Pink Floyd The First Band In Outer Space Essays -

Pink Floyd: The First Band In Outer Space For many people, the group Pink Floyd is considered as un-popular, aged, and without any sense in today's modern society. It's so unfortunate that true rock and roll music is being left behind for the new head-splitting garbage that infests the airwaves today. The newest generation is unaware of the history behind all the music they listen to now. Where did it all begin? Who first wandered into the realms of psychedelic music to create a style and a culture that would last for decades, and never be copied? The answer of course is Pink Floyd Pink Floyd was the first band in outer space. Since the mid-'60s, their music has relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they have wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. While Pink Floyd is mostly known for their extravagant concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were a much more conventional act that the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands. Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback, electronic screeches, and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; onstage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, child-like wonder. The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, Arnold Layne, a sympathetic, comic song about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic See Emily Play, made the Top Ten. Their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album ever. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming funhouse of driving, mysterious rockers, odd character sketches, childhood flashbacks, and freaky pieces with lengthy instrumental passages that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and light-hearted than those of their subsequent epics. The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarm signs of mental instability. Syd would go catatonic onstage; playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was finding him impossible to work with, in concert or in the studio. Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live outfit; Barrett would still be able to write and contribute to the records. That couldn't work