Archive for roger waters

The Flaming Lips – Dark Side of the Moon

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , , on September 23, 2012 by David McInerny

Attempting to play a legendary band’s entire epic album was something of taboo in days past, but Dark Star Orchestra’s treatment of the Grateful Dead’s most famous live shows, and Phish’s rendition of Quadrophenia showed that it could be done. Nonetheless, tripping over the eclectic Oklahoman’s – The Flaming Lips – tackling Dark Side of the Moon gave me pause, and prompted several complete listens over the past few weeks as well.

It’s a serious success. In macro terms I would describe it this way: I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan, going back to the Syd Barrett days of the late ’60’s up through and including the post-Waters work of the mid – ’80’s. I still love pulling out Meddle, Saucerful of Secrets, Animals, The Final Cut, you name it, but … I rarely play Dark Side these days. It’s not that I don’t adore it; it’s just that it was so overplayed in my youth, and continues to be a rock staple with my sons, that I rarely feel the need to listen to it again. TFL’s version (2010) has awoken me to the genius of the music again. I haven’t been this excited about Dark Side since I first heard it on 8-track being driven to high school by my sister and her future (and present) husband.

The Lips are faithful to the songs as well as the mood, including the between-song bits of “wisdom” that were written and read by Pink Floyd’s crew and employees of Abbey Road Studio on the original album (“I’m mad, I’ve always been mad…). Wayne Coyne’s vocals are sympathetic to both David Gilmour’s smooth lead as well as Roger Water’s haunting voice, but the guitar playing and treatments are modern, eschewing the slick production of Gilmour’s style and implementing an edgy urgency that is all Flaming Lips. There is a lovely dark-chocolate chunk of a bass line that opens “Breathe” and runs all through “side one,” coaxing the listener, somehow sacrilegiously, to get up and move.

Coyne also slips in a sonic salute to a few other more obscure Pink Floyd songs along the way, including “Careful with that Axe, Eugene,” “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.” I’ll let you find them (hint – use headphones, but why wouldn’t you with Dark Side of the Moon?). I’m impressed with this disc, and when I read recently that the band is now toying with early King Crimson music well, stay posted.

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Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

Posted in Music with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2012 by David McInerny

Immediately following the multi-platinum juggernaut, Dark Side of the Moon, yet not too long before Roger Waters turned Pink Floyd into his personal, psychiatric catharsis, the band crafted the enduring gem, Wish You Were Here in 1975.

An unabashed nod to Pink Floyd’s founder and erstwhile leader-gone-mad, Syd Barrett, the album stands as the most poignant and listenable of the Floyd’s entire oeuvre. All the elements of the bands songwriting skills gelled, and by that I mean the long, spacey song templates of the early albums got the tightness and clarity that came out of Dark Side, and also the near synth-pop of Dark Side (save for David Gilmour’s epic guitar licks) were given some room to breathe, courtesy of the band’s earlier work.

As a result, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a nine-part song that intro’s and outro’s the disc, and encompasses two-thirds of the effort, never wanders or loses its tension and virtuosity. Sandwiched between this epic are three great rock songs, “Welcome to the Machine,” “Have a Cigar,” and “Wish You Were Here.” Roy Harper was used as lead vocalist on “Have a Cigar,” the only time other than Clare Torry on “Great Gig in the Sky” that the band went outside the unit for a lead singer. Harper sounds so much like Waters, though, that you need the liner notes to discover this tidbit of Pink Floyd trivia. (Another bit of trivia – Foo Fighters cover “Have a Cigar,” with Queen’s Brian May on lead guitar, and which appears on the soundtrack of the first Mission: Impossible film – it’s a highlight of that disc.)

Waters’ lyrics were never better than in 1975. He conjured the intense weltangst that came to the fore in Dark Side, but the words have a lingering maturity that disappeared after he careened into the lyrical silliness of The Wall. When he and Gilmour managed to actually collaborate, the results were unforgettable, and Wish You Were Here remains as vital and relevant 37 years after its release.

How I wish

How I wish you were here,

We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,

Year after year,

Running over the same old ground,

What have we found?

The same old fears,

Wish you were here.

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