Remember when you were young? Pink Floyd‘s members (with the exception of drummer Nick Mason) don’t seem to relish the thought, but those opening lyrics to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” perfectly evoke the spirit of Pink Floyd’s 50th-anniversary box set, a 360-degree retrospective of the tip of the band’s pyramid. It’s a time capsule anthologizing one of the strangest times in the quartet’s lives.
Half a century removed from its conception, it’s easy to forget how much pressure the band felt to follow up their breakthrough, The Dark Side of the Moon, with anything half as good. David Gilmour once said the band felt “creatively trapped” at the time. But they nevertheless rallied to compose a record filled with legends and martyrs and miners for truth and delusion all caught in the group’s kaleidoscopic swirls of fuzzy synths and post-blues guitar.
The new Wish compendium includes nearly all of the bonus material from the band’s 2011 “Immersion Edition” box set, but the band’s new deal with Sony has shaken loose early mixes of songs, a few demos, alternate versions of songs, and a newly official bootleg recording of one of the band’s 1975 Los Angeles concerts. There aren’t any major revelations — it’s already a perfect album; it couldn’t be more perfect — but it’s a holistic look at a time when the quartet functioned in near harmony, and it enriches the experience of listening to the original album.
Fifty years later, the studio LP still shines brighter thematically and musically than Dark Side, as well as the two albums that followed it. Roger Waters‘ lyrics remain cynical — criticizing societal conformity (“Welcome to the Machine”), the record industry (“Have a Cigar”), and the vapidity of humanity as a whole (the title track) — but there are glimmers of hope and humor within that no wall could confine. The “Shine On” suite still sparkles with Gilmour’s cosmic B-flat-F-G-E motif (a monogram as memorable as NBC’s G.E. chimes), Richard Wright‘s ethereal, sometimes funky synth lines, and of course Waters’ poetic ode on the madness of Syd Barrett.
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“Welcome to the Machine” would be Pink Floyd’s dreariest song — with Waters hectoring lines like “We told you what to dream” over Wright’s root-canal synth drilling — if they hadn’t done The Wall, but buying a guitar “to punish your mom” is still funny. “Have a Cigar” proves that when you stare into the machine, the machine stares back with a winking lampoon of music-biz dealmaking thanks to guest vocalist Roy Harper’s smarmy delivery and a particularly funky jam at the end. And finally, “Wish You Were Here” remains the band’s best and most affecting ballad, a meditation on not being present and trading heroes for ghosts and making legends of the musicians. It’s Waters’ greatest lyrical feat. The band members all got songwriting credits on this LP except for auto enthusiast Mason, who was driving his Jag-yoo-ar, showing how they all worked together.
The bonus material provides a lot of “what if” questions, showing different directions the band could have taken with the album. It begins with three outtakes previously released on the “Immersion” set: “Wine Glasses,” Gilmour’s first sketch of “Shine On,” with a drone supplied by a finger on a wine glass; a version of “Have a Cigar” with Waters sneering the lyrics (Harper’s performance is better); and a gorgeous rendition of “Wish You Were Here” with a violin solo by jazz virtuoso Stéphane Grappelli, who was recording in the same studio. The last track feels almost too beautiful for the song; Gilmour’s hummed guitar solo that closes out the studio version captures the loneliness of Waters’ lyrics better.
The previously unreleased bonus material begins with a 19-minute rough mix of an instrumental rehearsal of “Shine On” that shows what the song could have been as a full suite. It kicks off around Part II and features Gilmour’s brilliant improvisation and Waters’ funky bass line in Part V, which transitions into Part VI, making it one of the rare recordings connecting the opus into a complete thought. Originally, the song was to take up one side of an LP, like “Atom Heart Mother” and “Echoes” had. (The flip side would’ve been early versions of Animals’ “Dogs” and “Sheep”.) Since Waters decided to snap it in half and write “Machine” and “Cigar” to round out the album’s themes of societal disaffection, they effectively mutilated the segue into a work of art.
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On this rehearsal, though, the transition works beautifully, like an alternate-universe version of the track, which unfortunately fades out right when they funk their way into Parliament territory, with Wright even playing Bernie Worrell-like interstellar noodling. (A later bonus cut in the box set combines the album versions of each half, but the segue still feels unnatural since they didn’t actually record it as such.)
Waters’ demo of “The Machine Song” sounds hushed and claustrophobic the way his Wall demos sounded in that record’s “Immersion” box set. He projects a more disillusioned tone than the angry one on “Welcome to the Machine” and the lyrics aren’t as cutting. You didn’t buy a guitar to punish your mom this time; you bought it to “worry” her. The sputtering and crashing synth sounds are present, though, showing his vision of industrial rock arrived fully formed. The version listed as “Demo #2, Revisited” sounds more band-ready, with wah-wah guitar and icy synths, but overall the tone is more resigned and relaxed. It’s still more machine than rage, and it feels more like art rock than anything that would fly in a stadium.
The two versions of “Wish You Were Here” included among the outtakes show how Gilmour, specifically, developed the song. The “Take 1” recording has a pronounced acoustic-guitar solo at the top with different contours from the album version, and he sounds more tentative delivering Waters’ lyrics, even trying out a different rhythm for the parting “Wish you were here” refrain. Without the fuzzy radio effects or the big, contemplative guitar solo at the end, it feels more like a campfire cowboy song the Eagles might have recorded than the poignant statement they ultimately arrived at. The “pedal steel instrumental mix” is just that: It’s the album version with Gilmour playing angelic country-rock guitar throughout. It sounds angelic in this form, like end-credits music, and it somehow carries the same emotional weight as the vocal version, a rare feat.
The concert recording, captured on April 26, 1975 — nearly half a year before the album was released — at the Los Angeles Sports Arena by an ingenious bootlegger, sounds about as good as a stereo tape capturing live quadrophonic sound could. It’s disappointing Pink Floyd didn’t have the foresight to record or film their concerts, which paved the way for today’s stadium spectacles with lights, film, and surround-sound effects, especially since live albums were big business in the Seventies. This recording, if it sounded professional, would be even better than any of the big live albums of the era, because it presents the band as they truly were, with no rerecording in the studio later to patch up mistakes.
The set list begins with the early versions of the Animals songs, titled “Raving and Drooling” and “You’ve Got to Be Crazy,” then and bearing worse lyrics (like Gilmour singing “You’ve gotta keep on smiling, take another shit” in the latter). Wright’s keys drone on like a bumblebee throughout the former. It must have taken a lot of patience, ardor, and drugs to be an audience member sitting through 25 minutes of music that wouldn’t officially come out for two more years. But as Waters says at the top of “Crazy,” “You’ll either get it or you won’t.” Either way, the band performed the songs with gusto.
Next they play the “Shine On” suite, now split in half with “Have a Cigar” in the middle. When you listen to the studio versions of these songs you never really think, “How did four people pull off this densely textured music live?” So it’s curious to spot which guitar and keyboard parts Gilmour and Wright jettisoned from “Shine On.”
When the first half ends with Wright playing a heavenly high note, an audience member shouts “no” or “whoa,” but either way, his disbelief or amazement are rewarded with Gilmour playing the “Cigar” riff with more muscular grit than the album version. Live, the song is almost like a heavy-metal funk song in the way it swings and lopes in equal measure. Waters sings lead with Gilmour doubling him in a lower register, singing a more staccato “which one’s Pink” than Harper, and it doesn’t feel as good until Gilmour improvises an impressive blues solo far removed from the album version.
This time, Gilmour’s murky guitar guides the song back into “Shine On.” Wright’s keys sound thinner and cheaper than the studio version in this take, but he saves the day at the end with a powerful fanfare to close the suite. This half of the set ends with Waters chiding the security at the venue, telling them to sit down and enjoy the show when the band returns.
And of course, everyone there likely enjoyed the second half of the concert since it was The Dark Side of the Moon in full. It’s all looser than the album version. Gilmour jams a little on “Breathe (In the Air),” and comes up with a different solo, sighing more than usual, on “Time.” “The Great Gig in the Sky” sounds jazzier than the album version, with backing singers the Blackberries harmonizing what Clare Torry recorded with the band. On “Us and Them,” each singer trades vocals round-robin to emulate the studio version’s echo. “Any Colour You Like” stretches a corpulent eight and a half minutes live, and the set ends with a euphoric rendition of “Eclipse.” Hearing Gilmour warmly harmonize the lyrics with Waters makes it a contender for the best, most cathartic concert closer of any band of the era.… And then they came back and played all 22 majestic minutes of “Echoes,” with a Dick Parry sax solo for good measure, as a finale. All you can do is wish you were there because you probably weren’t.
The vinyl edition of the box set (which we’re reviewing here) includes a 12-inch with two live recordings from the “Immersion” box set, a rare, 20-minute, uninterrupted “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and 18-minute “You’ve Got to Be Crazy,” captured at London’s Wembley Empire Pool in 1974. (Missing is the 12-minute “Raving and Drooling,” probably because it wouldn’t fit.) There’s also a Blu-ray with various mixes of the album (original stereo, Atmos, 5.1 Surround, Seventies quad) and the animations the group used live, a replica Japanese “Have a Cigar” seven-inch, a replica poster, and an amusing tour program, which was sort of a Zap Comix affair spotlighting each member, including one frame of Waters receiving a nude massage and another of Wright flanked by topless groupies.
Sony, which bought the rights to Pink Floyd’s catalog last year for $400 million, put a lot of effort into making the collection worthwhile to maximize its ROI and to please fans. The packaging looks incredible, and unlike some reissues, where the album art appears Xeroxed, Hipgnosis’ imagery in the reproduction LP looks crisp. The hardcover book includes outtakes from photo shoots (you can finally see the real face of the surrealistic Invisible Man on the back cover) and a couple of rare shots of Syd Barrett when he visited the studio during recording. The outer packaging even mimics the black cellophane (and robots-shaking-hands sticker) that enveloped the original LP.
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At the time of its release, the band was starting to fracture interpersonally, not that it was apparent in the music. Those chasms would widen dramatically over the next decade, leading to Waters’ exit and Gilmour’s control of the band. But for a few months in 1975, all four members worked in unison to create a masterpiece and perform concerts that became legendary, thanks to bootlegs like the one here. Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd’s most humanistic album, and thanks to this box set, you can now feel the way they all tapped into the same spirit and developed it into one of their finest moments.
Listening to the box set, you remember when they were young: They were heroes and ghosts, legends and martyrs, and, by the way, they were all “Pink.”
