Pink Floyd

Certain Songs #1567: Pink Floyd – “Comfortably Numb”

June 22, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Wall
Year: 1979

. . .

Hi, I’m Jim and I have a confession to make. I’m a big fan of Pink Floyd and I don’t like The Wall.

Oh sure, when it came out, I bought it just like everybody else, and was jealous that Larry got to go see the tour and enjoyed a lot of the songs on the radio. And I also appreciated the fact that it was comprised of a bunch of short songs instead of epics.

But. I. Just. Didn’t. Get. It.

Certain Songs #1566: Pink Floyd – “Sheep”

June 21, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Animals
Year: 1977

. . .

Obviously, things worked out in the end, but in the same universe where “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” took up a whole album side, the other side consisted of the other two songs they initially wrote at the same time in early 1974, “You’ve Gotta Be Crazy” and “Raving and Drooling.”

But, of course, it wasn’t to be, so instead those songs fueled the two concept albums that followed The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals. (In case you forgot.)

Certain Songs #1565: Pink Floyd – “Dogs”

June 20, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Animals
Year: 1977

. . .

It’s one of my favorite jokes in TV history — an admittedly throwaway gag on one of the most beloved sitcom episodes in history — but for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t even exist anymore.

Of course, I’m talking about the infamous WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away” episode, an episode that cemented the still-new sitcom as one of my favorites, even though the joke I’m referring to was more of a piece of character-building than it was part of the master plot.

Certain Songs #1564: Pink Floyd – “Wish You Were Here”

June 19, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wish You Were Here
Year: 1975

It was Live 8 when I realized it.

Somehow Ser Bob Geldof had talked Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason into to playing together for the first time in over two decades — shaking off or at least ignoring the humongous well of bad feelings that had accumulated in all of that time. It kinda felt like a miracle watching them. So after the requisite pair of songs from The Dark Side of The Moon, backup guitarist Tim Renwick starts playing the tinny guitar from the opening of “Wish You Were Here” — the conceit on the album being that someone is listening to “Have a Cigar” on the radio, wants to hear something else and while scanning the dial, lands upon “Wish You Were Here” (tough luck Pink Floyd Haters) — and Roger Waters addresses the crowd, because even he is caught up in the weirdness.

It’s pretty short, of course, but he talks about how much emotion playing with the other guys is raising inside of him, and dedicates “Wish You Were Here” to “Everyone who’s not here. Particularly, of course, for Syd.” Of course.

Certain Songs #1563: Pink Floyd – “Have a Cigar”

June 18, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wish You Were Here
Year: 1975

. . .

One of the more underreported things in 1970s Pink Floyd history is the obvious existence of what I call the “Pink Floyd Vocal Transmogrifier,” a handy device that transforms the vocals of anybody who uses it into the lead singer of Pink Floyd.

This is why, to the casual listener, it’s nearly impossible to tell if it was Roger Waters or David Gilmour or even Richard Wright singing on any given Pink Floyd song. And so in 1975, unsatisfied with the lead vocals that both Gilmour and Waters tried to lay on top “Have a Cigar,” they turned to Roy Harper, who was also recording in Abbey Road at the time, and asked him to have a crack at it.

Certain Songs #1562: Pink Floyd – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

June 17, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wish You Were Here
Year: 1975

. . .

I don’t really remember why — or exactly when — I chose to purchase Wish You Were Here as my first Pink Floyd album, though I’m guessing it was during the second half of 1978 or early 1979, and possibly at the behest of one prog-loving friends, at whose house I first heard it. I can only report its effect on me.

Which is this: not only is Wish You Were Here my favorite Pink Floyd album, my favorite Prog album and one of my favorite albums of the 1970s; it’s practically a desert island disc, to boot. And it pretty much was from the very start, despite the fact I was getting into it at exactly the same time I was getting into the Who, the Rolling Stones and punk rock.

Certain Songs #1561: Pink Floyd – “Brain Damage / Eclipse”

June 12, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Dark Side of The Moon
Year: 1973

. . .

The Home Office gave me all kinds of shit for only doing a couple of posts on The Dark Side of the Moon, figuring that it would be total and complete clickbait, and maybe even drive my readership into triple digits, but I told them to fuck right off, not because I have any kind of integrity, but I want to get to writing about Wish You Were Here.

Of course, if side one of Dark Side of the Moon was somewhat sparse in terms of actual, you know, songs, I’ve come to realize that side two is probably why it became so incredibly beloved.

Side two started off with the outlier “Money,” which not only somehow managed to be funky while sporting a 9/4 time signature, it also became an incredibly massive hit single — making it to #13 on the U.S. pop charts — no doubt benefiting from massive airplay on both sides of the AM/FM divide, with the album version (featuring another getting airplay on the free-form FM stations while the shorter single rose up the top 40 charts.

Certain Songs #1560: Pink Floyd – “Time”

June 11, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Dark Side of the Moon
Year: 1973

. . .

What is there to say about a behemoth like The Dark Side of the Moon? It’s been so incredibly ubiquitous for so incredibly long, it’s pretty much woven into the fabric of the lives of anybody who has listened to popular music for the past several decades.

So it really doesn’t matter what I think, does it? But I’ll tell you anyways: I’ve always found it a tad . . . overrated is the wrong word, so how about “undeserving?” And while side two is pretty much bulletproof, kicking off with with an unlikely hit single and closing with a piss-taking joke that’s still a meme all these years later, I’ve always been bothered the fact that are only two actual songs on the first side, bumping up against sound collages and the piano-led tone poem with vocal pyrotechnics which closes it.

Certain Songs #1559: Pink Floyd – “Echoes”

June 10, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Meddle
Year: 1971

. . .

Ping!

“Echoes” was where Pink Floyd became Pink Floyd for good.

Ping!

While there had been prog-leaning experimentation on both 1969’s Ummagumma and 1970’s Atom Heart Mother — and both records have their adherents, even though my favorite part of either record is the recursive Ummagumma album cover — to my ears, “Echoes” was the first time (and only time, if you don’t count “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”) they truly pulled off a side-long song. (Sorry, “Atom Heart Mother.”)

Certain Songs #1558: Pink Floyd – “The Nile Song”

June 7, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Relics
Year: 1969

. . .

The first Pink Floyd album I ever bought was, of course, Wish You Were Here, followed by Animals & The Wall (not Dark Side of The Moon, though, cos Joe owned that, and I had some issues with it, which I’ll explain in a couple of days), but at some point, I was curious about their early days, so I picked up a compilation called Relics, a compilation that originally came out in 1971, and was only released because their nervous record company was worried that Meddle was going to take a long time to make.

Relics was a strange beast, to say the least. Despite coming out in 1971, it didn’t have any selections from either Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother, rather it was an incomplete mismosh of Syd-era singles — and “Interstellar Overdrive,” (which is probably I bought it in the first place, to hear the legendary “Interstellar Overdrive”) — and non-Syd b-sides and album tracks from A Saucerful of Secrets and Soundtrack From The Film More.