Ummagumma

It was sunny this past Saturday, the humidity was low, not a cloud in the sky. I did my usual grocery shopping after a morning with extra coffee, a slower pace, some reading and listening to music. After groceries I got in a run. It was breezy but comfortable out. When I got back I had lunch, vacuumed the entire upstairs, and then got out my chainsaws to clear some trees that had fallen in our walking paths since last fall. I planned to mow after that but, in between, I opened up the windows, let the early spring breeze run through the house and drank a couple of beers while sitting in the sunshine on my front porch. Jennifer joined me for awhile. She was busy weeding and mulching. I have been listening to Roger Waters outside of my classical explorations recently. I decided to crank up Amused to Death and blast it out into the brilliant bird-filled afternoon. This is the way life ricochets sometimes. Jennifer had gone on a camping trip with some of our friends to Cumberland Island ...

The final bow. Pink Floyd, July 2005. David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright. The greatest rock band of all time. July 5, 2005. It is late afternoon and I’m sitting in the basement of my brother’s house watching Pink Floyd live at Hyde Park in London. It is a great image on a 50-inch high-definition flat screen TV. It is late evening over there. It is the first time Roger Waters has performed onstage with his former band mates in well over two decades. A heartbeat. Repeating. The crowd roars as the curtain opens. A female artist singing a scream in tune with the bass. In the crowd hundreds and hundreds of flashs of light from digital cameras trying to capture the moment. Then they ease us back into themselves with Breathe . Ah, yes. The Floyd . Glacial. Poetry. This is followed by what I consider to be the best version of Money I’ve ever heard anywhere, including the original record. Dick Parry joins them on-stage to brilliantly recreate his original saxophon...

Proof of Purchase.  A handsome package. Pink Floyd is my all-time favorite rock band.  I have blogged about, among other Floydian things, their final set  in 2005 and about their final bow  in 2011. Now comes their final studio album (as Pink Floyd). The Endless River is almost 55 minutes of mostly wordless musical conversations, jam sessions taken from many hours of recordings unused in the band's excellent 1994 record The Division Bell .  David Gilmour and Nick Mason revisited this material which heavily features the keyboard work of Rick Wright who died in 2008.   Roger Waters , the driving force, lyricist, and visionary behind the band's best works, quit in 1985.  Earlier this year the two last men standing in Pink Floyd went back into the studio, sifted through the unused recordings, picking the best parts of what were at the time (in late-1993) hours of improvised musical doodles created while laying down more established songs ...

The juxtaposition of two small events the past few days has brought considerable entertainment in to my life. A couple of weeks ago I was watching David Gilmour’s Remember That Night DVD. There are several noteworthy aspects to that 2006 concert in the Royal Albert Hall (released in 2007). David Crosby and Graham Nash sing some background vocals on Gilmour’s full presentation of his album On An Island and then they come back later for an encore; their remarkable harmonies joining with David’s great voice on a terrific rendition of Find the Cost of Freedom . Then David Bowie comes out to perform Syd Barrett’s original part in the old Pink Floyd tune, Arnold Layne . Bowie follows that with performing Roger Waters’ vocals in Comfortably Numb . Really nice stuff. But, for me, the highlight of the DVD is the performance of Echoes , which so prominently features the keyboard work of Richard Wright . Though Echoes is one of my favorite Pink Floyd concepts (at 22-plus minutes it is h...

  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 Roger Waters successfully channels the classic Pink Floyd aesthetic with Is This The Life We Really Want? , his first album in 25 years.  I have listened to the record several times now.  It has grown on me, although it isn't as good, in my opinion, as his 1992 Amused to Death and he comes off as just an angry old man on a couple of tunes.  Nevertheless, at 73, Waters shows he still has plenty of passion and lyricism to justify the effort. Is This The Life We Really Want? has most of the trappings of the classic Pink Floyd sound.   The album begins with a sound  montage of a beating heart, clocks ticking, and looped background voices, mostly radio announcers.  So it starts out with that wonderful classic feeling.  “ When We Were Young ” and “ Déjà Vu ” are rather nostalgic. They are interesting, if uninspiring, pieces of music (well, the opening track is a “sound collage” rather than music).  “Déjà Vu” is the album's be...

"The reality was that we were struggling with making the follow-up to Dark Side and we rushed back into the studio to do that.  We put ourselves under sort of ridiculous pressure in a way trying to make a record from nothing." -  Nick Mason "It was disengagement.  It was not being willing to apply yourself sufficiently.  The concentrated activity was rather diluted.  I'm sure for a very pushing, driving sort of person like Roger it was more frustrating than it was for anyone else, although considerably frustrating for all of us." - David Gilmour "I had to fight David for a bit, as he acknowledges completely.  We had completely different ideas and that was a fight that I won.  So, at some point in that process, I came up with the idea that this has to be thematic.  This will make this a more coherent work.  And because it's coherent it will be better than if we just throw all the songs we've been working on together and go boom, there you ...