Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  It’s pointless nearly half a century after the fact to relitigate Michelangelo Antonioni’s decision to use so little of what he had hired Pink Floyd to create for Zabriskie Point, but fans of the band’s work have for years compiled and shared all available unused tracks and alternate versions. Nearly thirty minutes’ worth of these appeared in 2016 as part of the massive Pink Floyd box set, The Early Years. While some of the recordings had circulated among collectors, others could be heard for the first time.

  The first Zabriskie Point outtake on The Early Years is the brief “On the Highway.” It’s nothing more than a retitled snippet of “Crumbling Land” that seems to end prematurely. “Auto Scene Version 2” is an instrumental featuring Richard Wright playing a pretty, chord-based melody on a harpsichord; a version including Nick Mason’s count-in and a brief announcement from the studio control room circulated among collectors for years under the speculative title “Country Song.” As the bootleg track ends, someone in the control booth can be heard telling Wright, “Okay, come hear it.”

  Despite its title, “Auto Scene Version 3” is a very different tune. Much simpler and more straightforward than most Pink Floyd compositions, it’s a boogie rock number that features a prominent and driving Waters bass line and a slightly jazzy organ part from Rick Wright that is redolent of Brian Auger’s Trinity.

  Long known among collectors—since its appearance on the 1972 bootleg LP Omayyad—by the (again speculative) title “Fingal’s Cave,” “Aeroplane” opens with the slowly unfolding sound of a gong, possibly tape-reversed. The whole band enters, with David Gilmour’s winding, heavily distorted guitar as the sonic centerpiece. Richard Wright’s overdubbed organ and harpsichord are low in the mix (another still-unreleased alternate mix seems to have some Mellotron keyboard sounds as well). “Aeroplane” is easily the hardest-rocking track from the Zabriskie Point sessions, and the uncharacteristically metallic number can be thought of in that sense as a musical cousin to “The Nile Song” from the More soundtrack.

  “Explosion” is still another version of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” complete with David Gilmour’s high-register moaning serving as a counterpoint to his initially subtle lead guitar lines. Roger Waters plays two notes an octave apart, and Nick Mason lays down a solid beat. Richard Wright’s organ provides an interesting melodic line in the song’s first half; after the crescendo, David Gilmour plays some lead guitar lines that are more conventionally rock-oriented compared to other versions of the tune.

  “The Riot Scene” is easily the most noteworthy previously unreleased track from the Zabriskie Point sessions. Known among collectors as “The Violent Sequence,” the short track is a stately piano melody from Richard Wright. Much unlike anything that had come before in the Pink Floyd catalog, “The Riot Scene” features only Wright on piano with a bit of sympathetic bass guitar by Roger Waters. The instrumental is unmistakably the basis—both in its verse and chorus sections—for “Us and Them,” a track that would appear (with lyrics by Roger Waters) on 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. As Nick Mason wrote of the Zabriskie Point sessions in Inside Out, “We quietly gathered up all our out-takes. There was sure to be some opportunity to use them in the future.”

  At just under two minutes, “Looking at Map” is a country-flavored piano melody with band accompaniment, a tune that once again hearkens back to Pink Floyd’s More sessions. David Gilmour provides some soothing do-do-do vocalizing; his electric guitar and Wright’s piano engage in sympathetic—if simple—melodic runs.

  Pink Floyd would record at least seven different tunes titled “Love Scene.” While none were included in the finished film, two versions (“Version 4” and “Version 6”) appear on Rhino Entertainment’s 1997 expanded CD reissue of the film soundtrack. More musical sketches or improvisations than actual songs, some of these—like “Version 7”—sound a great deal like parts of “The Narrow Way, Part 3” from Ummagumma. “Love Scene Version 7” features David Gilmour on at least two acoustic guitars, and possibly as many electric guitars. There is neither bass nor drums on the track, and percussion is minimal, featuring only a brushed snare.

  The melancholy “Love Scene Version 1” is built around a sustained series of organ notes from Richard Wright. Gilmour adds some ghostly, high-pitched electric guitar, applying echo effects to the signal.

  “Love Scene Version 2” is remarkably similar to “Version 1” save for the subtle addition of more guitar, vibraphone, and percussion. Confusingly, the melody of both “Love Scene (Take 1)” and “Love Scene (Take 2)” circulated for decades among collectors, among whom it was known as “Love Scene #4.” It’s a vaguely jazzy mood piece featuring Richard Wright’s piano and vibraphone.

  The hard-rocking “Take Off” is a one-minute, one-chord jam featuring Nick Mason’s pummeling drums, an exploratory Farfisa run by Richard Wright, a two-note bass line from Waters, and screaming guitar from David Gilmour. “Take Off Version 2” is a straightforward rock tune; it doesn’t rock as hard as “Auto Scene Version 3,” but it’s otherwise similar in its approach.

  “Unknown Song (Take 1)” circulated on the traders’ circuit for years under the speculative title “Rain in the Country.” Another multiple-guitar instrumental, it is very much of a piece with David Gilmour’s solo section on Ummagumma. But as it unfolds, the song provides additional interest in the form of Gilmour’s band mates joining him. The melody doesn’t go anywhere, but as a folk-leaning tune in the More tradition, it’s effective at setting a mood, and perhaps with Roger Waters adding lyrics, could have developed into a fully formed song.

  The Early Years’ “Crumbling Land (Take 1)” is similar to the unreleased “rock” version of the song discussed previously, albeit without the rock introduction. It’s also taken at a quicker pace.

  Still unreleased—even after the exhaustive The Early Years project—are two takes of one of the most unusual recordings from Pink Floyd’s Zabriskie Point sessions. At nearly eight minutes, “Love Scene #2” and “Love Scene #3” are also the lengthiest recordings from the Rome sessions. The tracks, likely different mixes of a single recording, both feature Wright’s organ and vibraphone creating a static, sonic landscape; the net effect is not unlike the opening moments of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from Pink Floyd’s 1975 LP, Wish You Were Here. The track anticipates Brian Eno’s ambient musical excursions of the 1970s as well as the synthesizer-based tone poems of German group Tangerine Dream. David Gilmour provides muted guitar textures, and Nick Mason supplies dramatic swells of gong. “Love Scene #2” (not to be confused with the now-released “Love Scene [Take 2]” discussed above) features wordless moaning and gasping—from Roger Waters and David Gilmour—explicitly simulating the sex act. At one point, just before some ecstatic screams, one of the musicians gasps, “Penetration!” The track ends with uncontrollable laughing as Waters comments on the session, “Fucking long three minutes . . . and I do mean fucking!”

  Though Michelangelo Antonioni was a darling of the film community around this time—thanks in large part to the success of his 1966 film, Blow-Up—Zabriskie Point was both a commercial and critical disappointment. The film’s overall personality sat between two styles: the art-house film that its director had hoped to make, and the American International Pictures–style youth-exploitation movies for which the Curb-led MGM often provided soundtracks. Still, some reviewers did take note of the effective use of Pink Floyd’s music in the film. Reviewing Zabriskie Point for Atlanta-based underground paper Great Speckled Bird, Steve Wise wrote of the “awesome, pounding, soaring music which accompanied that symbolic instantaneous blow-up of the bourgeoisie,” describing its sheer emotional impact and calling it “rock music at its best.”

  For its part, when Pink Floyd decamped Rome, Italy’s Technicolor Sound Services in late November 1969, the band believed its music would form the core of Zabriskie Point’s soundtrack. Some additional sessions took place back in London at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in mid-December, after which the band
considered the project complete. Speaking the following month to a writer for Beat Instrumental, Waters said, “We’ve done the complete score with the exception of a few bits of canned music.” Zabriskie Point, he said, “seems to be an excellent film.” In the same story, Richard Wright said, “Zabriskie Point should attract more offers, because working with Antonioni is starting at the top for us.”

  Once the film was released, Pink Floyd’s disappointment with the project was manifest. Speaking with a Pasadena, California, disc jockey in 1971, Nick Mason said, “it was a huge disappointment to us. There were things that we might have did which we really thought were better than what eventually went on.” Richard Wright chimed in: “I don’t know really what’s going on with that movie.”

  After putting its creative energies into making music to someone else’s specifications—and finding that work-product unused—it was once again time for Pink Floyd to begin work on an album of its own. But no new material was yet at hand. Ummagumma had been half live performance of older material and half experiments, and Zabriskie Point was a work for hire. And however effective it might have been in live concert, “The Man and the Journey” was a stitched-together suite of existing material. It had been several months since the band had added a new piece of music to its live show.

  With EMI/Harvest ready for another album, something had to give. In the end, Pink Floyd would do something it had never done previously (and for that matter, would never again do). The band would rely upon an outside composer for fresh ideas. But before embarking on that project, the members of Pink Floyd would put their energies into additional outside projects.

  Chapter 15

  No Good Trying

  In early 1968, mere months after Syd Barrett left (or was dismissed from) Pink Floyd, his management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew King encouraged him to begin work on a solo album. Upon Barrett’s exit from Pink Floyd, Jenner and King had cast their lot with Barrett, believing that the prime architect of Pink Floyd—and its primary songwriter—had the better potential for ongoing creative and commercial success. In a 1996 interview, Rick Wright recalled that the band’s managers “thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a breakaway band, to try and hold Syd together.” Barrett’s managers thought that his unschooled approach would combine effectively with Wright’s more traditional musical foundation. “I doubt if Syd could read music,” Jenner says. He had observed Wright’s strengths within the context of Pink Floyd. “Rick could read music; he knew what chords were. He was always the one who set the harmonies and things in the studio,” Jenner recalls. “If we said, ‘let’s have some backing vocals,’ he would be the one who would get the notes together for them.”

  That January, Wright and Barrett were sharing a flat in southwest London. “Believe me,” Wright told interviewer Mark Blake, “I would have left with him like a shot if I had thought Syd could do it.” But by most accounts, Barrett could not.

  Jenner had seen potential in the few songs Syd had written near the end of his time with Pink Floyd, though he was fully aware that the material was not of an especially commercial nature. “As his songwriting became more interesting, it also became more sort of weird and psychotic,” Jenner says. “It wasn’t what the record company wanted.” An attempt was made to get Syd—now a solo artist—into the studio. But early recording sessions with Jenner producing yielded little suitable for release; the producer would later admit that he had underestimated the difficulty of working with Barrett in his current state. Today, Jenner says that working with Syd reminded him of the electric trolleys he encountered as a child in postwar London.

  “You’d stand there in the fog and you couldn’t see anything,” Jenner says. “Trolley buses were silent; they were electric, so this light would come toward you out of the fog, and then it would disappear away again into the fog. And I always thought that that’s what had happened to Syd in the studio. Something would emerge from what he was doing, and we’d say, ‘Oh, that’s good! Can we get more of that, please? Can you do that again?’ And then he would go back into the fog. And then the next time he came out of the fog, it was something different.” Shortly after those abortive May 1968 sessions, Barrett returned to Cambridge and went under psychiatric care.

  By the end of the year, Syd seemed well enough to return to work on recording his debut album. The project was handed off to Malcolm Jones, the head of Harvest Records, EMI’s progressive subsidiary label. Sessions with Jones producing took place in April 1969, focusing on both new recordings and overdubs and edits to the 1968 tapes. Barrett enlisted the help of friend Willie Wilson from Jokers Wild, David Gilmour’s old band.

  “I knew Syd from when I lived in Cambridge,” Wilson recalls, noting that Barrett sometimes sat in with Jokers Wild. Once David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd, he, Wilson, and Syd all lived in close proximity to one another. “Syd just said to me one day, ‘I’m going into Abbey Road in a few days’ time; will you come and play drums on a couple of tracks?’”

  The handful of recordings in which Wilson took part would initially feature only him and Barrett at EMI’s Abbey Road. “It was a huge, cavernous studio. I had my drums, and Syd had his Telecaster.” Wilson’s friend Jerry Shirley—drummer for Humble Pie—was at Abbey Road as well. “I was a chauffeur,” Shirley says with a laugh. “You couldn’t rely on Syd to get himself there. They needed somebody reliable to make sure Syd got to Abbey Road. I had a car, and Willie had a license.”

  “After we recorded the tracks, it was then decided that bass was needed,” Wilson says, “So Jerry got the job.” “They needed a bass player and there wasn’t one,” Shirley recalls. “But there was a bass. So I picked it up and played it.”

  “But because of Syd’s erratic chord changes—and Jerry not being an actual bass player—he found it really hard,” Wilson says. He describes Shirley’s bass on those tracks as “a bit of hit and miss as far as the particular note he should be hitting.” Shirley recalls adding “percussion bits and pieces” for several tracks on The Madcap Laughs as well.

  Even though The Madcap Laughs sessions represented the first time Wilson had been in a recording studio, Syd’s loose style of playing didn’t present a challenge for the drummer. “Not having to follow a chord sequence, it didn’t really make a lot of difference to me,” he says. “Syd was fine rhythmically.” Comparing Barrett’s approach to meter with that of old blues men, Wilson says, “if it sounds right in your head, then you do it that way.” Shirley concurs. “That was Syd all over. He was obviously listening to a lot of blues when he was younger.”

  Barrett didn’t offer much in the way of direction for Wilson, leaving him free to sort out his own drum parts on the Jones-produced sessions. “I don’t seem to remember too much of anybody saying, ‘This is what you should do,’ or, ‘That’s what you should do.’ So I just played as I played at the time.”

  Later sessions involved overdubs to Barrett solo recordings; those featured three members of Soft Machine: bassist Hugh Hopper, keyboardist Mike Ratledge and drummer Robert Wyatt. These sessions, too, were fraught, as Barrett’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting, coupled with his mental instability, made communication and progress difficult. Though they would yield recordings for use on the final album, in general those sessions with Malcolm Jones producing didn’t go well, and by the end of May 1969, Jones had given up. Wilson says that Jones “found it a bit hard going; he couldn’t quite keep up with Syd, the way that Syd was. So Dave and Roger took over production on that.”

  Barrett had approached his old friend David Gilmour—then on holiday in Ibiza, Spain, the setting for the Barbet Schroeder film More—and asked him and Roger Waters to produce. They agreed, and scheduled overdub and recording sessions on spare days between live performances and post-production work on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma.

  On its January 1970 release, The Madcap Laughs would feature thirteen original Syd Barrett songs; the finished product was an attempt to organize the hodg
epodge of recordings Barrett made over the previous year and a half. Five of the finished tracks bear a Gilmour–Waters production credit; two others are listed as Barrett–Gilmour productions. Most of the remainder is sourced from the Malcolm Jones sessions of April 1969, with one track (“Late Night”) featuring a Jones-overdubbed take of a recording from the earliest sessions produced by Peter Jenner.

  Though neither Gilmour nor Waters had any official production credits prior to 1969, the band’s work on the More soundtrack at Pye Studios had given the pair a good deal of hands-on experience behind the recording console. Jerry Shirley says that by this time Gilmour “had already grasped what it took to be an excellent engineer and then producer. He was learning as he went. I’m sure that whole experience was a huge learning curve for him.”

  Unlike the Jones-produced sessions, most of the songs overseen by Gilmour and Waters would be solo performances featuring only Syd Barrett’s voice and acoustic guitar. Production duties, then, would have less to do with technical matters and more to do with marshaling a suitable performance from Barrett. Syd’s unwillingness to conform to conventional rules of song structure and meter meant that no two takes of a song were the same, so the idea of post-production editing-together of acceptable sections from multiple takes could not even be considered; Gilmour and Waters would instead have to coax several takes out of their charge, and select from among those.