Ummagumma

  P·U·L·S·E Boxed CD Cover.  Pretty cool! As I have said before, one thing leads to another .  I have an idea for a future blog post "All The Ways To Be Comfortably Numb."  There are several really good versions of this Pink Floyd song performed by the band as well as by Roger Waters and David Gilmour separately.  I decided I would blog about all the interesting facets of the different performances of that song.  There would be no covers.  At least one band member had to be involved.  I have my favorites and several that are not as good but nevertheless interesting. In putting the list together from YouTube videos naturally I came across in the incredible performance at Earl's Court on October 20, 1994.  This appeared in 1995's CD (and 2005's DVD) entitled  P·U·L·S·E .  This was the final full-on tour by Pink Floyd, so this music is special.  Suddenly, where I was once obsessed with just "Comfortably Numb" I became hyper-fixate...

Proof of purchase.  My 1994 CD. “ The band is just fantastic, that’s really what we think Oh by the way, which one’s Pink? And did we tell you the name of the game, boy, we call it riding the Gravy Train.” from “Have a Cigar” written by Roger Waters. After Dark Side of the Moon (see here and here ) , Pink Floyd achieved superstardom. Which, of course, is what every recording industry band dreams of. But, what happens when you achieve that success? I have seen the band members interviewed (separately) about what that was like. In listening to the various responses of Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason it seems they were basically numbed by their own success. Waters’s marriage fell apart, Mason’s did too as they recorded their next record, Gilmour just wanted to make music and didn’t see what all Roger’s fuss was about, and Wright just sort of drifted along with, like, whatever. The band was selling out concerts globally and toured triumphantly in 1974. Dark ...

I have been listening to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album a lot lately and, as always, one thing leads to another. I have ended up listening to a great deal more classic material and pondering the music in different ways. In this case, since Wish You Were Here (1975) was a fantastic follow-up to The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), it got me thinking about how many great consecutive albums there were in rock/pop history. The genre is packed with towering achievements, of course, but very few performers have ever actually managed back-to-back masterpieces that stand the test of time, with no “filler” tracks, no stumbles, just two sequential statements of greatness. By my reckoning, only five artists qualify, and Pink Floyd’s one-two punch is the greatest of them all. The Floyd’s pairing is distinctive in how different the two albums are while still standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the rock canon. Dark Side is sleek, polished, cohesive — a perfect conceptual arc on time, madness...

  My 1994 CD cover.  They changed the "classic" album cover slightly to reflect that this was the first remastered digital recording.  How did we ever think this format made stuff sound good?  This was not a replacement for the vinyl record, I never actually owned one of those. There has never been an album like Dark Side of the Moon .  Pink Floyd's 1973 mega-classic has ranked somewhere on the Billboard Top 200 List for an astonishing 971 weeks over a half century.  That's 200 more weeks than the second-place album in terms of longevity, Legend by Bob Marley and the Wailers.  Dark Side spent a unmatched 724 consecutive weeks on that list from March 1973 until April 1988.  Since then it has reappeared repeatedly for shorter lengths of time.   I blogged about Dark Side in 2010 when it reappeared on the chart for what seemed like mysterious reasons to me at the time.  It turned out that Billboard changed their accounting methods....

The album cover features a close-up of an ear overlaid with some water droplets.  The great graphic designer Storm Thorgerson created this but the band weighed-in heavily on the idea.  He later regretted it, saying it was his least favorite Pink Floyd album cover. “Basically, we're the laziest group ever.  Other groups would be horrified if they saw how we waste our recording time.”  ( Blake, page 159 )  That's what David Gilmour opined as Pink Floyd muddled through various musical ideas for their sixth studio album back in 1971.  At first all they had was a bunch of short pieces that might turn into a song or two.  The band was just noodling around.  They were not under any pressure.  Their record company wasn't bugging them for another album.  They just felt that it was time to do – something.  But what? They started calling the assorted fragments “Nothing.”...