This must be considered Pink Floyd's "debut" album, even
though they had already placed 2 singles on the UK charts, and those two
aren't on this album. That is significant, because Pink Floyd seems
to be saying right from the beginning that they saw a definite distinction
between their "hits" and their "music". (for those two songs, see RELICS)
They had also been a fixture for some time at the UFO club, where they
were honing their skills at songwriting and instrumental experimentation
(with varying degrees of success). At the time, the band was driven
by the artistic vision of Syd Barrett,
and displays an interesting tendency toward experimentation while remaining,
at the core, essentially a late-60's psychedelic band. Much of the
music makes you want to dig out the old bell-bottom pants and paisley shirts.
It is indicative of a band very influenced by the LSD
culture.
Pink Floyd here is still primarily "song"
oriented, with only one track being over 5 minutes long. Ten of the
11 cuts on this album could have been released for radio play, but only
one of them was. If you are a fan of 60's psychedelic rock, you should
find this album both historically interesting and musically pleasing.
It is not the hard-driving acid rock of Jimi Hendrix, nor is it namby-pamby
60's chart music, like
Crimson & Clover or Mellow Yellow.
Ironically, given the distance of time that (hopefully) allows us to view
this music more objectively, many of these tracks are far better musically
than those that did make the charts in 1967. Still, you should not
be misled into thinking that this is typical Pink Floyd. Though most
of the elements are here, this album is as different from the Floyd of
10 years later as it is from Beethoven.
The album title comes from The Wind in the Willows,
and most of the songs seem to have a childlike nostalgia woven into them.
This is a major theme of Syd's work in the early years, an apparent fascination
with fairy-tale settings and concepts.
This album is a contemporary of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band" by the Beatles, an album which the Floyd found very motivating.
Interestingly, listening to that album enables one to see how rapidly the
Beatles were developing in comparison to the Floyd, but that rapid development
may also have been partly responsible for the impending breakup they would
suffer. Perhaps the Floyd's more deliberate pace of growth allowed
the band to grow together for awhile, rather than apart. Even though
the band eventually did split up (as all creative rock bands seem to do)
their greatest music was still ahead of them.
Astronomy Domine
is the sort of song you'd expect out of a "Space Band", as Pink Floyd was
widely thought at the time. It has an interesting free-form tune,
one of the few by Pink Floyd that you can actually hum. I often think
that the lyrics here were a sort of poetic experiment by Syd, not being
written so much to communicate a particular idea as to set a certain mood
through rhyme, alliteration, and
rhythm. The ambient "Cape Canaveral"
sounds {CPFS}
here are very appropriate. A very underrated tune, it came out quite
differently when they recorded it live for UMMAGUMMA.
Lucifer Sam could have
been an Evil-Hollies tune, with it's deep guitar sounds and high chorus
lines. Syd obviously is too worried about this cat, but it's still
a catchy 60's song.
Matilda Mother takes
a slower, hollow approach to Syd's childhood. You can almost imagine
his mom reading him bedtime stories, which he interprets in his own slightly-twisted
way (as we all do).
Flaming begins as a
short experiment in feedback and vocal noises, then turns into a pretty
silly song, that really doesn't fit in well with the other material on
this album. It's really pretty dumb.
Pow R Toc H is the sort
of space jam instrumental for which the Floyd was famous at this time,
but it begins with a tropical-sounding set of vocal effects that seem to
have come from a "George of the Jungle" cartoon. This melts into
an easy-going piano blues with pounding drums, and then just gets pretty
weird.
Take Up Thy Stethoscope &
Walk is Roger Waters' first foray into songwriting, encouraged by Syd,
so what do we get? Mostly a bunch of guitar plucking by Syd (either
foreground or background). The early lyrics seem to be another experiment
in how many words we can find to rhyme, and could have been written and
recorded by any of about twenty 60's bands you'd recognize. It shows
none of Roger's later poesy or anger, and is pretty much uninspiring.
Interstellar Overdrive
had been in the Floyd live repertiore for a long while by the time it was
put on vinyl (this was 'way before CD's
kids). It begins with an interesting guitar line that causes me to
wonder about the direction a "normal" band would have taken. Pink
Floyd turns it into an extended collection of instrumental noises that
sometimes connect, and sometimes don't. The band recorded two separate
tracks without necessarily planning their connectivity, then simply laid
one upon the other. {CPFS}
(This makes for an interesting experiment - listen to the tune once with
only your left earphone, then once with your right, and finally with both
together. Hmmmm.) It ends with a return to the early guitar
line slightly modified, and Syd playing with the balance knob, to make
the sound jump from ear-to-ear, resulting in a dizzying effect.
The Gnome represents
another Syd voyage into childhood thoughts, and comes out much like Lucifer,
Matilda, and Scarecrow. It may be connected to some piece of
literature I'm not familiar with, (who the heck is "Grimble Gromble"?)
but it's pretty forgettable in any case.
Chapter 24 seems to
have derived all its lyrics from a bunch of fortune cookies (or perhaps
the I Ching), and like the preceeding number, lets Syd's voice do
most of the melody, while the instrumentation simply holds the piece together.
It may be artistic, but it's not really deep philosophy or great music.
Scarecrow is much
like the previous two in construction, but contains an interesting attempt
by Syd to cram as many words into a lyric as he possibly can.
Bike strikes my musical
funny bone in just the right way. It's both interesting in lyrical
construction and musical formula. It makes me laugh regularly, and
exhibits an excellent combination of instruments, lyrics, and ambient sounds.
Though it sounds similar to much other 60's music (and similar to much
of the other work on this album), it has its own special qualities that
only Pink Floyd could have produced. Syd has a really unusual collection
of toys in his "other room".
Syd was feeling very artistic on this album (as was his
wont at the time), and Roger tried out one tune, but it is my feeling that
this album helps us see that, if Syd had remained mentally healthy, the
Pink Floyd that we see later would never have existed. I do not believe
that Syd would ever have been willing to allow the other members to stretch
their creativity in the ways they eventually did; stretching which led
to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON,
their greatest composition. Still, this album is an excellent view of the
Floyd of '67, and enables us to further appreciate the journey taken by
the band in later years.
The greatest irony here is the cycle of drug use
and musical creation that inevitably begins with hope for new vistas and
invariably ends in disaster. Syd, through the use of LSD,
has experienced "highs" that he wants to share with his audience.
He writes music in which he tries to communicate that "high" to his audience.
Since they are unable to grasp the full concept, the audience decides that
IT
must be high in order to enjoy the experience fully. Being high,
the audience misses the point of the music altogether, leaving Syd feeling
unfulfilled. When the cycle continues, Syd tries harder to go "higher"
in order to achieve the effect he's been missing, and winds up with music
that just plain stinks. Sadly, the audience neither realizes that
the music stinks, nor that they have helped destroy Syd through their ignorance.
In the end, everyone loses.
