The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And Tom liked to think that—recording their first album, in EMI’s Abbey Road studios, a wall between them and The Beatles, who were there fine tuning Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—Pink Floyd had peeked in on that hurricaning orchestral crescendo that breaks apart and brings to a close “A Day in the Life.” And that Pink Floyd got it. Like someone receiving the code to the understanding of all things. Pink Floyd would be not just a band but a brand, something that transcended their individualities: Pink Floyd would be like one of those alien creatures, like one of those extraterrestrial intelligences, not particularly interested in invading or destroying but content to float, in orbit. A celestial body that, had it been spotted by the Russians before the Americans, who elevated it to the level of Supernova, might well have been christened Comet Oblomov. A flying object, unidentified except for its name, which meant nothing.

  Pink Floyd, whose name had sprung from the fusion of the names of two bluesmen and, yes, the beginning of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” was very bluesy, and that of “Wish You Were Here” very country; but country & blues as if filtered through a teletransporter of intergalactic and bidimensional matter. Pink Floyd, who had lost their first leader—Syd Barrett, “aSyd” Barrett—on a one-way acid trip that left him with kaleidoscopic eyes like two black holes in the sky of his face. Pink Floyd, who had, without Syd Barrett, gone on to become a successful band and, in 1973, a universally consecrated cult band with The Dark Side of the Moon: music about how to go mad. And, not knowing what to do afterward, in 1975, and after several frustrated attempts (like a ridiculous project of recording an entire album with the sounds of domestic appliances and objects), Pink Floyd, after many hours of playing darts with a compressed air rifle or venting frustration with squash shots, had gone on to record Wish You Were Here—the perfect sequel to The Dark Side of the Moon. Music for someone who no longer knew how to come back from madness. Syd Barrett invoked again. The Crazy Diamond they wish were here. And (Tom had read and seen it so many times, in biographies of the band and in documentaries about the gestation of Wish You Were Here and its leftovers, which would be mutated and bestialized via the Moreau/Orwell method for their next album, Animals) wish granted. But—ah, as often happens with granted wishes in the best stories of genies or deals with the devil—not entirely how they wished or in their best interest.

  In the spring of 1975, the 5th of June, the band is in the studio celebrating David Gilmour’s wedding and suffering Roger Waters’s divorce and, after years of not being seen, Syd Barrett reappears in Abbey Road, while his ex band mates are recording the live requiem-suite of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” dedicated to him. And in the exact moment that David Gilmour sings the part that goes “Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far,” a door opens and Syd Barrett—there, near and not far—materializes to ask when it’s his turn to “put in” his guitar parts. And Syd Barrett no longer looks like the Lord Byron that he once was, but like a kind of Homer Simpson—yellowish skin, fat, bald, with the air of a zombie, his eyebrows shaved, stuffed into a white and dirty and wrinkled suit—whom Waters and Gilmour and Mason and Wright don’t recognize at first. Uncomfortable and shaken, they make him listen to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” to see what he thinks. Barrett limits himself to murmuring that “It sounds a little old, right?” And he adds, sounding almost anticipatorily like the enumerative and alienated Pink in his hotel room on Side 3 of The Wall, that “I have a color TV and a refrigerator. I have pork chops in the refrigerator, but the pork chops run out all the time and then I buy more pork chops. Until they run out.”

  Then, as he came, Syd Barrett goes.

  And his friends are left there to cry. And to record. And, with time, Waters and Gilmour think that that might have been the moment, after wrapping up Wish You Were Here (that in the beginning didn’t entirely win over the critics, that reaches number one in sales on both sides of the Atlantic when it’s released, and that time and perspective and distance elevate as their unanimous and indisputable crowning achievement), the exact and perfect time for the band to break up. The precise instant—from which there was no going back—to conclude their life cycle, with that ode to the omnipresent absent friend. And that way avoid the imminent ex-friendships resulting from the convulsive and revulsive recordings of Animals and The Wall and The Final Cut. To go, to let go, with those airs bottled in the fullest of emptinesses, the absolute and joyously sad emptiness of their lyrics and music. With that magic moment—at the end of “Welcome to the Machine” and the beginning of “Wish You Were Here”—when someone seemed to be trying to tune in a radio, the one in David Gilmour’s car. And you heard voices and a few bars of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. And suddenly all the sound drops, like a candle blown out for the birthday of an era. A pause that it took Tom many listens (staring intently at the needle above the grooves, trying to see what was happening) to grasp wasn’t a potential defect in his parents’ stereo equipment reacting to some secret frequency so that then, after the entrance of that vintage acoustic guitar solo, everything would climb again, like the highest of rising of tides.

  And all of it wrapped in the cover design of Storm Thorgerson, one of the patrons of the Hipgnosis graphics studio and someone who, for Tom, was like Pink Floyd’s fifth member—the graphic design equivalent of George Martin’s musical influence on The Beatles. Storm Thorgerson—official agent of the band’s image, in times when, as Thorgerson himself always pointed out with the pride of an artisan, “Photoshop didn’t exist”—had also achieved an insuperable pinnacle with his work on Wish You Were Here. Various tests and images to “represent absence,” the album’s diffuse theme, which doesn’t take long to impose itself with the force of something that’s no longer present but that you can’t stop seeing and missing. Like postcards sent nowhere so that nobody receives them and they’re returned to sender charged with new meaning: the swimmer run aground, the man in flames, the suspended diver, that red veil floating in the green and blue breeze of a forest under the sky, the clasp of robotic hands melting together in the desire never to part. Life after people.

  Every so often, less and less, but without ever really letting it go, Tom dreamed of another life in which The Silver River had been a success, in which they’d done collaborations with members of Pink Floyd, and had Storm Thorgerson among their ranks. And wasn’t it odd, maybe a strange sign meant for him alone, that the new Pink Floyd album, after so many years of silence and assembled now around Wright’s ghost, was named The Endless River? Then he woke himself up, searching for ways, while awake, to get as close as possible to that impossible dream.

  Tom had made a special trip—taking advantage of his honeymoon—to London, in 2005, to Live 8 in Hyde Park, to witness the Pink Floyd reunion. Roger Waters no longer had that caveman aspect of his youth (now he looked more like a kind of Mr. Hyde for a hypothetical version of Stevenson’s classic with Richard Gere as Dr. Jekyll); David Gilmour, far now from his beginnings as a long-haired weirdo, had acquired the intimidating look of a veteran yet still quite dangerous marine; Nick Mason was like a fugitive of the Monty Python troupe (following in the tradition where—after Ringo Starr and like Keith Moon and so many others—drummers are almost obligated to be oddballs); and Rick Wright retained his increasingly fragile melancholic air, like an actor/character in a decadent Edwardian novel, adapted by the BBC. That same Wright who, in 1996, had the gall to record a solo album, Broken China, about his wife’s depression, that was virtually a marital remake of Wish You Were Here, with a Storm Thorgerson cover that gave a wink, between mischievous and solemn, to the cover design of Wish You Were Here (again, that diver in the trance of his dive, perfectly immobile and vertical, posed like that, without tricks of photography) but that ended up looking almost like a discomfiting nervous tic, a falsification clumsily executed by the original artist. And it showed that both he and his bandmates were still unable to separate themselves from the specter of Barrett and the way that, time and again, his ghost—actual
ly a medium—invoked them. And invoked his Great Theme in Pink Floyd: mental disturbance as beautiful art. And they seemed so sad, so melancholic (Waters’s apparent and almost wild happiness had the unmistakable pathological quality of people desperate for the ephemera of happiness), so trapped by the sound of their past, which was the sound of Tom’s past and present and future. And, yes, they still sounded really good. So much better than any of the festival’s other participants. And then they played a song called “Wish You Were Here,” and Tom—standing amid thousands and thousands of concertgoers and on millions and millions of TVs—felt they were playing it for him alone. For Tom, who was a musician, but—his fantasies had been translated into reality in a rather oblique way—a musician belonging to a subgenre known as “news music.” A kind of avant-garde, in the end.

  An ex-member of The Silver River—who was now a millionaire TV producer—had reappeared in his life, contacting him in the studio where Tom worked composing advertising jingles, and proposed the idea of doing a “cool news program” and, in the process, the guy ended up seducing the mother of his son. An affair, which, though he didn’t say it and wouldn’t dare admit it, hadn’t bothered or hurt Tom all that much. Just the opposite, he now considered it the only ace up his sleeve, something he could use to control and keep the mother of his son in line, who, of course, felt no guilt with respect to him and the situation, but who did worry about what everyone else would say. So, threatening to submit him to a battery of psychological tests where “your autistic side” would be readily apparent, she’d managed to take Fin with her (and to attenuate her condition as adulteress but, to tell the truth, seeking a “more healthy and more abundant and more comfortable environment” so her son could grow up “wanting for nothing”). And, in the process, to establish a fragile and fraught truce with him, like the Cold War, like one of those wars that, in the opening minutes of the news, is always about to break out.

  And the “product” proposed by his ex-bandmate who made an ex of his wife was called New(s). And, among its special features, there was Tom—a live keyboardist who musicalized the news in situ. Like those player-piano piano players accompanying silent movies in the early days of movie theaters. So, on the screen, live and direct, Monday through Friday, Tom—doing as he was told—shot out mischievous winks and blind quotations and musicalized references for connoisseurs, while behind him, like on a Pink Floyd tour, images were projected. Airplane accident music, red carpet music, citizen protest music, bombed cities music, soccer music (Tom, after a few too many drinks, would tirelessly remind anyone in the vicinity, over and over, that the closing music composed by Vangelis for the end of the first version of Blade Runner was used over and over by TV sports programs; which is why what he did wasn’t that far away from the sci-fi progression), beauty queen music, someone going into a McDonald’s with a machine gun music, environmental catastrophe music.

  So, in the sign-off, in the moment when he says goodbye to everyone, after the weather forecast, when the news is starting to get old, when there’s only time for one final update, generally something “colorful,” Tom—by his own express wish, almost a personal request—had gotten to “musicalize” the death of Syd Barrett. And of Rick Wright. And of Storm Thorgerson. And Tom had always done it with those dissolving flourishes at the end of the final and ninth part of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” with which the circle came to a close. There, some Rick Wright improvisations over—both composed by Barrett—“See Emily Play,” the band’s second single that describes a girl sleeping in a meadow after having taken LSD; or sometimes, when he played it live, “Arnold Layne,” the band’s first single, which told the story of a man who spent his time stealing women’s underwear that were hung out to dry on a clothesline.

  Pink Floyd who . . .

  How was he going to transmit all of this to Fin, all these echoes and heratbeats, all this melancholic passion? With the charged and adolescent prose, packed with titles and names and styles and dates, of rock journalism—because all rock listeners are kind of rock journalists—in which he thought about Pink Floyd? Impossible. Useless. Idiotic. Not recommended. Besides, it was even possible that Fin, having listened to Pink Floyd since he was a baby without knowing who or what Pink Floyd was, had absorbed all of it—in the same way that Tom had subliminally absorbed The Beatles when his parents listened to them—and that he understood Pink Floyd even better than Tom did. And no: Tom wasn’t ready for that sort of a revelation. And the mother of his son, no doubt, would get really upset when Fin told her that “Papi started to talk about Pink Floyd all the time and it seemed like he was talking to himself.” So, better, as Tom puts on Wish You Were Here as background and surface music, tentative close-ups, partial zooms: to give Fin (under strict supervision, and so that his first dose of “conscious” Pink Floyd enters more through his eyes, with a little help from our friend Storm Thorgerson) everything contained, like a jack-in-the-box, inside the Immersion Box Set, Ceci n’est pas une boîte. So that Fin could tear into it the way he rips open the envelopes containing his beloved Golactuses.

  Sometimes, at the end of the weekend, when Tom returns to the empty flat and gets into bed, he discovers that Fin has left behind, between the sheets or under a pillow, a Golactus to keep him company in his absence. The Golactuses are small plastic and collectable aliens, arrayed in a complex system of castes and powers and colors and textures. They come in envelopes, two per envelope. Fin has, like, two hundred of them—all the models from all the planets. And the other day he said, in the voice of the narrator of Life After People, that “maybe the Golactuses are real extraterrestrials for real and seriously, infiltrating homes across the Earth, waiting to be reanimated, zap!, by an invisible ray from a distant galaxy and to take over . . .” In the same voice that, as Tom enters the living room with his Wish You Were Here box set under his arm, Fin says: “Papi, the phone is making a weird noise.”

  And there is something that all true Pink Floyd fans don’t dare admit openly, but that, with the door locked and the blinds drawn, so nobody sees or hears it, they think all the time in whispers: it was lucky that Syd Barrett had gone mad and had left the band almost without knowing what he was doing, lost forever in the sweetness of the acid. Because in light—in the glimmers—of what you hear about the band’s exceedingly venerated debut and Syd Barret’s 1967 farewell, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a Pink Floyd fronted by a lucid Syd Barret would’ve been a very different Pink Floyd, much easier to fit in a category with other bands. A Pink Floyd with simpler and funnier songs. A more childish and playful Pink Floyd. A Pink Floyd much happier to be Pink Floyd. A Pink Floyd not in conflict with its past and its present and its future and who never would’ve recorded Wish You Were Here or all those songs about the horror vacui of being a dead rock star still radiating light. A Pink Floyd that—for the children of Tom’s generation—would never have functioned as the most precise and perfect ambient music in times of divorcist futurism: the arguments and the sounds of doors opening and closing between tracks on Pink Floyd’s albums a distraction from the other shouts and other slamming doors in the houses where the Pink Floyd albums played.

  And there was never a more futuristic time, Tom thinks, than his past, his childhood.

  Suddenly, everything was scientific and fictitious. TV was overrun with black and white shows and series with spaceships and faraway planets and twilight zones where there’s always someone who, on their own, realizes that they’re not alone or that they’re more alone than ever. The first golden glimmers of the genre, with cosmic adventurers and Martian princesses and atomic paranoia, with hapless individuals who grow or shrink or transform into something else, had opened up time and space (in that decade between 1965 and 1975; because decades, Tom had always thought, actually begin and end in the middle of the decade) for some strange years, mixed, frontier, borderland years. Times when nothing was entirely clear, when terrestrial computers went mad, and extraterrestrial presences never revealed themselves to a
ged astronauts who died only to be reborn on their return trip home.

  Tom had gone to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time because of his parents, who’d bought him a ticket and left him there, promising to come back and get him at the end of the movie. And Tom wasn’t the only spaciotemporal orphan for those two hours and forty minutes.

  2001: A Space Odyssey had become the perfect movie for parents to deposit their kids at and where those kids would then be submitted to the radioactivity of unsolvable mystery. A movie that began with prehistory and ended with the future at the far reaches of the universe. And, ah, there was that moment when the simian, more man all the time, threw the tapir bone into the air and it turned into a spaceship and Tom, with time, learned that was called an ellipsis; a name that, of course, sounded so much like the title of a song or an album by Pink Floyd. And Tom also knew that Stanley Kubrick had contacted Pink Floyd to see if they would let him use music from Atom Heart Mother (1970): number two in Tom’s pinkfloydian ranking, also his second favorite cover, which Storm Thorgerson had defined as the most perfect “unpsychedelic non-cover.” No temptation to deform its image or to add a green and phosphorescent glow to the animal. “Just totally a cow” that nobody can stop looking at and where everyone, almost desperately, tries to find a hidden message, a transcendent truth.