[MUSIC PLAYING]
In his mixed opinions and maxims, Frederick Nietzsche writes,
"Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.
The stage of life at which a philosopher found his doctrine reverberates through it.
He cannot prevent this.
However far above time and hour he may feel,
thus, showpanhowers' philosophy remains the reflection of ardent and melancholy youth.
It is no way of thinking for older people.
And Plato's philosophy recalls the middle thirties
when a cold and hot torrent often run and roar toward each other
so that a mist and tender little clouds form.
An under favorable circumstances and the rays of the sun
an enchanting rainbow.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That's an interesting preamble to our show today,
as devoted to the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd.
I've been promising a Floyd show for some time now,
and listeners have been writing in urging me not to put it off.
The day has come because my brother Tom Harrison is in town.
You may remember him from a show I did with him on the year 1910,
a few years back.
Tom is a professor of literature at UCLA,
where he also regularly teaches courses on rock music in the music department.
This year, he taught a course on Pink Floyd,
so I have him with me in the studio today to share his expertise on this band with us.
But first, let me explain why I began with that aphorism in Nietzsche.
I don't know whether what he writes about age and philosophy is true across the board,
but I've always felt that it's true about Pink Floyd.
This is a band that, as it evolved through the decades,
continued to give expression to what I think of as the state of mind of adolescence,
broadly understood as the age of alienation,
bewilderment, inwardness, transformation, and a hopeless longing for love.
No one puts adolescence to music like the Floyd,
or let me put it differently,
because a lot of very bad rock music is simply uncultivated adolescent raving.
I'll rephrase and say, "No one puts adolescence to music with more adult-like maturity,
lucidity, and merch virtual musical virtuosity than Pink Floyd."
Repeat. No one puts adolescence to music with more adult-like maturity,
lucidity, and musical virtuosity than Pink Floyd.
I say that with unbounded admiration because it takes true musical genius to do justice to adolescence in the realm of art.
No stage of life is more complex, various, and emotionally fraught than adolescence,
and no one does it better than the Floyd in my view.
Welcome, my son. Welcome to the machine.
That is the machine that wants to crush the nation,
adolescent soul, which has to learn how to fight back against the world.
For me, that is the essence of Floyd, a music that fights back against the machine.
Tom, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Robert. Pleasure to be here.
I start our show on Pink Floyd with a track from wish you were here, the album,
in the early '70s, and it's in Mediasides in a certain way.
Do you think that there's something about the rage against the machine that encapsulates the essence of Pink Floyd for you?
Oh, certainly. But that's what I might call the second Floyd.
The first one was adolescence in all its positive,
wistful, optimistic spirit.
When Pink Floyd was led by Sid Barrett, say from '65,
when they banded together, Sid Barrett was the last to join,
and he was also three years younger than Roger Waters.
But nevertheless, he believed he was the singer and the songwriter.
Until 1968, that was quite different Floyd from the one you started us off with.
And this wish you were here, as you can tell from the very title,
is already a lost adolescence.
And the way I read that second Floyd, which is without Sid Barrett and Roger Waters,
and David Gilmore come to the rise to the top, is a post adolescence, really,
that largely bemoans the loss of the dreams that the 60s children so deeply believed in.
So who was Sid Barrett and why did he not last with the Pink Floyd longer than he did?
Well, the simple answer is that he did too much acid.
I started doing acid with very readily available in Cambridge,
where the boys were from, and Sid started at 19,
and was very experimental, so he used to do trip after trip.
And clearly had also a type of genetic predisposition to mental imbalance,
and found himself unable to perform with any sort of methodical rigor,
and such an improviser that the band eventually had to kick him out.
He became a huge liability, and that's when they replaced him with the more well-known guitar player,
David Gilmore, officially in '68, Sid was fired,
and David had been playing with the band in place of Sid on stage for about a year before that.
A lot of people believe that rather than being fired, Sid Barrett just went out of his mind,
there was no longer able to be an active member of the band.
Oh yeah, that's why he was fired.
He lost his mind and was fired because of it.
I think that Roger Waters comes back to indirectly, very often in his lyrics,
some residues of guilt perhaps for having forced him out,
but he literally used to sit on stage staring at the audience.
Sometimes not even pick up his instrument by mid-67 forwards.
So that's the first pink Floyd.
What we're hearing here is a second, then of course Roger Waters,
the leader gets pushed out of himself, pushed out, or he says he's quitting,
and it doesn't think that the other three boys can carry on without him,
but that pink Floyd makes as much money, at least on the concerts,
as the pink Floyd of the Wall and dark side of the moon.
So is there a distinct difference in the Floyd music with Sid Barrett and after Sid Barrett?
Oh sure.
The lyrics are totally different.
It's psychedelic, space rock, which gets chiseled in carve thereafter,
because interestingly Sid was a painter, a student of painting,
while Roger Waters and the others were architecture students.
So without Sid's very expressionistic splashes of color,
throughout the music, the compositions become much more highly structured,
and no one will change even in a performance, as opposed to the very daring,
and frankly unheard of style of pink Floyd back in the 66-67.
Can we hear a few examples of Floyd with Sid Barrett?
Sure.
Why don't you play a little piece of Interstellar Overdrive,
which is from the first album, and this is the kind of song that they would play
at these all night raves and psychedelic clubs in London,
where everyone was on acid, including them, although not all of them,
because Roger Waters apparently only did it a few times.
And these were very improvisational, so it became known as a space rock,
and people would invent the way of dancing to it.
[music]
I'd say a lot less architecture there than you get later, huh?
Later, David Gilmore calls it psychedelic noodling.
He wasn't participating in it, but you'll hear a lot of things that wouldn't have happened later.
It's very dissonant, it's very chromatic, the way Sid Barrett's playing the guitars
diametrically opposed to the way David Gilmore played it later and became famous for.
The keyboard player, Rick Wright, has got this oriental scale.
The power base of Roger Waters is keeping it going, and this song that could drag out 20-30 minutes,
and did regularly every day.
Maybe we can give a listen to a second track that you brought along,
I don't remember what the title is.
Well, this one is interesting to show you, or at least to show the listeners,
that it wasn't just Sid Barrett, because this is a song written by Roger Waters,
called Power Talk H. And if we hear like the first minute of this,
you'll see the voice effects are all Roger Waters.
The very jazzy feel of the keyboards, and already the drummer is using mallets on his tom-toms,
the way he'll perfect later.
That's Roger Waters.
[Music]
Well, I'm going to let you analyze that because the Floyd that I know and love the most is the subsequent incarnation of them,
and I really have never known what to make of the earlier space rock Pink Floyd, and how you get from one to the other.
Well, you know, the field was totally different, and the function of their music was different.
At this point, they were improvisers, and you get that jazz feel that could extend an improv for 15, 20 minutes or more,
while people were dancing in a very small club, and in the back they would have these liquid psychedelic liquid light shows over the band members.
It's once they become successful, as a matter of fact, I brought in one of their first single hits, and once they become successful,
then their style has to become a lot more structured. If you play this wonderful song called "See Emily Play" and see if it's number three on this.
[Music]
It's lighting up and down. They would be their plastic ruler or lighter as it shows.
[Music]
It's also one of the two.
Very first band in England, here's the British accent, and talk about really British subjects,
they have an imitating Americans.
[Music]
Very Beatles reminiscent.
Well, this is a pure pop with sprinkling of the psychedelic sound effects throughout,
but the structure, of course, of the city of Paris, composition was always different from the mainstreams.
Listen to this part.
[Music]
So you get the wishful side of youth, but also the melancholy.
This is a girl Emily that was in the club, that was a teenager that --
[Music]
And who would have been the musical influences on this first floor, predominantly?
Well, they were not as pop as you might think.
I said there was listening to John Coltrane, Jazz improv, and Rick Wright, the keyboard players.
And as you mentioned, it was a lover of jazz.
So, when they recorded this song, as well as their first album called "The Piper of the Gates of Dawn,"
the Beatles were in the same studio recording Sergeant Peppers.
And so they used the same engineers and some of the same instrumental effects,
and you can feel that already in this song as well as the entire first album.
But then again, who were the Beatles being influenced by?
But Eastern Music, Citars, Spacey, Spacey Sounds.
Was this a successful album?
Oh, it was a very album guard, very, very -- one of those albums that anybody in music who was self-respecting owned.
But I don't think it made a lot of money.
Sort of like the first Velvet Underground album.
And how many albums were made with Cit Barrett?
Just this one.
Just this one album.
As a matter of fact, even during the recordings, he was already starting to lose his functionality.
And he went on to -- he died only recently, didn't he?
Yeah, I think he died in 2006.
And for all those years, was he resentful of the Floyd for having become such a huge band?
Not as far as anyone can tell.
He didn't want to talk about them.
He didn't want to speak to the press about being a musician.
He sort of denied all of it.
He's not out of resentment.
Just out of -- he felt -- he started with Welcome to the Machine.
Many people reached Cit Barrett as a casualty of that machine of the music industry of financial
pressure of fame.
Is that how you understand the machine in that song?
Yeah, pretty much.
Since the whole wish you were here, album is a indictment of the music business, the producers
managers, the dream of making a lot of money.
That's the sad irony that Roger Waters writes about often is I don't ask to get what you
want because if you do have it, then you may regret it.
So they had the fame and fortune and all the money.
And that's where at the beginning with wish you were here, they start.
And then later in the wall, explaining how destructive that the whole scene is.
Yeah, it's easy to blame the music industry for that, but it's also an indictment if I understand
you correctly.
It's your own desires to become a rock star and to make it on the big stage that once it
becomes a reality, then you realize what the downside of that is.
Exactly.
And does that come with a con-commit-in-loss of innocence?
Well, for sure.
I mean, how else could it be?
Well, I was just trying to play to a stadium, a sports stadium with some 80,000 people.
You know how the wall supposedly came to Roger Waters as an idea as a concept was that they
were playing, I think, 80,000 people in Montreal.
He felt so alienated from this audience that would just a roar with any note and seem to
him to be a mindless machine that he singled out one guy in the front row and spit in his
and then felt mortified at this huge alienation that had said in between they, the performing
artists and the audience.
And so the concept of the wall was built out of that, all the effects that from your mother
to your school teacher to your job.
Yeah, we'll talk about the wall more in detail, but before we get to the wall, there's
a number of remarkable albums in the, I guess what you call the second Floyd incarnation.
No, when does that begin?
Which is again right after Sid Barrett or?
Yeah, pretty much begins with our second album, "Saucere Fuller Secrets."
But they don't know how to find their way until probably metal.
That is each album from "Saucere Fuller Secrets" through to "Dark Side of the Moon" where
sort of high period begins is a different concept.
And it's only once Roger Waters has the confidence to consider himself the musical composer
and lyric writer that he becomes.
And does that start with "Dark Side of the Moon?"
According to him, it starts with the long suite called "Echos" on the metal album, which immediately
precedes it, I think it's 71.
And prior to that, were the songs being composed by multiple members?
Yes, they were.
So Rick Wright as well as...
Rick Wright would do a kind of a Gilmore.
Yeah.
And Roger Watercut, he comes into his own then in the 70-71.
Well, around 71, I think he discovers that he's a good lyricist, an excellent lyricist,
and takes it upon himself to write all of the songs to "Dark Side of the Moon" from the lyrical point of view.
Not obviously from the musical point of view because David Gilmore, in particular, is extremely...
You know, musically, as important as Roger Waters, if not even more at this stage.
But the lyrics become written, the whole album conceived by Roger Waters alone.
Well, since we want to get through this entire career within an hour, why don't we go to the high point,
which I guess is "Dark Side of the Moon."
Would you like to talk about some of these songs?
Well, first thing with the album itself is, would you call it a concept album?
Oh, without question.
And what is a concept album, by the way?
Well, a concept album is...
And you know, by the way, this is incidental, but they took their record company, EMI, to court in March of this year,
and they won the suit, which this allows EMI to sell their songs individually, without the band's consent,
as they had been doing on iTunes and are still doing, actually.
Because the songs on these albums were conceived as parts of one single hole,
and the theme of "The Dark Side of the Moon," which is the side that's opposite the Sun side,
therefore the Moon on the one side, the Sun on the other, madness, sanity,
these concepts run through each and every song on "The Dark Side of the Moon,"
and not only that, each song blends into the others through cross fades and segues,
so there's not even an actual silence between the end of one song and the beginning of another.
In fact, I have an excellent example of that.
So if we listen to the end of time, it's an excellent example of how one song alone will re-prize the song again before it,
and also segue into the song this coming after it.
In the first case, it's a breeze, and in the second case, it's us and them.
[Music]
Sun is the saving relative wave that you're all loved.
Shores are a friend, one day comes a dream death.
Every year we're scared of each one and every single time.
[Music]
Here time goes into breathing.
[Music]
It's good to walk my bones beside the fire.
[Music]
At that point, it segues directly into the great gig in the sky, and so within that one song time,
you've got a re-prize of the second song of the album, and in a seamless and within the very same
tempo, continuous cross segue to the following song, so that's for the time basically unprecedented.
In your view, why is that one of the highest-selling albums in musical history?
I don't think anyone has the answer to that, even the band doesn't.
Some theories are that it's the most sort of space-out album for people who like to smoke joints and just lay back.
There's love-making scenarios that some people say account for it, so you can see it,
you can play the whole side of the album, and without any seamless interruptions.
I also think the themes of that you mentioned earlier about adolescence, alienation, lunacy, death, having to get on with your life and anxiety that is attached to it,
all that spoke very, very strongly each and every year to the youth of the world.
For many years, if not decades, it was a number one selling album, or the top ten selling album.
Well, it was in the charts for the longest period of any album consecutively, some thousand plus weeks,
week after week, no albums done that.
So as you chose it, it affects people regardless of the historical time that they're listening to it in.
Would you say it's their best album?
My preference is wish you were here.
Mine too, actually, yeah.
But this one is really hard to beat.
You have to be a toss-up for me between those two.
Is there something from which you were here where you start with Welcome to the Machine?
Well, you know, Shine On is a real classic.
If you want to play a piece of that, what's so interesting about Shine On is the way it starts with a guitar solo.
And I think even a saxophone solo.
So it turns compositional methods upside down before the singer comes in, you've already had two long...
Two long solos, I recall correctly.
It takes a long time for this song to start.
And what do you make of the lyrics?
I mean, what is this shine?
This crazy diamond.
A lot of people see a Sid Barrett reference there too, that this is in...
A mournful of Sid Barrett, and he's the crazy diamond they wanted to Shine On.
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Now there's a look in your eyes like black holes in the sky.
Yeah, it's undoubtedly about Sid Barrett.
This gem in the role, who wore out his Welcome with Random Precision.
So he was a master guitar player, but he played with a random precision.
He was the Piper, the last line of the song says...
The least Piper reference of the first album.
Yeah, come on, you painter, which it was.
You Piper, you prisoner, and Shine.
And you know the story, I guess.
It's told all the time, even in the videos about that when they were recording this, Sid Barrett walked into the studio by total accident.
Nobody could recognize him. He had shaved his head. He gained all sorts of pounds.
He showed up as those summoned by the song.
And they started to cry, looking at him.
They didn't recognize him for the longest period.
That's why they asked him what he thought.
And they said, "Well, I don't understand why he played it over and over."
Sounds occasionally.
Didn't seem to consciously register that.
That's very eerie that he would walk in.
And it's the true that they listened to this 40 times before they were happy enough to release it.
Yeah, they kept going, combing through it over and over.
They had originally wanted to do it. David Gilmour wanted to have it all on Sidewon and the album.
And Roger Waters prevailed on cutting the thing into two.
So now you've got parts one through four or five on the beginning of the album and then the second half at the end of the album, which actually was an excellent choice.
Why?
Because like the song, echoes, if it hits played straight through for 23 to 25 minutes,
people's attention would have faded out after 12 or 13.
Does this album subsequent to Adam Hart mother?
Oh sure. Which does have the first side, which is all one long piece, which I think is one of the most undervalued or underappreciated albums of the Pink Floyd.
One of my favorite for sure.
Yeah, it's an album from 1970 that they didn't know what to do with.
And so they put it in the hands of a friend of Roger Waters called Ron Geeson, who came up with the orchestral accompaniments of that Adam Hart mother suite and the choral, a beautiful choral section.
And horns and symphonic.
And yet for some reason a lot of music critics consider the flawed effort.
And they themselves weren't particularly happy with it either, or no.
No, they weren't. But I think that they devalue it. I think that's a beautiful album, even side two, which is criticized for being songs,
simple songs that have no relation to side one. I think it's from start to finish excellent.
Although I have to say, if side two were a pro-longation or in the same vein as side one, it could just make such a strong statement that it's a full concept album as such that maybe it would have had a different fate.
It seems like they were only half committed to it.
Yeah, yeah. It ended up being a hybrid product because of the difference between the two sides.
So here's the beginning of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" in the sense.
What three and a half minute introduction?
And now it's almost like we're getting close to it beginning.
That's right. Four minutes into the song.
The domain...
It's a great little riff here.
Yeah, and this of course was David Gilmore's composition.
Very dramatic with the drums and the synthesizer behind.
And they take their time.
This Roger Waters has leaves some emptiness, leaves some holes in your composition.
Well, even in the song "Time" from the previous album, it takes forever to get started.
But once it starts, it really does.
You sense the clarity of the Florida-to-stage of their career.
The masters are not only on the skirks, but the dynamics.
So the precision in these laid-back compositions is unparalleled.
And that obsessive repetition of the same motif.
Unfortunately, they were so closely structured that they'd be played back exactly no for note during the concerts too.
And I saw the Floyd in Rome in 1970, one or two doing Adam Hart mother.
And unlike a lot of rock bands, they were always perfectly in two.
Yeah, perfectly in two.
They had such respect for the precision and discipline of music.
So finally, you think you're going to get into the song.
And guitar keeps going.
And when he's finished, there'll be another solo.
The sax solo.
They'll just switch the knob on his guitar and get a different tonality.
But you can see how almost nobody would not appreciate having his music playing their living room.
Whether it's an old lady or an eight-year-old boy.
I don't think there was anything like it at the time.
Or six.
There's also something else that hasn't been much spoken about in terms of the appeal of Hank Floyd.
And I think you sense it in the bass beat here, for instance.
Dark side of the moon begins with a heartbeat.
It ends with a heartbeat.
And Roger Waters has this kind of oscillating bass opal, which evokes the heart and the bio-rhythms in a way that subconsciously connects with you.
Do you think he's a great bass player?
I do.
I just start a universal consensus about that, is there?
No, because his range is considered very limited.
He has a very distinctive style, often he uses a pink as he does here.
Emphasizing the octaves, the fit and the octaves.
So he's got a recurring style.
Sometimes he'll even recycle his bass lines.
But he's very, very thumping.
And here's the next guitar solo.
It's a fantastic guitar solo.
By the way, unlike some of the later recordings about Pink Floyd,
at this stage they're just four of them playing their instruments.
You know, any sense does their spaces and a clarity of each instrument.
Later, it becomes more complicated than that.
Because they brought in a lot of studio musicians to play the parts.
Why was that?
Well, they stopped getting along.
Some of them stopped taking their jobs seriously.
So Nick Mason, the drummer on the wall, was seen unable to play his parts.
So they brought in some session drummers.
And by the end of that album, the recording of that wall,
they literally fired Rick Wright.
It wasn't showing up for the recordings.
And there's very little of him on the album.
So that's the beginning of the song, proper.
That's eight minutes, 55 seconds before we get the first lyrics.
At this stage, all four of the musicians are really contributing creatively to the musical endeavor.
And that stops me in the case around the wall time.
Did they just burn out or was it drugs or...?
No, no, it wasn't drugs.
There's probably burned out with the...
Let's say, inspirational.
And as the other members kind of burned out, inspirational, Roger Waters grew in inspiration.
And albums became more solo projects.
And the more they became solo projects, the more resistance the rest of the band members would show.
So you lose the perfect blend that you get at this stage.
I think you feel it already by halfway through the wall.
The wall, though, I believe is a great album.
Whatever ways in which it might be compromised by the lack of full participation by other band members.
It's as a concept album, I think it's a great epic, starting from childhood and going through the...
into the adulthood of a rock musician.
And interweaving it with the war and the historical context and the alienation that comes from totalitarian.
And so on and so forth.
All this stuff which has to do with the mood of an era and not just a stage of life.
The 70s as such.
And a kind of post-Cold War sentiment.
It's pre-post-Cold War.
But the Cold War is kind of...
To say it was cooling off is an oxymoron.
But you know what I mean by that.
It's no longer the terror of the Cold War of the 50s or 60s, but now the 70s, it's kind of the weariness of that.
And yet it's still very much of a presence in the concept of the album, no?
Yeah.
It's a post-historical album, if you think about it thematically, because it's post adolescence.
These band members have grown up.
They would have been say 32, 33 years old, accomplished their dreams.
Childhood is behind them.
Even the hot politics of the late 60s and early 70s is a long lost dream.
The late 70s was a wretched time, especially in England with unemployment and strikes and violence, racism.
So there was a sense of having outlived the essence of life and then telling the song biographically, that it's telling one's life story, without huge joy.
It's a fairly bleak, thematic statement, this is the wall.
But do you agree that the wall, as a double album, has a distinctly adolescent tonality to it?
Well, in so far as...
Well, adolescent and certain, it's primarily the emotions of estrangement and alienation, rejection of one's elders.
The revolt against the mother accusations towards the father, this search for a foundation on which to build your own life, which is not yet forthcoming.
This idea of the wall of isolation and the difficulty of relating to others, whether it's people of your parental figures or even women and friends, that there's just...
The adolescent sense of disconnection from the world.
And the frustrations and the sense that the system has sold us short, the institutions of learning, the parental figures, the real life that once supposed to join, one has turned out to be grossly disappointed by all that.
And I think that's what young people find in the album so easily, is that sense of it's pent-up rage, out of frustration and powerlessness.
And of course, the wall after the wall, the band has, I guess, one more album before they break up.
So I have one more. But could you say that it's because they outlive the stage of life emotions that, in their own biographies, by becoming two old themselves, to credibly communicate with expressive vibrancy, these pent-up emotions and rage that belong to an earlier stage of life that, in a certain sense, they even Roger Waters, who came into his own late later in the history of the...
the pink floor that even he outlived himself in that regard.
Well, yeah, in another sense, he might make the mistake, according to some critics, the mistake of becoming explicitly political and even psychoanalytical, revisiting his childhood psyche with his dad, who he lost as an infant in the war.
And this revisiting of the self was very alienating to the other members of the band, primarily David Gilmour, who said, "I don't personally share these problems. I don't feel alienated from my audience. And I don't feel that I was screwed up by losses in my life.
So that's not the type of stuff I want to sing about. If you think musically what was going on by late '70s and early '80s, it was pretty mild stuff that didn't...
...want to indict anybody. It was the '80s where a decade of sort of just bland music.
I think that...
But are the themes of the wall that different from Dark Side of the Moon and wish you were here?
No.
So Gilmour had reached a point of exhaustion with those themes, I guess.
Yeah, and he felt that they weren't his.
But earlier he was contributing willingly to the Dark Side of the Moon and wish you were here.
Yeah, he was. But Roger Waters became too much of a tyrannical musical director within the band.
And David withdrew. He went into his shell. And they had to get even a separate producer to do this album because the two of them,
waters and Gilmour wouldn't even sit in the same room together anymore. And much less speak to each other.
They had completely different concepts about how to deal with this album.
Earlier they didn't have that clash.
Well, why don't we give a listen to one of my favorite tracks on the wall which is "Hey You."
And it's one that gets a lot of radio, air play, and in a certain sense we're revisiting songs that are very well known by the broad public.
But if there's any song that for me encapsulates that extraordinary adolescent isolation and disconnection and reaching out for another who may or may not be out there, it's this song.
Who sings "Hey You" by the way?
They alternate verses. It's pretty clear when Roger takes over. It's the third verse or so. He has a screaming part, the more shrill emotional delivery.
And the more control he takes of the band, the more he insists on singing the part.
Hey You, out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me?
Hey You, standing in the eye of the ditching, feeding smiles can you feel me?
Hey You, don't help them to bury the line
Don't give in without a fight
Hey You, out there on your own sitting naked by the phone will you touch me?
Great drums.
Hey You, you're here against the wall waiting for someone to call out beat you to touch me.
That heartbeat based down.
Exactly.
Hey You, would you help me to carry the stone?
Stone is one of his favorite images Roger Wallace.
Do you think that's a illusion to sissiface?
Surely.
I'm in.
Searing guitar.
I just see that all of this is going to turn out to be just a fantasy.
Once we have the bridge section, it's a calling for connection and empathy.
Can you make connection with me?
But you're also out in the cold.
You two are sitting naked by the phone that is waiting for someone to call.
So all in the same predicament, why can't we connect the Roger Wallace, you know, theme of empathy?
You'll see that after the guitar solo, he's going to say that it was only a fantasy.
The wall was too high.
As you can see, no matter how he tried, he could not break tree.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Because insanity sits in as an outcome of modernity.
Starting here.
The wall was too high.
You can't see.
No matter how he tried, he could not break tree.
The Roger's going to hold on to the rest of the song.
He's going to sing the rest of it.
And that will be taken out onto the LA freeway, so to speak.
When he points out those people who are driving around on the road doing what they're told.
Are they in the authorities?
And then other adolescents breaking bottles in the hall, drunk or otherwise.
Can't they ever want to try to help each other?
The question is rhetorical.
It goes in answer.
Hey, you!
I'm out there on the road.
Oh, no, why you still be watching?
Oh, can you help me?
Hey, you!
I'll leave you in the morning.
Breaking bottles in the hall.
Can you help me?
Hey, you!
I'll leave you in the morning.
Oh, no!
Together we stand, defying with more.
Now, the song ends on this communitarian note, because Roger Waters' famously socialistic had a mother that was an activist.
Now, last line is together we stand, divided with fall, and the division would be the capitalist, dog-eat-dog lifestyle that causes this alienation and crying out for the solidarity that could be achieved if we were more communitarian.
Which reminds me of another album of theirs, which I think is also undervalued, which is animals.
And the lyrics of some of the songs there on that album are just really directed directly to the capitalists, you know?
And the notion that it's too late to shed the weight that you used to need to throw around.
I'm remembering one of those songs.
Yeah, that's in fact probably my favorite line in Pink Floyd II.
If we could hear it to be great, but I can read you, I've got to written here.
And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sewn.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And then there's musical interlude, and they come back in saying, and it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown as you go down alone, break down by the stone.
And that's the dog-eat-dog system.
So the wall becomes, despite the fact that band members at the end weren't even talking to each other.
You mentioned that they had to bring an outside producer because they couldn't agree on what kind of album it should become.
And they got to an impasse and who is the producer who came in and saved the day for them?
An American called Bob Ezraan.
And he beautifully mediated between the two factions of Gilmore Waters.
And he convinced Roger Waters to change the order.
That is this rock opera, if you want to call it that, doesn't need to start with a birth of Pink at day one.
And then go through the childhood, brick in the wall, the mother, the young lost straight through to the end.
But for the sake of the musical coherence that Gilmore insisted on, those songs had to be mixed up.
And he also wrote at least one if not two new songs for the album, Bob Ezraan did.
Which ones did you know that?
I thought Roger-- Well, actually Gilmore writes a few of the songs on the album, then.
Yeah, he writes Young Lost and comfortably Numb.
The music's written by David Gilmore.
And that's another Floyd favorite among a bunch of people we can listen to it.
But it's another classic expression of alienation and being the loss of feeling and disconnection.
With one of the great guitar solos of all time.
Wow, consistently ranked in the top 10.
Hello, you, is there anybody in there?
Just not if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?
[MUSIC]
This of course, the dialogue between the doctor and the patient.
The doctor is trying to revive Pank to perform on the show because he's become exhausted.
And so the doctors joined the administer the injection.
And then Pank is revived in the next verse, he'll hear you.
There he is.
There's Pank to him.
There is no pain you are receding out.
The minister shifts, the horizon, the reft in himself.
He'll hear you like it to his childhood experience.
I'm the child, I'm the fear.
My hands melt just like to a moon.
Now I've got the fear once again.
I've got to explain your love to say.
This is my how I am.
I'm the man.
Is that Mason on drones or did they have to outsource that?
It's probably not Mason.
Although it's simple enough, it could have played it.
Is it true that Gilmour had to bring a studio musician for who she was here, the song wish you were here to play the rhythm set to the acoustics session?
Why was that?
They're in the studio.
They wanted to lay it down and couldn't get it that day.
But even this solo I think is pieced together out of five different solos.
This session musicians would have been around the corner and at a certain point it became more pragmatic to pull one
into the job.
It's in a sense the story of sit there it becomes an allegory for all of these band members.
Because just like he becomes comfortably numb and is wrecked by the business,
so does Roger Waters talk about the same phenomenon.
But Roger Waters strikes me as someone who is in need of a theme or to always resurrect the same theme.
Now he's going around, he's preparing to go around the United States to bring the wall on stage again without the rest of the pink floor, obviously.
From some of the comments he's been making he's going back over the same old ground, how he found the same old fears,
alienation and a capitalist system that was heartless and it's time in history when we were caught between the communists and the capitalist systems.
And he seems to be for me insisting a little bit too much on the same old story.
Well yeah that was his peak and what he did thereafter proved much less compelling as far as the music buyer was concerned.
And the transition is right here at the wall where his lyrics become explicitly political and confessional.
So the alienation that's being talked about here explicitly was self-referential.
Yeah but in the earlier albums he was communicated more indirectly and more musically in the sense.
The disconnection was in the musical fabric of the sit there at Floyd.
And it's a more one of the cleanest guitars soloists.
It's the only one who gets that sound out of a fender stratic messenger.
It's a beautiful sustain, a floating type of sustained notes.
This is always a highlight in their concerts whether with Roger or Roger or Roger without them,
alternating guitars soloists.
[Music]
Thankfully by the way it has the strongest downbeat that I can think of in rock music.
That helps their appeal. That hit that one and they hold it.
[Music]
What do you make of their last album as a whole group which is Division Bell?
I'm sorry not Division Bell, it's the final cut.
Yeah Division Bell is the one without Roger Waters.
Right well you know the final cut was the final cut for the band.
No one could bear Roger at that point anymore.
It was virtually a solo album he sings each and every song.
He only won his David Gilmore helping him out on.
So he wrote it from start to finish and there's very little David Gilmore guitar soloing.
Rick writes not even credited on the album because he doesn't play.
So they disband very soon after that.
Most people think the final cut's pretty lousy frankly.
A failure. Too many lyrics.
Too much explicit address of contemporary politics like Margaret Thatcher and Roddy Reagan and Big
Geen and Falkland Wars.
So those things unfortunately they date much much quicker than something that's
talking about the moon or the sun.
And if that signals the end of the floor that we know then the Division Bell,
which is the album that's made by the rest of the floor without Roger Waters,
what do you make of that?
Well they have two studio albums after Roger bows out.
The first one, "Mominteri Laps of Reason" is another sort of solo conception.
In this case of David Gilmore and less successful than the Division Bell.
The Division Bell was very viable commercially.
A lot of people love it.
And when I taught Pink Floyd at UCLA, the students and sisters are on dealing with the Division Bell
because that's what they were most familiar with.
It was the highest grossing concert tour in all of rock history.
That Floyd made a lot more money touring than any Floyd before them.
You don't have the lyrical profundity. The themes are somewhat banal and superficial.
The music is a bit packaged Floyd.
It's not much less brilliance than there was before.
So it seems to me like they're sitting a bit on their laurels.
It's not very inspired. I don't go back to those albums very much myself.
Do you?
No, I don't. I find it's such a disappointment.
For me, the Division Bell is like a bird that has wounded in one wing.
And sometimes you see them and they can't fly.
And they're just kind of on the ground with a handicap.
It just seems very handicapped to me.
But likewise with Roger Waters, I mean hopefully the Floyd won't come to listen to our show here on Title of Phoenix Get All.
Riled up against what we're saying here about the disappointment that many Floyd fans feel about both Floyd without Roger Waters and Roger Waters without Floyd.
In a certain sense it's even more disappointing to hear some of those albums of Roger Waters without the other band members with him.
It just goes to show how interactive and collaborative musical project is that it's never one man show even when you have huge talents like Roger Waters or Jimmy Hendrix.
It's what everybody's putting into the sauce that makes it a great one.
I agree, but I think that rock bands have an intrinsic lifespan, like any animal lifespan that they're bound to at a certain point just give up the ghost.
Or they can continue to go on doing it.
The Rolling Stones are this kind of miraculous exception to the law of obsolescence.
The Beatles last quite a while, but even they had a natural death.
Pink Floyd lasted a very long time, ultimately compared to a lot of other bands because they're starting in '68 going till '65 to '85.
Twenty years.
A long time for the life of a rock band.
Yeah, and of course their ambitions were much greater than the Rolling Stones.
It's easier to stick together as a Rolling Stones band.
I think then someone that a band is trying to reinvent the musical wheel over and over and over again.
Well, with that we can include our show with one of the songs from The Wall.
It's a mother which is a kind of random choice if you like, but it is.
The Wall still at their...
I still think it's a high point of the Wall.
The Green of the Pink Floyd, the Wall, is the very end of the peak, if you like.
And mothers, one of those songs, that appealed to me a great deal.
So thanks for coming on.
We've been speaking with Tom Harrison, my brother here on entitled "Pinions."
Tom is a professor of literature at UCLA and also teaching courses at UCLA and rock music and rock lyrics.
Just concluded a course on the Pink Floyd and we've been speaking with him for entitled "Pinions."
Hope you'll tune in next week. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
They'll drop the bomb.
Well, they'll do you think they'll like this song.
[Music]
Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls?
[Music]
Mother, should I build the wall?
[Music]
Mother, should I run for president?
[Music]
Mother, should I trust the government?
[Music]
Mother, will I cut me as the fire at night?
[Music]
There isn't just a waste of time.
[Music]
Fresh, now baby, baby, don't you cry?
[Music]
Mother's gonna make all of your nightmares hurt you.
Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you.
Mama's gonna keep me right here, and I'll get her away.
She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama's gonna keep baby, goes in and warm.
[Music]
Mother, do you think she's good enough?
[Music]
Mother, do you think she'll think you'll love?
[Music]
Mother's gonna keep baby, goes in and warm.
Mama's gonna wait up until you get it.
Mama will always find out where you're good.
Mama's gonna keep baby, go in and warm.
[Music]
Mother, do you think you'll always be good enough?