But aesthetic tugs-of-war usually play badly in the Real World the payoff is an interregnum backlash, an inevitable “correction” between our private and public selves. These were participants in a (western) worldwide upheaval in social mores and kultural values, recalibrating a generation’s perception of pleasure and their own artistic possibilities. There are any number of ’60s advertising-like slogans still, twenty years later, two of the most radical exponents of its pop-cultural possibilities-San Francisco’s Grateful Dead and London’s Pink Floyd-define the Top 10, while their New York counterpart, the Velvet Underground, has set the avant-garde standard for two decades of subversion. Rather than obliterate one’s place in the cosmic order, the new psychedelics-including rock music-affirmed it. It wasn’t merely drugs, though the invention of LSD offered a transcendental option to the let’s-get-ripped mentality usually accorded clandestine highs. The spirit of irrationality might be discovered anywhere. Though the title is meant to imply a sudden release from our everyday thought processes, a sidetrip into the slipstream of the surreal and unexpected, I prefer to put the emphasis on “Momentary”-as in, “We’ll be back in a…” But when they began, the Floyd had abandoned Reason altogether.
The newest album, released under the Pink Floyd imprimatur, is called A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. Syd Barrett, the founding visionary who took them out as far on a limb as it’s possible to go, and then started sawing madly Roger Waters, bass, whose dour commentary added caustic cynicism and a back-to- The Wall despair to the band’s flowerchild idealism, manifesting Pink’s triumph as a ’70s superstar David Gilmour, a Strato-master whose airy windswept landscapes and soaring guitar lines have gained ascendence in the current Floydian state of the art, especially in the reeling senses of “Learning To Fly” and Nick Mason and Richard Wright, without whom… Oh, by the way, which one’s Pink?” The query from “Have A Cigar” on Wish You Were Here, is too perfect, of course. They are Pink Floyd, a musical life-form whose existence transcends identity, who becomes and grows as the years mutate one into the other. Pink Floyd’s impact has been enormous, their influence pervasive-from the astronomical reaches of synthesizer space-rock, to the more Earthbound regions of garage psychedelia.
#Pink floyd ummagumma cassette tape full#
(Careful With That Axe, Roger!) A new, X-minus-one Pink Floyd emerged from the rubble in 1987 to reclaim the spaced-out blues high ground, while hitch-hiking runaway Roger Waters took full possession of the family soapbox. The end of that Meddle-some decade saw the emotional temperature of their music drop even further, as they Walled themselves into a frigid corner that could only be escaped through a Final, fragmenting Cut. The Floyd began with songs of psychedelic whimsy and sonic adventurism, which metamorphosed (after the exit of founding member Syd Barrett) into a cooly hypnotic trance groove, leaving them in the ’70s as the foremost non-American “tripping” band on the planet. Though the Pink Floyd name has survived through years of subsequent history, the band has had numerous distinct musical incarnations, each with its own devoted cult of raving and drooling fans. Pink Floyd was an essential part of the soundtrack to the ’60s psychedelic renaissance-the era when our collective unconscious was turned inside-out and paraded around the streets like a flashy new wardrobe. In conjunction with the band’s 55th birthday this year, we’re republishing it below. In February, 1988, writer Lenny Kaye’s sweeping story about Pink Floyd was printed in High Times magazine.
0 kommentar(er)
