part of another major tune in the band’s body of work, “Us and Them” from The Dark Side of the Moon.

  By the time Waters, Gilmour, Mason, and Wright arrived in Italy, they were old hands at the task of making music for films. Through their experiences with The Committee and More, the band had learned a great deal about the process of crafting music-to-order to fit the demands of a director. But Antonioni employed a more hands-on approach than did Peter Sykes or Barbet Schroeder. As Nick Mason recalled in Inside Out, “The problem was that Michelangelo wanted total control, and since he couldn’t make the music himself he exercised control by selection.” Thus began an arduous and ultimately frustrating back-and-forth between band and director; Pink Floyd would end up recording multiple versions of several tracks in hope of delivering whatever it was that the director wanted.

  The band went so far as to create multi-channel mixes of several songs, allowing Antonioni the ability to manipulate the channel faders in the studio control room, adding or subtracting instrumental parts that changed each song’s character to his liking. But even after going to such lengths, the director was not satisfied. In his biography of Pink Floyd, Nicholas Schaffner amusingly cites Roger Waters’s recollection of presenting tracks for the director’s approval. “Eet’s very beautiful,” he quoted Antonioni as saying, “but eet’s too sad.” Or, “Eet’s too stroong.” Waters summed up the experience as “sheer hell.”

  In the end, only three Pink Floyd songs would be used in the film. Instead, Antonioni selected an odd, seemingly random assortment of already existing tracks by artists including Patti Page (the 1950 hit single “Tennessee Waltz”) and “I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again” by high-lonesome folk singer Roscoe Holcomb.

  Adding insult to injury—though Pink Floyd did get its travel expenses covered—when the Zabriskie Point soundtrack LP appeared on MGM Records, the band was third-billed behind the Grateful Dead and Kaleidoscope. Notoriously unhip MGM Records president Mike Curb ended his LP liner note essay with a prescriptive message: “The film and the music are not really meant to be understood, but to be lived.”

  The three Pink Floyd tracks that did appear in the Zabriskie Point film and soundtrack LP are nonetheless worthy of note. “Heart Beat, Pig Meat” is based upon a hypnotic, cymbal-less drum beat from Nick Mason. Atop that repetitive, almost looped-sounding percussion, Richard Wright adds simple yet melodic single-note runs on his Farfisa organ. Neither Roger Waters’s bass nor David Gilmour’s guitar is audible on the track; additional interest is provided by flown-in bits of sound effects and dialogue—and even brief snippets of orchestra music—from the film. The version that appears
onscreen is mixed in mono and runs slightly longer than its LP counterpart; some of the found sounds are different between the two versions, as well.

  “Crumbing Land” is one of the tracks for which Pink Floyd would create multiple versions and/or mixes. As released in the Zabriskie Point film, the song has a West Coast folk rock vibe, with instrumental hints of the Grateful Dead, and massed high vocal harmonies—mostly courtesy of David Gilmour—that strongly recall Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Crumbling Land” would not have been out of place on the soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder’s More. The recording included on the soundtrack LP brings Roger Waters’s bouncy, insistent bass line forward in the mix, with Nick Mason tapping along, mostly on hi-hat. That version’s midsection has a dreamy interlude much more in keeping with the customary Pink Floyd sound; a gong signals a return to the main melody.

  Multiple versions of “Crumbling Land” exist, both released (including one on The Early Years) and unreleased (on bootlegs). Some run as long as nearly six minutes; perhaps the most interesting outtake is an unreleased version featuring a rock (electric, full-band) introduction; it’s essentially a different song, albeit one very much in the style of Buffalo Springfield, with Gilmour playing in a more “twangy” manner than is his usual style, and thunderous tom-tom runs from Nick Mason. After about a minute, the rock arrangement segues into the familiar folky section.

  The third and last Pink Floyd track in Zabriskie Point would be used for the film’s climactic and explosive final scene. Yet unlike “Crumbling Land” and “Heart Beat, Pig Meat,” “Come In, Number 51, Your Time Is Up” is not truly a new work. Instead, it’s yet another permutation of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.” For the film, Waters leaves out the title phrase (as he did when the tune was called “Beset By Creatures of the Deep” and part of “The Man and the Journey” set piece), and the band plays in a different key than on the original. Here, Roger Waters’s whispering is more prominent, as is David Gilmour’s wordless, high-register vocalizing. Waters’s bloodcurdling scream—and the accompanying musical mayhem—is used in the film to coincide with the highly stylized, slow-motion depiction of an explosion, and—even against the backdrop of so little of the band’s music being used in the finished movie—represents one of the most effective uses of Pink Floyd’s music on the silver screen.